Queens' Play (9 page)

‘They’re here for the fun. There’s paper coming.’

It was the kind of recklessness that Stewart could not stand. He raised a prickly eyebrow. ‘Getting a bit cocksure, aren’t you? You’re taking in paper tonight, with the King at the gates and the whole place heaving like an anthill?’

‘Why not? They’ll think it is another patch for the Pegasus Arch.’

He was probably right. His paper mill was twenty miles away; his arrangements were typically neat. The cart would arrive at Rouen, bearing his marble or his clay, his new furnace or his fuel; and in the false bottom lay the quires, ready to drop by grille and chute straight into the cellars while the cart stood, innocently unloading, in the inner courtyard. In the cellar, there were cupboards everywhere: in the base of a vast sculpture, with the armatures showing like the ribs of a bog-corpse; in the floor; in the bottom of the paste trough. Stewart thought he would take Thady Boy home.

Thady Boy had gone. Instead, a tall man in handsome blue lounged at his side. ‘Hullo, Stewart. Who’s your portly friend?’ It was Sir George Douglas; and Stewart reacted typically.

‘I wouldna call him friend, just. It’s Ballagh, one of the two Irish I’m bear-leading till Thursday.’

‘You ought to keep an eye on him. He’s over there with Abernaci. Does he talk English?’

‘Oh, aye, and Irish and Irish-French and Irish-Latin for good measure, the times that he’s not snoring drunk. All you can say for him is that he’s under no illusions about his master. They’re going on Thursday.’

It happened to be news. Sir George said, ‘Oh, they’re going?’ and immediately lost all interest in whatever speculation had inspired his enquiry. He moved off, and Stewart pressed on to where he knew the turbaned head and talbot-hound features of Abernaci would be crouching.

He was in his usual place, with Thady Boy Ballagh seated before him, the worse for drink. Thady’s breeches were stained with vermilion, and his idle gaze was focussed on Abernaci, cross-legged on the floor, his dark face hidden and his long, brown fingers curled round a knife. He was wearing robes, finely laundered and brilliantly printed, and a jewelled turban on his head. From a block of pearwood in his left hand the shavings were falling, tender and curled in the light.

‘Woodcuts. He’s fair away with himself making pictures,’ said Stewart ironically, towering over Thady’s right shoulder. ‘Hérisson
found him doing it one day, and asked him over to see it on the press. It’d surprise you sometimes what these natives can do. You wouldn’t credit him with a thought barring slitting your throat one dark night for your buttons. Wait till you see the face on him. Abernaci!’

The carver looked up. Under the fine turban, the brown face was small and seamed like a walnut. Years of Indian sun had dried a skin possibly middle-aged to look like the sloughed hide of a serpent; his nose was broken-backed and ignoble, and he had a scar, running from brow to cheek, which clenched one eyebrow unnaturally high. He glanced at the two men, and then resumed his carving without a word.

‘Will you look at yon!’ said Robin Stewart, who was no longer feeling so remote from his guest. ‘And he can take a drop, too. Abernaci!’ He bent over the silent figure. ‘Drink—good, yes?’ He made a motion of drinking. ‘More?’

Within the black beard, the thick lips moved. ‘More,’ said the man Abernaci gutturally; and Stewart, laughing, turned away.

In an untidy, stained heap on his hocks, the ollave remained, watching.

The carver looked up. The knife, razor-sharp, lay still in his hand; but his grip suddenly had changed. On the opposite wall a leather ink bottle hung with a table just below it, and on the table Robin Stewart’s white jacket lay.

The hand with the knife moved. There was a flash, a hiss, and the blade, arching slim through the air, slit the fat-bellied bottle clean through. Ink, in a thin black stream, began to issue and splash on the table. The brown hands clasped, the robes were still, and Abernaci was passive once more, his dark eyes resting on Thady.

There was a knife in Thady’s hand, too, although no sign of how it came there. He turned, balancing it thoughtfully, waiting until he might be unperceived; then he judged it, and threw. It was a more difficult target than Abernaci’s. The knife hurtled straight to the bottle cord, and parting it, let the spouting ink flask fall free to spill its black pool harmlessly on the floor. Black eyes met blue in mutual speculation; and Lymond, speaking softly, said, ‘More?’

And then the shouting began.

The voice of Hérisson’s steward began it; a door banged, and his calling rang suddenly through the packed cellar. The paper cart had reached the Porte Cochoise and was entering the city. Stewart, fighting back to collect Thady, watched for two minutes while the scene dissolved into pandemonium, with Hérisson in the middle sonorously making his dispositions to take the illegal consignment. Then he hurried Thady outside.

It was the ollave, cheerful with much drink, who wandered immediately
from Stewart’s side and was found presently halfway up the adjacent scaffolding. And it was Thady Boy, rocking slightly on the steeple top, oblivious to the Archer’s angry hissings below, who spotted the spark of gorget, the glint of arquebus and the bristling shadow of pikes under the housetops in the Rue aux Juifs.

They raised the alarm in the Hôtel Hérisson as the cart arrived from the north. The grille was lifted, the base unbolted, and the bales were sliding into the cellar while the city guard was two streets away. Bouncing like a cork, Thady Boy ran downstairs to the cellar; and when Stewart, scrambling, got there after him, the ollave’s voice, raised in charitable zeal, was already making drunken, flamboyant and shatteringly practical suggestions on how to deal with an imminent raid.

For years after, in Hérisson’s circle, they told the story of that night: how with a cordon round the whole house the bailly and his sergeants burst into the cellars to find nothing worse going on than an uproarious, a scurrilous rehearsal for part of tomorrow’s great Entry, with charade following monologue and lampoon following charade under the direction of a potbellied, black-headed Irishman representing the Spirit of France, suspended gently swaying above the packed audience from the blocks and pulleys on the roof.

And when, reluctantly at length, the city guard tore themselves away, the entertainment was only beginning, for they had forgotten to let down the Spirit of France and that fluent person, not at all willing to be ignored, had captured the hand bellows and, declaiming, was coating the seething heads below with black varnish.

It was Michel Hérisson himself, draped half-naked in a sheet and almost helpless with laughter, who jumped for the cable operating the hook and let go, so that Thady Boy hurtled down through the air, past the dais under which lay the portable printing presses, past the bales of paper disguised behind scenery and the bales of paper disguised as scenery, and straight into a full trough of paste. A wall of white porridge three feet deep rose with a glottal smack and dropped in knackery-haunted gouts on the company.

It was as if a divine signal had come. The audience stood to a man. Into the nameless, lung-scouring gas which replaced air a clay ball shot; then another; then one with lead in it knocked someone out. Benches began to rise. The Delphic Oracle, tackled low, sagged with godlike indifference and stuffed her august nose at last into the copper. Abrupt as an overtaxed weight lifter, other deities fell. Someone whirled a stone elbow, skirling; paste-soggy clothes ripped; and in the glorious, semi-inebriated whirl of pounding flesh, the
thicket of flailing arms and belling throats and the shouts of damnable hilarity, blood and ink became one.

They delivered Thady Boy, damp, clean and singing at the Croix d’Or at three in the morning.

Not a few people heard him arrive. A door banged after repeated farewells, and an uneven satisfied chanting ascended the stairs interrupted by innumerable thuds and clatters:

The O’LiamRoe heard it. He awoke from his fireside snooze in the parlour and turned a speculative blue eye on the door.

‘Death alive, the world’s only liquid chapbook,’ said O’LiamRoe.

The solemn voice was outside the parlour. There was a prodigious fumbling, a scrape, and the door shook.

‘The reason I love Derry is for its quietness, for its purity and for its crowds of white angels. Still up?’ Thady Boy Ballagh strolled in, locked the door, slung a spattered cloak on a chair and stuck out his tongue at a mirror. ‘God, I’m full of sour wine and cows’ feet and you could make scones from my underwear.’ His voice was pleasant, without accent, and clear as a bell.

O’LiamRoe, while philosophic enough about a reverse of his own, did have a conscience, and had been out of temper ever since Lymond’s summons from his Dowager Queen. Addressing his prodigal ollave, his voice had an edge to it. ‘The Queen Mother of Scotland surely has a queer style of entertaining?’

‘Oh Lord, no. I spent the evening elsewhere. Playing at paper games. With your admirer Robin Stewart.’

‘In Ireland,’ said The O’LiamRoe shortly, ‘that man would be put into petticoats and set to milking the goats. He’s a terrible let-down to his sex.… So the royal audience was brief? Fruitless her corn, fruitless her rivers, milkless her cattle, plentiless her fruit, for there was but one acorn upon the stalk, and it failed her?’

Quickly, methodically, Lymond was stripping. Under his soaked shirt the false stomach sagged in its leather covers. He unbuckled it,
his face unruffled, and examined it before laying it by the hearth. ‘She has her worries. No need to concern yourself.’

‘What did she say?’ asked O’LiamRoe, driven to being explicit.

Lymond paused. His black hair, damply curling, showed a tinge of gold at the roots; and only the dye ingrained in his skin disguised the gold stubble of his beard. In the slack-lidded eyes lived an echo of something hilarious and vital. O’LiamRoe felt a sudden obscure drag at his entrails. If he could, he would have withdrawn the question.

‘What did she say? “I have brought you to the ring—hop it if you can.” Quotation,’ said Lymond.

O’LiamRoe stood up. ‘My life for you, it’s another master you’re needing. Is there not a smart, orthodox rebel of an Irishman that would do? There’s young Gerald of Kildare now; but he’s in Rome and maybe a thought too small for the hire of an ollave. Or Cormac O’Connor, then. His father’s between four walls in the Tower of London and Cormac is wild, wild to kick the English out of Ireland; Henri would see that he came to Court and sat soft in the crook of his arm, and his ollave too. You would need only another name, and pink hair maybe.’

Lymond glanced at him, and picked up a towel. ‘What’ll you wager I can’t enter the royal circle as Thady Boy Ballagh?’

‘Before Wednesday?’ O’LiamRoe spoke sarcastically, the exaggerated ease out of his manner.

‘Or Thursday.’ Below the collarbone, Lymond’s skin was surprisingly brown, and the contouring was neat-muscled and shapely, despite the flawing of scars. He added, glancing up from his towelling, ‘If I achieved a foothold at Court, would you stay?’

O’LiamRoe’s freckled face gleamed as he enjoyed the idea. ‘As your ollave? Let you not be tempting me.’

Lymond flung a bedsheet round his shoulders and hugged his knees, his gaze on the hot charcoal, and this time gave his mind to it. ‘As O’LiamRoe. This nonsense will sort itself out. And after the pleasure of berating the King’s Majesty, it might be pleasant to spend the winter at his expense.’

‘Ah! The powerful old women there are in it,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘This nonsense is to be sorted out, is it? And Francis Crawford of Lymond needs a sponsor, if that awkward clod of an Irishman will drop his pretensions to pride?’

Lymond was not drunk. But even taking a tenth of what he appeared to take, his head was not at its clearest to deal with O’LiamRoe in this mood, and he knew it. He said finally, ‘You’d better play tennis with them on Tír-nan-óg, my dear, if you’re going to call thirty-five old. The Queen Mother isn’t going to stir a little finger in this affair; and I’m not at all sure that I want to meddle in hers. I
suggested a sporting wager; but if you’re bored with France or with myself, no doubt you’ll take ship on Thursday.’