Queens' Play (6 page)

He did his adequate best. Since he left the Slieve Bloom, O’LiamRoe had never looked so memorably neat. The saffron tunic abandoned, he had sent out for breech hose, brought in at Thady’s back, and a holland shirt, and a doublet of near fit and bold colour. Not to waste money on slippers, he had pulled his half boots on top, but cleaned, and had got a small cap with a feather which sat flatly on his combed yellow head. Only the beard, unregenerately floating, hinted at the rebel inside the silk cords.

When the latch rattled, he thought it was Ballagh. Cursing under his breath, his hat under his arm and cloak over it, he strode to open the door. He was very late, and the King’s Gentleman, back on the hour, had been waiting some time for him below.

On his threshold stood Oonagh O’Dwyer.

O’LiamRoe stood still without speaking, the latch in his hand. It was his visitor who showed her surprise, unexpected colour flooding her brown skin and revealing the light, limpid eyes. Then she said shortly, ‘It’s wonderfully grand you are this day. I feel enough of a prostitute as it is, without standing side by side with you on your doorstep. Will you let me pass?’

She was alone; something unheard of in a young woman of standing. He shut the door, stood still as she marched past, and made no comment until she turned to face him. ‘I am not in the habit of doing this,’ she said.

‘It is not a bad habit, now it’s started,’ he said. ‘If you confine it to one person.’

It was the worst line he could have taken; he recognized it instantly. Her lips went hard, her body tautened; and for a moment he expected a blow. It did not come, but when she spoke he realized that in her mind she had closed a human relationship and opened a business meeting.

‘I have just come from Bonne-Nouvelle. My aunt is there with a friend who is in the Queen’s train. I have a word from her.’

‘Have you so?’ He did not offer her a seat.

They were of a height and otherwise utterly in contrast: the handfuls of hair under her hood were wood-black where his were tortoise-shell to the pellicle. She looked him straight in the eye, and her small, round mouth curled. ‘They are an idle cageful of mockingbirds; always fresh for a new victim.’

He knew then. His bearing relaxed a little, and he leaned back against the painted panelling, his blue eyes attentive on hers. ‘Let them laugh till it sends the Adam’s apples on them up and down like cerbottana balls, my dear. It won’t hurt me.’

Her strong, soft brows stayed level. ‘However, you have spent some money on yourself, I see, this day?’

‘Yes,’ said O’LiamRoe calmly. ‘That was a mistake. I am thinking that I shall just change back to the saffron. Is there an ostrich of your acquaintance would like a tail feather?’

She ignored the flourish of his hat. ‘It does not affect me, O’LiamRoe, one way or the other. I came to tell you that the Household are having sport with you. You will get a summons that is not from the King.’

He smiled a little, among the flosslike whiskers. ‘The like of an appointment to meet his double?’

‘How did you know?’

He turned from her wide eyes, and gestured outside. ‘He stood there for a while to get our view. A dark man with a beard.’

Oonagh O’Dwyer said dryly, ‘Yes, that’s likely. Some of the younger Court mignons have hired the man who’ll play King in Wednesday’s procession. Your fame preceded you from Dieppe. They are hoping to confront you with the false King and make the world’s fool of you.’

Not in the least upset, he said merely, ‘A dangerous game, surely, to put a discourtesy on the King’s guest the like of that?’

‘Would you have the courage to complain to the King?’ she said impatiently. ‘You maybe would, but they think you would not. They think that since peace has been made with England, and a new coolness with the Emperor, France is not so hot to appropriate Ireland, and would hardly be troubled if a lordling, offended, took the first galley back home.’

‘I am tempted,’ said O’LiamRoe.

For a moment longer she studied him; then with her square-tipped boy’s hands pulled her green cloth hood forward. ‘That is all. I promised to tell you. I hope,’ she said pointedly, ‘that your philosophy does not leak on you under stress.’

‘Do not disturb yourself,’ said the Prince of Barrow, and the sunlight carried his raw shadow and laid it like a plinth at her feet. ‘If they come close to tickle, they can’t complain of the fleas. Is Thady Boy expected to join in my folly?’

‘No. He speaks French. It is you alone they are baiting. I am sorry,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer unexpectedly, raising her light grey eyes straight to his. ‘It is not the sweetest news from a woman.’

‘No,’ said O’LiamRoe slowly. ‘No, it is not. There must be vanity in me somewhere yet. But it was not an easy errand you gave yourself either, and my thanks to you and Mistress Boyle.’ He opened the door as she moved forward, his oval, whiskered face quite benevolent. ‘But God help me, I was raised on all the wrong sports in the Slieve Bloom,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe.

An hour later, in his saffron, his leggings and his frieze cloak, Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, walked into the royal residence at the Priory of Bonne-Nouvelle, hairy as a houseleek; and the thick cream of French
espièglerie
closed over his head.

It was a young, supple Court, with the sap still in its veins. Henri, absolute lord of nineteen million Frenchmen, was thirty-one; and of the ten de Guises in whose hands half the power of ruling France lay, the eldest, the Queen Mother of Scotland, was only thirty-five. It followed that the courtiers, too, were mostly young. Those of an older generation had been born into the world of Henri’s predecessor Francis I, the enchanting rake, the Caesar, the Sunflower, who did not care for dreamy, sullen, sleepy children and had committed his two sons without a thought to the prisons at Pedraza in his place when he lost his Italian war and his liberty at the battle of Pavia.

Henri came back from Spain an uncouth eleven-year-old, unable to speak his native language; and the gay Court noted him in passing—‘M. d’Orléans, a large, round face, who does nothing but give blows, and whom no man can master.’ When he was King, he kept a court still of marzipan and kisses, but a tough, esoteric, gamey core also persisted: the patronage of scholars and master craftsmen; the habit of good talk and private accomplishments, with the poet and the professor familiarly at the elbow.

But although the personal triumphs of the sullen, sleepy prisoner were now established, not without pains; although the swiftest runner, the best horseman, the finest lute player in France, was her King; although he had ended the English wars successfully, regained possession of Boulogne, would have Scotland when his son married the little Queen, and was in a fair way to frightening the Emperor with his league of German princes—in spite of all these, Henri of France kept two things from the world of his father as a child keeps its cradle rag: his beloved Montmorency, shrewd old warrior whom Francis had exiled from Court; and Diane de Poitiers, for fourteen years Henry’s mistress.

Too wealthy, too powerful, too blunt for King Francis’s liking,
Anne Duke de Montmorency had been none the less one of the bulwarks of the kingdom; and it was not until the old King’s latter years, when Montmorency was already nursing the young heir, that the final clash came, and Francis threw him into the exile from which King Henri rescued him.

Diane, widow of the Grand Seneschal of Normandy and familiar with courts, had come, at thirty-six—some said straight from the old King’s pillow; and with wit, address and a natural kindness perfectly disarming, had begun teaching the future Henri II, then seventeen, his roles of lover and prince. It was unlucky that before his father died, Henri had become too attached to Diane his mistress, that Montmorency had become too helpful to Henri his prospective master, and that Henri had talked a little too freely of the appointment he would make and banishments he would cancel when his father was dead … selling the skin, said the Court, before the bear was killed. Francis did not like it; and it was as well, on the whole, that Francis had died when he did.

O’LiamRoe, who was well informed in his magpie way, needed little or no material briefing from the Gentlemen of the Bedchamber who had waited with remarkable patience for two hours to take him to the presence of the King. He received an unbelievable amount of information about etiquette; about bowing, about titles, about the gentlemen he might meet—for, as the interview would take place in the tennis courts, ladies were unlikely to be there. He listened with a thoughtful tolerance as he was handed through the guard posts into the Priory, pricked with golden fleurs-de-lis and busy as a Michaelmas market. Archers, steward, equerries, pages came at him in waves, and keeping him off the main corridors, channelled O’LiamRoe and his escort into a side room, a side door and a grassy courtyard where someone had hastily pinned up a net. The Gentleman of the Bedchamber, who was red in the face and sweating slightly under his satin, gripped O’LiamRoe’s sleeve with soft fingers and said, ‘Here you are. Wait. There is the King.’

The square had a look of disuse. Built up on three sides, it was overhung by nothing but shuttered windows. Benches, hung with fine cloths, had been put up hastily on its paved edges with food and drink laid out, and there were stools and one or two chairs, with a doublet or a racquet left lying. Because of the height of the building, the sun was nearly off them, but the four or five men talking at the far end of the court were in shirt sleeves. In the centre a man, big, broad-shouldered and black-bearded, stood listening, with an arm on either shoulder of the flanking players. He was dressed entirely in white. ‘The King,’ repeated The O’LiamRoe’s guide; and pointed.

The O’LiamRoe’s oval face craned forward. ‘Do you tell me,’ said the Chief, fascinated. ‘He’ll be at them for the scrofula.’ Two of the
men in the group had been with d’Aubigny at Dieppe: the scent of them carried downwind.

The Gentleman of the Bedchamber, whose English was not quite perfect, opened his mouth, thought better of it, and ended by saying, ‘He has seen us. Come forward, my lord prince, and I shall present you.’

‘Faith, he’s complete,’ was O’LiamRoe’s next remark, as they moved forward, ‘and as black as a crow. I heard he’d greyed early; does he dip it, now? There’s a fine receipt of my mother’s: two pottles of tar to a pottle of pitch. From the hour we put a brush to it, we lost never a sheep. And is this the King’s grace?’

The two parties had met. In a loud voice, the escorting courtier made the introductions; and as his titles hung quaintly on the warm air—Monseigneur Auleammeaux, Prince de Barrault et Seigneur des Monts Salif Blum—O’LiamRoe stood like an amiable chaffbin, the day’s merciless noon on the dreadful nap on his frieze cloak and the dreadful lack of it on the saffron tunic below; like an exercise in the assembly of rubbish, to be dismantled shortly and given away to the poor. He stood at ease, without the shadow of a reverence, and when de Genstan of the Royal Guard of Scottish Archers, slipping forward, hissed in his ear, ‘Sir, it is customary to bow,’ he merely widened his disarming grin and said, ‘Do you tell me. And here am I born like the devil with my knees at the backs of my legs. What’s he blathering on about, the poor man?’

M. de Genstan, with the faintest sign to his allies, slipped into the role of interpreter. ‘His Majesty is welcoming you to France, sir. He would have had you meet their graces the Duke and the Cardinal of Guise, and the Constable Montmorency as well, but they have pressing business to attend to.’

‘Ah, devil take it; and I had made up my mind that wee little one there was the Cardinal,’ said O’LiamRoe agreeably. ‘Will you tell the King’s grace he’s a happy man, surely, with the kingdom running itself while he can lep about after a ball. What’s he saying?’

Speaking through an interpreter imposes its own languors and strains on an encounter, and this one was in any case, with astounding clarity, failing to take the course expected of it. The sieur de Genstan, his face flaming, was trying hard to prolong the interview by censoring his translations. The man in white, at least aware that some of the courtesies were lacking, was still a little at a loss. In a slow, carrying voice he addressed his interpreter. M. de Genstan said to O’LiamRoe, ‘His grace asks you to be seated and take wine with him.’