Queens' Play (58 page)

‘In the name of God, what with?’ said Cormac O’Connor, and turned to Oonagh, and barked.

‘With force,’ said O’LiamRoe mildly. ‘I have sent word to the Slieve Bloom today. Do you land, with your French or without, you will get such a blow you will never need another.’

Nobody laughed. In the white, stark glare of the lights, in the antiseptic heat of the air, Mistress Boyle drew a sharp breath and was still; Cormac, his thick wrists outflung on the counterpane, lost his smile and Oonagh, behind him, rising to her knees with the night robe paged taut by the pillow, said ‘Phelim!’ and tugging the heavy stuff free, slid astonishingly to the ground and moving swiftly, caught his shoulder.

Swung round, he looked down into clear, grey-green eyes searching his own. ‘But Phelim—The meaty haunches who grunt and whack while the knowing ones smile and bide their time.… The world to be fairly divided among the small, calm men who watch and think …?’ They were his own words. ‘This is Francis’s doing?’

‘Equally I oppose Mary Dowager of Scotland,’ said O’LiamRoe
quietly, ‘should she lean her elbow on Ireland. Though I will help her to know what Francis Crawford would do for her daughter. Sad, sad is a recusant. I was the world’s bully at four, so they say. I have been made to learn a thing: that like a garden of windflowers, our nature is talk. But good talk has its roots in the earth; like a turnip it thrusts its feet in the soil and its head in the clear air, thrusts with vigour, moves, swells, ripens and is harvested.… I, a miscast, rambling thing, am ready to plough up this field.’

She had dropped her hand, holding his gaze with her own. ‘There is a death in it,’ said Oonagh.

O’LiamRoe smiled. ‘There was always death in it, since
La Sauvée
sailed. Your fears have come true, that is all.’

‘There is death in it. She is right.’ The harsh voice of Mistress Boyle spoke not to Oonagh but to Cormac. ‘God show you your duty.’

‘ ’Tis no duty with our philosopher’s maidservant here, but a pleasure entirely,’ said Cormac O’Connor, and he rose to his feet.

‘Get back, Phelim,’ said Oonagh.

O’LiamRoe did not move. ‘It’s this way will be best. My cousin is tanist heir, so. I have sent word, and he will do as I would. You can tell the King of France that Ireland is lost to him.’

She had her back to him, her eyes on Cormac, moving slowly from the bed. Her aunt stood still in the far doorway. ‘Escape while you can. Himself will kill you.’

‘Maybe,’ said O’LiamRoe.

Standing full in front of him, her voice sounded oddly dry. ‘Francis Crawford depends on your help.’

‘No offence in life,’ said O’LiamRoe, ‘but he depends on you, not myself. I am at my extreme end. Will you move, now?’

Cormac took another step, smiling. ‘Yes, move now, me darling slut,’ he said. ‘God bless you kindly, my brave black bitch, with no sweet oasis in her white body she would not have ready to bless the thirsty traveller with. Move, my delicate whore, and let me kill him.’ The steel was out of his scabbard, but O’LiamRoe had not drawn his sword—the mishandled, miswielded blade which he had never mastered and never bothered to use.

‘Why do that?’ said Oonagh. Her face was dry and grey as earthenware in the kiln, but the clear voice was cold. ‘You will save nothing and have the King at you, only.’

Within touching distance, Cormac stopped. In the coloured rind of his skin, the red lips parted and smiled. In his hands the blade lifted and stilled. ‘Kill him,’ said Mistress Boyle from behind, and the grey plaits jerked, like bell ropes weaving an echo. ‘Kill him and the woman too. That is something the French will understand.’

Oonagh had been leaning a little against the Prince of Barrow, her
black hair caught in his shirt, the soft robe brushing his feet. At that, she flung up her arm, and then collecting herself, moved a step forward and faced the great black bull-shape of O’Connor, her pride, her king and her lover. ‘Leave troubling, Cormac. Let him go.’

Her voice was sane and quiet. The stab of the sword cut across it like a battle cry, as Cormac raised the blade, high and true, and drove it at O’LiamRoe’s heart through hers.

O’LiamRoe was made badly by unresented ill-luck—strung stiffly, knotted wrongly, animated faultily. But he had a brain; and he had seen that move coming. As the sword flashed, he gave Oonagh a great shove, and as she struck and rolled on the floor he threw himself to one side so that the missed blade pulled the swordsman staggering past his quarry and brought him up short beside Theresa Boyle. Then as O’LiamRoe recovered, Cormac O’Connor jumped forward again.

O’LiamRoe fled. He did it hastily, and with a frantic lack of address which was its own grace. Chairs rocked and tumbled in O’Connor’s way. The bed curtains ripped, dropped and draped him as he followed the others over the counterpane; kicked pillows tripped him; the jogging end of O’LiamRoe’s own scabbard at one point caught the big man and nearly felled him. Oonagh, rising, was crouched hard in a corner; Mistress Boyle, eyes wild, had retreated to the parlour and watched from there. No one attempted to fetch help. If this was to be a crime passionnel, the fewer witnesses the better. And no servant, knowing Theresa Boyle and knowing O’Connor, would dare intervene.

In the crowded space, the sword was not easy to use. It stuck, became impaled on the panelling, or impeded the wielder with its weight. O’LiamRoe, jumping on a fine marquetry table, had it knocked from under him by Cormac’s boot and falling, found a shield quite by accident as Cormac’s steel sank deep in the wood.

Cormac left it there and jumped on the soft somersaulting body of the other man. As he hit him, O’LiamRoe’s arm shot out with the impact, found the poker laid in the nearly dead hearth, and swinging it over the big Irishman’s back, branded him like a heifer. With a screech O’Connor flung free, and in the stench of wool and hide his curses found habitat.

O’LiamRoe got out his sword and scrambled to his feet as the other man, his fists opening and shutting, rose likewise and faced him. In the parlour there sounded, briefly, a sharp crash. O’Connor’s attention left his victim for a second; long enough to catch the broken-necked glass tossed to him diamond-bright by Mistress Boyle. Holding it queerly before him, flashing, pure as a bride’s bouquet, he feinted neatly and leaned to stroke the jagged glass down O’LiamRoe’s face.

O’LiamRoe was not even looking. His kind face, printed with surprise and dislike, was turned to Theresa Boyle. He opened his mouth, shifted his weight, and with perfect simplicity sat down, just as the arched blow approached him. It passed over his head, stirring the marmalade hair, and Oonagh, moved beyond even her steely strength, let out a high sharp note of laughter.

O’LiamRoe had dropped his sword. On all fours he was fumbling to lift it when with a rustle Mistress Boyle swept through the doorway and bent down to seize it.

‘Ah, no!’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. ‘Ah, no, wild hag, we are not heeding you this night at all.’ And laying hands on the two wiry grey plaits, she made to drag the older woman like a drowned thing to her feet.

In that moment, for the second time, the bright glass aimed at O’LiamRoe descended. Like the grey shears of Atropos, grim among the late flowers in Jean Ango’s garden, the needle edge dropped, cleaving the thick plait with a tug clean between hand and scalp; and falling, bit into Theresa Boyle’s neck.

The scream, when it came, was like a man’s, gross and brutal, and all the folds of the bundled cabbage, screwed featureless on the floor, had become poured over with red. His mouth open, the up-wrenched bottle still fast in his hand, Cormac O’Connor bent over the woman while O’LiamRoe rising backed, his face sick.

He turned and ran.

He had reached the parlour door when Cormac came back to himself. O’Connor said nothing; the curses and threats all cut off by the weight of the shock. Then rage came. Like a man spiritually harmed, like one who has looked on the symbols of a diabolical Mass, he put out his hand and armed himself, lifting the heavy sword from its deep cut as if it were paper and presenting it, across the width of two rooms, at O’LiamRoe’s unarmed body.

Oonagh saw it. Rising stony-faced from the fallen woman’s side she jumped at O’Connor, her two hands firm on his arm, and without looking he hurled her off like a cur. As she crashed clutching into the far wall, O’LiamRoe’s hands moved.

It was only a small sling, and the stone was small too, round, silvery and warm from his pocket. But slinging was an ancient art, a lost custom, a piece of erudite and unnecessary knowledge which only O’LiamRoe would have bothered to gain, and an art which only O’LiamRoe would have thought it worth while practising. With the soft, craftless fingers which, right hand or left, could split a held hair, the Prince of Barrow fitted his little stone, lifted the sling and let fly.

The first struck O’Connor in the mouth, breaking in the fleshy lip and like a wrecked forum razing his teeth. The second, stinging sharp
in the middle of the round, suffused brow, felled him like a tree; slowly, buffeting shrub and sapling and undergrowth, flat to the ground. Holding hard to the wall, Oonagh watched him.

Above the old woman’s harsh moaning, ‘Never fear,’ said O’LiamRoe breathlessly. He cleared his throat, gasped, and moving stiffly nearer, ran a dirty hand through his hair. ‘He won’t be dead.’

In her white face the younger woman’s pale eyes looked almost black. ‘And if he were?’

Still breathlessly, he spoke at a tangent. ‘The woman will need help.’

Again she faced him without moving. ‘She is past helping.’

He said, ‘It had to be done … and at this minute I do not know yet if it is done.’

‘It is done,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. The woman moaned, and was quiet.

His oval face had no smile. ‘Twenty years of my thinking life have said their seven curses over him. He has won, too, in his way. It is a triumph of violence over culture, force over thought.… I have come to the crossroads you feared, and passed them. It may be a true road, or it may be the first step into all the kind, easy turnings of decay.’

‘Maybe. There is no knowing for either of us until judgment day.’ She passed him, remote as she had always been, dreamlike with her white face and her streaming black fall of hair, the stained robe dragging the floor; and opening the door, turned and faced him. ‘The back door is quiet to unlock, and not overlooked. Go quickly. The light is not far off.’

He came beside her, but no nearer than that. ‘I will not leave you with them.’

She turned her head. Raw, rumpled, stiff as an ox on the spit, Cormac lay in the smashed room, and at his feet the woman lay still, her thick hands at her neck. ‘It is time to go,’ she said. ‘I must take my road, too. From this out you will hear nothing of me, and will do nothing to search me out. That is my price.’

He did not reply all at once. Then, ‘For what,
mo chiall; a chiall mo chridhe?’
he said steadily.

But he knew already what his ignorance was to buy: the name he had wanted, the name of the man serving Lord d’Aubigny which was to deliver both Lymond and the Queen.

Telling him, her eyes were compassionate. ‘Leave me go kindly,’ she said. ‘My body will not want, and my thoughts you will have. There is a strong path before you, and a forced door you need not be ashamed of. Only violence could have sundered this man and myself, and the violence which parted us was the force that was born fresh in your mind, not the coarse work it has had to put its hand to tonight. It will find nobler tasks yet to do.’

Her hands lay cold in his. Searching her empty face he said, ‘We shall meet?’

‘At the fall of night, on the far side of the north wind,’ she said.’ ‘Love me.’

‘All my days,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, dropping into the tongue of his land. ‘Dear stranger, dear mate of my soul: all my days.’

And walking quiet and blind, he let slip her two hands and left.

‘His name is Artus Cholet, Lord d’Aubigny’s other henchman,’ Oonagh O’Dwyer had said. ‘He is of the district, a master gunner who has fought for any well-paying captain in his day. He will not show himself at Châteaubriant, but if he has been given work to do, he won’t be far away. Take the. Angers road, and at the Auberge des Trois Mariés ask for Georges Gaultier, and tell him what you want.’

Dark in the misty June morning, Châteaubriant was still. Dim through the painted shutters, the hoof beats of a single horse burst, applauding the cobbles, and were gone.

No one saw O’LiamRoe go. He had not taken time to find Dooly, curled on the straw in his dark lodging, watching the lightening sky. In another street, handsomely lodged, Lord d’Aubigny slept, ready to wake fresh and serene to his harvest at last. The English, courtiers and servants, lay exhausted by heat and diplomacy in rooms and lodgings, hospices and barns all through Châteaubriant. At the Château Neuf Northampton slept, well bedded, well content, under the three flags of Scotland, England and France. The Court of France. King and Queen and Constable, de Guises, Diane, fulfilled the allotted hours of slumber, precisely as automata, as part of the long-learned, accustomed framework of rite.