Queens' Play (20 page)

Softly as she went, the sound reached the hare. Her thews responded, flinging her forward in great jumps, eight feet and nine feet between her pricking, her dark-tipped ears surging above the high grass. She jumped; and from the short fur on her neck a blaze of green flared into life and died again in the shade.

St. André suddenly froze in the saddle. On the pied jennet, Thady’s blue eyes narrowed. But Robin Stewart, closer to the household than any, knew at once what it was. As the hunting cat, smooth as lava, unfurled to the rhythm of its most perfect pace, Stewart flung his horse forward, shouting, the words floating thinly through the ice-clear, sunny air. ‘Damn you. It’s the leveret! It’s the Queen’s hare you’re hunting!’

They heard on the ridge. On both sides of the field, for a single second, no one moved. An outsider looking at the flushed faces would have seen fright and irritation and anger. The death of a royal pet was not the best way to win favour. Of all the faces beside St. André, only O’LiamRoe’s showed pity. Thady Boy was as still as the cheetah on his leashed pillion had been. For clearly the little hare was doomed. Already, it had swum, big-headed, bobbing, over the stream and was halfway up the long meadow; and already, far behind, the long spine and the padded, working shoulders of the cat, yellow like smoke, smoothly loping, had begun to narrow the gap. And hopelessly behind on a tired horse, Robin Stewart was going to be too late. For no horse on either side could now reach Queen Mary’s pet hare before the cheetah did.

The hare was tiring. Little lovers’ gift, consecrated to Venus, fed on wild thyme and summoned by flutes, the young puss with her emerald collar was unused to enemies, had had no dreams of the bamboo forests of the Ganges and the glib death lurking there. She ran white-eyed and unbreathing, sensing the thick soft pads closing and feeding horror from every sense to her loaded heart until, clear above the sifting grasses, the far-off barking, the distant beat of a tired
horse, the voices muted and uneasy and the tinkle of bit and hardel, a familiar voice cried, a little porcelain mare started forward, and someone with a familiar smell and look and shape called
‘Suzanne!’

With all the strength in her bleeding paws, the little hare turned from the open, unyielding horizon and made for the small Queen. Far behind, the cheetah turned too, and pinned its mesmeric, passionless gaze on the white scut and the little palfrey and its red-haired rider beyond.

On the ridge, the Duke de Guise, his spurs instant and cruel, hurled his horse after his niece. Below, helplessly, the mounted and unmounted surged forward in their fear. But before that, a hand like steel closed on O’LiamRoe’s wrist, and Lymond’s clear voice said ‘Luadhas.’

For a second the silence lay between them, aching. Then O’LiamRoe moved and spoke. Unbelieving, the little Firbolg heard, bent and, slipping the fine shackles, sent the wolfhound Luadhas hurtling after the cat.

She was a noble bitch, high in heart and honest after her calling. She could overthrow a wolf, but the alien, wicked beauty slipping through the grasses ahead was of an element she had never known. She raced uphill, tail streaming, rough hair blown and parted with her speed, loping high on her long legs; and fast as the gap was closing between cheetah and hare, the gap between dog and cat began to close faster still. The hazel rod in O’LiamRoe’s right hand broke in two.

The hare was at its end. Thrashed by its heartbeats, suffocated with exhaustion and fear, its thick sight blinded, it was running by sound alone to its mistress’s voice, the fortune on its neck winking and sparkling in the unsparing sun.

And the porcelain horse, with the lightest and smallest of riders, had flown, skidded, stumbled downhill faster than any. Within yards of the creature Mary kicked her feet from the planchon and slid to the ground as the Duke’s gelding reached her. She rushed forward; the little horse fled; and her uncle, one-handed, snatched at her cloak.

Mary stumbled. She was weeping, her hair tangled about her hot face, the tears rushing off nose and chin. The leveret gave a mighty, last leap and stopped, rigid, in the naked ground out of her reach. Mary tore herself from her uncle’s grasp and flung herself forward as, in the distance, the grass shook and parted.

In an act as brave as any in his whole young, foolhardy career, the Duke de Guise leaped from his horse, seized the girl, and scooping up the leveret with one hand, flung it to the nearest rider. Robin Stewart caught the inert, warm, fatigue-sodden weight in his arms as the Duke flung the child on his plunging horse and followed her into the saddle.

From above and below, horses were rushing towards them; but the cheetah arrived before them all. The grasses stirred and he was there: lyre-marked face and strong forelegs and silken, yellow-white belly. He came upon the big gelding as the little girl clutched at the saddle and the topaz eyes followed the red head. He did not even pause. Cheated of his rightful prey he landed, turned and sprang. The Duke, the child in his arms, dragged the terrified horse sideways, but the spread needles did not reach them. Instead, a matted, brindled shape breasted the grass. A slender, pointed muzzle struck the air; long legs, rough-haired and uncombed, paused a little; and then the deerhound Luadhas, with the courage of her inheritance, gathered her powers and sprang on the cat.

It was a fight well remembered for years afterwards by the company who gathered there to watch it that day. No weapon existed which could now separate cheetah and dog, and no man could hope to pull them apart. As the child, sobbing, was swept to safety, the rest in terrible fascination stood and looked.

There was never a doubt as to its end. As O’LiamRoe had known, as Lymond had known, the dog had no chance. Hound and cheetah rolled over and over, compacted silk hair and rough, mean, triangular head and long-nosed Byzantine; then Luadhas, lips bared, would seek a grip on the spotted spine and the sinuous snakelike fur would unroll and untwine; the heavy soft paw would flash, and on the skull of the dog the brindled hair sank, wet and dark, as the deep lifeblood welled.

She was a brave dog. As she bled she bit, her strong teeth sunk again and again in the dirty yellow-white plush. She shook her head and the cat, blood-spotted and scarred, wrenched free and staggered a pace: a dancer tripped, inelegant and baleful. There was a pause. Then, his haunches tightened, the cheetah called on the great muscles of thigh and hock and with all his power sprang quiet, curved and deadly into the sunlit air. The soft body fell and its great paws, needle-sharp and fatal, sank into the great cords and vessels of Luadhas’s neck and spine. The bitch screamed, rolling over; and on the squeaking, flattened grass her great body opened and shut, the soft fur like a woman’s twined about it, the cat’s claws deep in her back. She threshed for a long while, panting in her blood and whining softly, but the cheetah’s grip never relaxed; and after a while the whimpering stopped and the pointed muzzle opened, and the cheetah withdrew its claws.

Its keeper, white with the premonition of royal doom, leaped down, chain in hand and, cajoling, approached the cat. The flat brainpan, the haughty lyre, the chestnut eyes turned, and he stopped. Delicately, in a high remote ecstasy of some icy bloodlust, the cheetah stalked by. Fastidiously he stepped over the heaving thing of torn fur,
bloody on the crushed ground, and his topaz eyes, roving, saw the wide circle of faces and of horses which, unbroken, encompassed him. One horse was nearer than the others and there, forgotten, was his true prey. Evilly, without warning, like some eerie familiar, he sprang at Robin Stewart where he sat, the leveret gripped in his cold hands.

The Archer’s elderly mare could suffer no more. As the hot fur brushed by, she neighed shrilly, reared, and throwing Stewart hard to the ground, galloped wildly downhill. On the trampled grass the cat crouched, watching Robin Stewart as he lay, the forgotten leveret tight in his arms, the mature amusement, the detached contempt quite disappeared.

Urgent and quiet, a voice said, ‘Throw it.’ But that would be professional ruin. In a kind of petulant stupor born of fright, Stewart lay and watched as the cat gathered its limbs for a jump. Then it was airborne. In the same kind of trance, he saw its belly above him, smelled the blood, saw the sun spark on the claws. And saw, torn from his dream, sick and fiery with hope, something hit and enfold the scarred, arching body, swaddling the spare head, muffling the peaty eyes, twisting and trapping the powerful limbs.

It was Thady Boy’s saddlecloth. As the cheetah, hurtling threshing against them, began to fight its way free, the ollave’s strong hands jerked Stewart, staggering, to his feet and, one steadying hand under his elbow, made him run.

With stones, with rods, pulling the horses as near as they dared to separate victim from cat, the others did what they could; but they were not quick enough. Insane for its baulked blood, the cheetah drove through them, wet with fresh wounds, and settled into its stride in the tracks of the two running men.

It reached them as, sprinting, jumping, twisting over uneven ground, Thady brought the Archer to the edge of the meadow where turf gave way to scrub and rank grass and the pitted limestone banks of the Loire. A wisp of smoke, the dying breath of some oracle, rose for a moment in the bright air and died away. Stewart turned, his bony hands tight on Suzanne’s fat body; and in a flash of torrid fur, the cheetah rose.

At that point, the automatic obedience which had brought Stewart so far came to an end. He could run no further. He couldn’t fight a hunting cat with his bare hands, nor could Thady. He began to duck, in pure reflex action, but in his mind was only a dead wilderness which did not even anticipate pain. Then something took him by the collar. As the cat was in mid-spring, Thady Boy ducked, twisted, and hurled Stewart forward with all the strength of his shoulder into the ground.

And the ground gave way. In a kind of trauma of exhaustion and
fright the Archer felt himself falling not merely forward on his knees in the scrub but sucked downwards, blundering, banging hip, knee and elbow on unyielding surfaces, losing his breath, and not merely from concussion; losing his sight, and not merely from panic. Slipping, sliding, skidding, in utter amazement, Robin Stewart tumbled head over heels into darkness.

There was a lung-flattening jolt, a burst of light, a choking flurry of smoke, and a scream. The Archer opened his eyes. He was sitting half-disgorged from a twisting stone chimney, on a hearth with a little wood fire: a discovery he made painfully and fast as Thady Boy, tumbling down on his tracks, landed plump on his lap. In that age-old limestone landscape, all colonized with caves, he had dropped on to the troglodyte hearthstone of the man with the cap. And ringing in his ears was a soft voice which had surely just spoken, back there in the field, before the bed of the fire burned his seat.
‘For O’LiamRoe’s sake, my dear,’
it had said,
‘you deserve to fall first.’

Before they left, the Archer got Thady Boy by the arm. ‘You saved my life,’ he said. ‘You’d no need to do yon for me.’ Then, being Stewart, he spared a glance for the little hare. Her eyes were open and her soft ears laid back, but already her brown fur was cold.

‘She died of fright just after you got her,’ said Thady Boy Ballagh. ‘I told you to throw her.’

A less worldly society would have cheered their reappearance from the cave. The Court of France cheered the cheetah, laughed, and went about their business. Someone brought up Thady’s jennet, and Stewart, sitting tenderly in the saddle, posted stiff-legged after the rest. The cheetah, masked and leashed, sat rock-still and silent once more on her groom’s crupper; and strung out, the horns speaking their message, the hunt was making for home. Long ago the Queen’s party had gone. The younger men trotted beside Thady; and St. André himself held him in light conversation, his hand on his knee. The leveret hung from his saddlebow, the jewelled collar winking green.

Back in the field, one horse still stood waiting; one man was not quite ready to go. Mistress Boyle noticed it, glancing over her shoulder; lightly she skirled, and winked at her friends. ‘Ah, Oonagh, there goes the fine present our noble friend was after making you. Is it paid for, do you think, or will he be needing to ask a loan of us next?’

There was a long laugh. It rolled clear over the crushed stalks and bruised grass, the smeared weeds and wet earth to where O’LiamRoe knelt, his golden hair blowing, by the shuddering rags of the dog Luadhas, and drew his knife in charity along her long throat.

T
HAT autumn, Margaret Erskine wrote to her husband, ‘Your lantern lissom of light is possessed of devils’; and far off in Augsburg, with its vineyards and walnut trees, its sandy, stony terraces and its ageing, weakening Emperor, the Ambassador, knowing Lymond, wondered what barbaric enfranchisement of soul or of body he was devising for himself and for his sponsors now.

Before the cheetah hunt was a week old, the full Court arrived at Blois, streaming uphill from the river to the broad court of the château. The sun on the King’s mail splashed through the dark archway, slid over the thick, eely salamanders on his father’s great wing and winked from the stony case of the stairway as the Court in silver, satin and jewels was sucked up in his wake, as O’LiamRoe observed, like crabmeat in a gullery.

With King, Queen and Constable had come the nursery. Mary was delighted to see them. In the old days she had enjoyed sleeping with Elizabeth and Claude, but she liked sharing her room with Aunt Fleming even better and was looking forward to mentioning it.

The death of the leveret had been a two days’ agony. After it, on her charming uncle’s advice, the small Queen was taken, her face still white with crying, to see and thank O’LiamRoe.

She was only seven. Halfway through, the speech came to an end; and she stood before him, breathing heavily, her lip transfixed by her teeth and a tear in each lid. The Prince of Barrow, who had been suffering an embarrassment almost as acute, instantly knelt, stumbling slightly, and said, ‘What is on you, Princess? There goes Luadhas, hunting with the old gods and the noble champions at the great Feis of Samhantide, with golden Cormac himself, without blemish or reproach; and after, Bran and Luadhas and Conbec lie all at the King’s feet, fed and sleeping. For this day, to be sure, the wolfhound and the little hare have shared the two sides of a dish of new milk; and when we have years and years on us they will be running yet
up there on the blue speckled Curragh, with their pink tongues and their sharp, young, white teeth. Thady Boy there will tell you.’

Lymond did not speak. Watching O’LiamRoe from the fireplace, he and Margaret Erskine, who had brought her, had already exchanged all their news; she had no wish to provoke him further to speech. The towering, icy rage of the Queen Mother after the hunt had been easier to bear than Lymond’s smooth tongue. Here was another attempt to endanger the Queen and her friends. On the face of it, a travel-split cage explained the hare’s escape from the menagerie; coincidence explained its presence there in the woods. It was Lymond, combing the bushes on his own, who had found the anonymous game bag afterwards, not far from where the hunt had paused during the final stint. Stiff, roughly perforated, offensive with crotel, it showed by a torn buckle where someone had wrenched it off in his haste, and then abandoned it. So the hare had been carried throughout the chase, it now seemed, its bag probably cloaked; and had been released just there, deliberately, to do what harm it could. And but for the dog, braver than anyone could have calculated, the trick might have succeeded.

Since that day, the tourniquet of their duties about the Queen had tightened. By Lymond’s laws they were bound now, in an unbreakable fence about the Queen. There was no second of the day when an Erskine or a Fleming was not at her side. Only Jenny, popular, resilient, was exempt, while they waited for the shadow of death or accident to fall again.

O’LiamRoe, silent on the subject of Luadhas, struggling perhaps himself with an unaccustomed need for privacy, was ignorant and content to be ignorant of his ollave’s affairs. And since Mistress Boyle, in her positive, eccentric way, had apparently forgotten the whole episode, he resumed his relationship with the lady and her niece, adopting with pleasure their wide circle of friends and finding in Oonagh, now and then, a trace of courtesy lacking before.

Fresh, night-long cronies from the Franco-Irish circle at Blois in turn visited him, and so did the English and some of the Scots. The big room shared by Prince and ollave was seldom empty of convivial company disputing hotly in French, Irish, English, Latin. Occasionally Thady Boy’s sardonic voice was heard, and O’LiamRoe’s face would admit a certain avuncular pride. Thady Boy could talk. And he was a pet of a listener as well.

Barred himself from the ultimate presence of the sovereign, the Prince of Barrow missed the solid hard work which was making Thady Boy indispensable at Court. At levée and reception, at ball and after sport, during meals and after supper parties, Thady was expected as a matter of course. His playing had become as fashionable as a drug. He made music in public and in private for them all:
the King, the Queen, Diane, the Constable and Condé, d’Enghien, the de Guises, Marguerite, and already they thought nothing and less than nothing of how he looked. Then, that goal reached, he hardened his long fingers in their entrails of icing and sugar and started to twist.

It was then that O’LiamRoe, coming back to his chamber now and then, found the door locked against him, and a woman’s voice, sweet and unrecognizable, spoke once when he rattled.
‘Non si puo: il signor è accompagnato.’
The next time the voice was a man’s; but it ceased as soon as O’LiamRoe rapped.

Only Robin Stewart upbraided Thady Boy, and then on the eve of their sole journey: a two-day visit by ceremonial invitation to Lord d’Aubigny’s home. Since Thady Boy’s first, carefree days in France, Lymond had kept his finger lightly on the pulse of Robin Stewart’s troubles, for little reason other than habit. Attention to weaker vessels had been for years a fighter’s necessity. It was also the sign of a born teacher, although this was not an aspect of Thady Boy which leaped to the eye.

On Stewart’s side through all this, a grudging admiration had succeeded distrust. Even before the hunt he had started to seek out Thady. After it, aggressively, he showed signs of haunting him, and Thady Boy, who by this time had his own reasons, did nothing to stop him. Faced now with one of the Archer’s more popular tirades, Thady Boy listened patiently, unrolling a doublet and beginning to put it on. Stewart’s lecture ended, and his bony hand rubbed over his face, stirring his already disordered hair and flicking his shirt collar awry. Unnoticing, he said suddenly, ‘Ballagh—why d’ye stay with O’LiamRoe? Any God’s number of dukes and lords here would be blithe to employ you, if it’s money you want.’

Thady Boy pulled shut the paned windows. ‘I thought you’d got O’LiamRoe out of your pate. What’s wrong with him now?’

The Archer said brusquely, ‘I don’t know.’ Then bending, he picked up his cloak and swung round, his face red. ‘It’s not worth speaking of. But … hell fry them … there they sit in their fancy clothes, with their lapdogs and their boy friends and the carbuncles bluff on their pinkies; and unless you’re Michael Scott or Michaelangelo, or Duns Scotus or Bayard, or a six-headed sow that can play prick-song on a jew’s harp, they’ve no use for you.’

Thady Boy, too, had slung his cloak over his shoulder and was standing, legs apart, hands clasped behind him, watching. ‘And which of O’LiamRoe’s spanking successes is irritating you?’ he asked. ‘Being turned off the tennis court or your cheetah clawing his wolfhound to death?—That hurt, by the way.’

‘I’m pleased to hear it,’ said Stewart viciously. ‘You’d never know it. He’s mediocre, and he doesna care. He doesn’t even bother with—’ He stopped.

‘With what? Women? That remains to be seen. You may think you’ve endeared yourself to the Boyle family, my dear, but I doubt it. And
is
he mediocre?’ asked Thady Boy. ‘He upsets your philosophy by being happy; but I find him irritating for other reasons entirely.’

‘Then why stay with him?’ Blundering, Stewart renewed the attack. ‘Do you think you owe him loyalty? Do we owe any jack of them loyalty? If you made one slip yourself, they’d have your liver under their nails.’

His voice was thick; Thady’s, mellow and cool as the Liffey. ‘ ’Tis yourself, my fellow, who needs to leave this fine country. Quit off and go back to Scotland. Why not?’

Robin Stewart drew a deep breath. The waves of heat from the hearth oppressed them both, fully dressed for the journey. Stewart’s coarse skin was moist with heat; the brows indented, line upon line, where the fretful pressures of his spirit squeezed into his flesh day and night. ‘I’ll be sorry I said it,’ said the Archer suddenly. ‘But I’d liefer you knew. I would have left many a long week ago, if it wasn’t for you.’

Neither surprise nor pleasure showed on the dark face opposite, only hard-held patience and something else so efficiently suppressed that Stewart missed it altogether. The ollave loosed his clasped hands and laid two fingers on the latch. ‘They are waiting for us. I hope you will regret nothing you do from this out. But because of me … because of me, gallant man, I think you should leave.’

For a moment, in silence, they faced each other. Then, without waiting for an answer, Ballagh opened the door and moving quickly and lightly, ran downstairs to the horses.

On a little river south of Orléans, at the eastern edge of the rolling green fens of La Sologne, lay the moated town of Aubigny-sur-Nère, given to John Stewart, High Officer of the Scots Army fighting in France, by a grateful nation a century and a quarter before this. Twice burned by the English and once by accident, it had risen on its ashes neat, prosperous and comely, with its statue of St. Martin, its shops, stables, gardens, houses, smithy, fountain, worksheds and its elegant castle where, beneath the lions and salamanders of a bygone Stewart the present owner, lordly in silk, welcomed the arrival of O’LiamRoe, Thady, Dooly and their guide Robin Stewart. And with Lord d’Aubigny were his two Scottish relatives by marriage, Sir George Douglas and Sir James.

Blandly, the visit began.

Once before, John Stewart of Aubigny had been surprised by the range of O’LiamRoe’s interests. Now, displaying his treasures to the
trained mind of the ollave, he found again an unwilling kinship with the ollave’s queer master. O’LiamRoe could and did alarm with unseemly fables of the Gobbam Saer; but Delorme, god of masons, could reduce him to silence; and the names of Limousin and Duret, of Rosso and del Sarto, Cellini and Da Vinci, Primaticcio and Grolier rose familiarly to his lips. With Robin Stewart sour and Thady discreet behind him, he wandered happily though Castle Aubigny and, next day, through Stewart’s other beautiful house on the Nère, touching silverwork and embroidery, admiring paintings, savouring gem-bound books and tapestries, imported tiles and Milanese beds and Florentine marquetry, the frescoes and the grave, Italian marbles. The houses were large; the staffs—stewards, equerries, ladies-in-waiting to his wife, tutors and pages for his son, chambermaids, waiting women, priest, surgeon, butler, cook, gatekeepers and porters, baker, cobbler and baron-court sergeants of the wards—were immense.

Watching d’Aubigny, his big, firm hands turning over a piece of enamel, his cultured Scots-French voice expatiating on the Pénicauds, it was hard to imagine him in the field, his company of arquebusiers mounted behind him, the smell of horseflesh drowning the pomades. Yet he had fought; he had been in prison, if for political reasons only; he commanded a company. And judged by the unfairest standards, set against a scourging aesthetism bloodily acquired, his tastes were easy and his appreciation oddly slack.

He showed them, at La Verrerie, a Cellini saltcellar given him by the King. ‘Some years ago now, of course,’ said Lord d’Aubigny. ‘He has certain other continuing drains on his income. It isn’t easy for him to be as generous as he would like. Except in some quarters. Chenonceaux—have you seen Chenonceaux? Prettier than Anet, in my view. She’s hardly ever there. Thirteen thousand aubergines, she has in the garden; and nine thousand strawberry plants he sent her last year. It will be a pity if she spoils it. They like throwing money about. Have you seen Écouen and Chantilly? It’s a pity when the taste isn’t there. They talk a lot of the Queen—these pearls from Florence, the furniture she has there at Blois. Of course, Florence was at its height very recently. She married at thirteen, a cradle between two coffins—you won’t remember the phrase—and learned all she knows about a court under François au Grand Nez. And we know what
that
means.…’