Queens' Play (29 page)

By next day, he and Piedar Dooly were back in their old room at Blois.

Thady Boy, when they arrived, was out, fêting up river with the Court. Stewart’s ambitious plan to remove him had all too obviously come to nothing.

O’LiamRoe was aware that he himself had not been helpful. He could understand the exasperation, of even the dislike which he supposed had prompted Thady Boy’s ill-natured riposte of the serenade. It was the abuse of Oonagh’s good name and hospitality which he found regrettable. O’LiamRoe, from his detached side of the fence, rarely thought of anything as unforgivable.

So for the next few days he stayed in his room, seeing few people, quietly coming to terms with himself, and only smiled a little at the irony when a Gentleman of the King’s called to invite him to a royal banquet on the following day. Recognition had come at last. When the puppetry had palled and no reason but pride was left to hold him in France, the innermost door, long forced by Thady Boy, had opened to him also.

That same afternoon Stewart came back, rattling in his caked spurs and yellower in the face than usual. Finding Thady out he remained only briefly. He and Paris were leaving on the first stage of their journey to Ireland next day.

Then the Court returned, late at night and hilarious. O’LiamRoe was wakened by the arrival of Lymond with a whole drinking party, introduced thickly and meticulously, who then stayed until dawn. O’LiamRoe gave him Stewart’s message when at first light the rabble tumbled at last through the door, and Thady Boy kicked off his boots.

‘Oh God, yes of course. You took your bruises to Neuvy. I could almost hear them begging you to go home with me before the end of it. What did she offer you to leave her?’

He couldn’t have known. But the foul taste of it, the casual accuracy of the guess, made him feel suddenly physically ill. So far from being detached, with another man O’LiamRoe might have blundered into violence. As it was, he left the room abruptly, without seeing the sudden stillness on Thady Boy’s face.

The next day, Friday the 16th of January, opened quietly. Blois slept late these days, for the King, never privileged to share his own father’s council, gave his own the least possible regard; and during a season of sport or fêting abandoned it with relief to the de Guises, to the Constable, to the Marshals and the cool, overseeing glance of Diane, who never slept.

This year, the pleasure seeking hid more than the King’s ingrained resentment and his wish to please and renew the love of his friends. Beneath the surface were new tensions, no less disturbing for being petty. About this time rumour, unavoidably, had begun to play about the appearance of Lady Fleming. She, moving serenely about her daily adventures, was undisturbed; but the rift between the Constable and the Duchess de Valentinois was now perfectly patent.

It could be guessed also, without pretence of secrecy, that the Queen Dowager of Scotland was finding it harder to harness her unruly nobles. Honours, pensions, ready money in the purse, had done nothing but sharpen their hunger. Failing the bribery they were worth, their minds turned again to power and to their duty to their religion, belligerently recalled. Tom Erskine, lingering on his way back from Augsburg and cumbered with transactions to do with papal legations and bishoprics, and with arrangements for the French garrisons and armies at home, was still there, doing his best to doctor the mess, while waiting to leave in due time to complete his last treaty of peace back in England, and to return to Stirling and Margaret’s small son at their home.

The invitation to Richard Crawford, which it had been totally impossible not to send, was now a month old. Lymond had been told, with extreme circumspection, that his brother had been sent for, but it was hard to say if he either listened particularly or understood.

The entertainment for this evening had been designed by the Constable and Queen Catherine, not with a new guest in mind, but in an effort to rationalize the feverish gaiety in the castle, and to reduce the tension. It was to be a private festival held by the inner Court for itself, and the only guests apart from the two Irishmen would be less guests than pensioners: the professors and scholars and scientists and wits who came by invitation to Blois, and sitting at the King’s elbow, turned somersaults for him in the swept galleries of thought. From Paris, Toulouse, Angers, not all of them had heard of Thady Boy. The King, amused, did not enlighten them. The new toy, wound up, clicking and jumping, was to be set among the pedants unawares.

For this reason perhaps, Thady Boy was not much in evidence during the day. The O’LiamRoe saw him twice only. The first time, as the ollave was dressing, he had sat himself astride a chair and said mildly, ‘In my day, as I remember, it was customary to ask permission before leaving one’s employment—The Lord guard us, are these all the clothes you have?’ And flinching aside from the shirt and trunks and doublet the ollave was donning, Phelim had opened the clothes chest. Piled and screwed up within were the other costumes, jewelled, embroidered and beribboned, given Thady Boy by the King of France. They had all been handled like rags.

Lymond was ready, in a hurry, and not interested in O’LiamRoe. ‘You’ve no need to believe every tale I tell Robin Stewart. It was the only way at the time to get rid of him. He’s welcome to sail back to Ireland and stay there, if he wants to. I’ll go soon enough … in better company than that.’

He hadn’t mentioned, but Piedar Dooly had, the incident of the arsenic. Watching him now, lute in hand, hurrying off to Diane, or to d’Enghien, to St. André, to Marguerite, or any of a score of his acolytes, masters, or mistresses, O’LiamRoe was conscious of a sourness in his mouth which recalled suddenly the taste of other wretchedness recently endured. He had to force himself to remember that the creations of an original mind were seldom bought nor were they offered without a price.

The second time, coming to dress for the banquet, he heard Robin Stewart with Thady. He had come at the wrong moment. The conversation, to begin with, must have been a stumbling one. The Archer by now was at his most abrupt and nervously aggressive, his voice splitting a little as his feelings ran beyond it. O’LiamRoe heard that; and heard Thady’s voice in a tone he did not at first recognize, quiet and clear-phrased and sane. He was still, he noticed, using his Irish accent. He spoke for some time; then Stewart replied, but a good deal of the edge had gone. Then Thady said something quite brief, and there was a little silence. It was getting late.
O’LiamRoe, feeling that he had done more than enough for Scotland, pushed the door open and went in.

Thady Boy was sitting on the edge of their decorated chest, rather still, looking with calm attention at Robin Stewart’s face. The Archer, evidently just risen, had come forward and had laid a hand, gingerly and enquiringly, like a nervous schoolboy, on Thady arm. Then, without seeing O’LiamRoe, he dropped to his knees.

O’LiamRoe made the next step a heavy one. The Archer looked round. His long-jawed face, hollow with hard work and recent travelling, went scarlet, and then white. He jumped up. Tired of the limp and foetid atmosphere of badly controlled emotion, the Prince of Barrow sailed across to his side of the bedroom, and sitting down, began to fight off his boots. ‘Ah! Don’t let him have you deceived, Stewart. How would he leave? He’s supping with the Cardinal tomorrow, and hunting the day after, and playing quoits with the King the day after that. Let you make haste to make your own plans with friend Paris and leave, for it’s that gay he is, there’s no knowing where he will stop. But, by God, if there was any sense in me, I’d come with you myself.’

For a burning second, no one said anything. Then Robin Stewart, all the sting returned to his voice, said shrilly, ‘God’s curse, I hope not. For five months I’ve had Irishmen falling out of my clothes like lice. I can’t wait to get done with them.’

He saw Thady shake his head; whether at himself or at the Archer was not quite clear. He had time to experience a happy sense of fulfilment before the door burst open and half Stewart’s comrades-in-arms tumbled in, tired of waiting to give him his send-off, and seizing the excuse to capture a better prize at the same time.

By invitation, O’LiamRoe went along with them and, dressed in a brave creation of pastel silk, a little niggardly at the seams, drank mulled wine and added his mite to the loud laughter and wild invention set afloat in the copious backwash of hot mace and ginger. Stewart, who had very little to say anyway, had no need to speak a word. Thady Boy, at his elbow, haunted possibly by his forthcoming exhibition, tipped down the thick, scented liquor, choked, swore, and was the first to stalk off when pages brought the early summons to supper.

From his discreet afternoons with the ladies, O’LiamRoe had sized up the great Court of France and considered that he had its measure. He stepped into the blazing Salle d’Honneur that night, and the reality hit him like a blow on the head.

About him were all the famous, high-browed faces pink-flushed in the firelight, the little pearls and crystals winking in every ear as the restless, chattering heads turned. Tonight, the colours were all different, heaped, tangled and flowing one on top of the other:
velvet orangé, tanné, green, cendré, blue, yellow, red cramoisie, white, gold, copper, violet. In her high chair the Queen had thrown back a cloak of white fur sewn with gems; the King was in cloth of gold, Brusquet and the Archers and the dwarfs in attendance.

Everything was here that he could not help but know was beautiful: a good taste made better by wealth, but which would have managed without it; intelligence on a scale which made him remember ruefully his once cynical words; and a brittle, assured and scholarly wit as detached and ironic as his own. He recognized that in pursuit of his theories, he had nearly fallen over the most remarkable signpost he was ever likely to meet. And while nursing the barked shins of his amour-propre, O’LiamRoe was still capable of honest admiration.

His neighbours he found pleasant, in a casual way. There had been no place yet for serious conversation, but it was well within his powers to make them laugh with him; and he supposed he did not care if they laughed about him afterwards. In any case, the ear of the Court was pitched, not to him, but to Thady Boy.

During supper, the ollave had been asked to sing, and did so readily, unprepossessing but reasonably clean, and almost quite sober. Palestrina and the caquet des femmes O’LiamRoe enjoyed; but he had not expected the purities of the
Gen-traige
, the
Gol-traige
, the
Suan-traige
. In what nether vert Thady Boy had learned the great music of the bard he did not know; but he played in the austere tradition of the monasteries, stretching from Pavia to Roth, which once made the music of Ireland free of every harpstring in Europe. Whatever he was, the justification was there in his art. The familiar music, precisely chosen, decorated the beautiful room as if it had been a painting, and O’LiamRoe, his heart tight, thought, This is my country. Whatever she may become, she has conquered the world. Then the meal ended, and the singing; and the other entertainments began.

These were pleasant enough. Nothing, in fact, hinted at a change in the tenor of the evening until the display of the savages was reached—a dance by some captured Brazilians, sent down from the latest expedition in charge of the Keeper. Abernaci, in a cloth of gold turban, was amongst them, supervising his men as they bustled the confused captives in. Suddenly the entertainment had changed from the civilized to the freakish: was that why the Scottish Dowager’s face was immovable; and Catherine fidgeted a little, as if prepared for imminent boredom? But the men of the Court on the contrary had come alive. The King, leaning away a little from his gathering of scholars, had caught St. Andre’s eye, and a smile of common understanding had passed. O’LiamRoe counted six men and one woman who had obviously had too much to drink. The rest, presumably, could hold it better. This surprised him too, for he had expected the
standard of behaviour here at least to be rigid to the point of fussiness.

For the Prince of Barrow, the urgency and beauty of the dance, in their own way, complemented the handsomeness of the setting no less than the music had done. The dancers were all men, black-haired and naked. Copper-skinned, they whirled and padded on the smooth tiles, bare feet slapping, the swinging blue-black curtain of their hair blown sticky on to their jerking, round muscled arms. Sweat, gold in the firelight, slid down the smooth channels of breastbone and spine, between the flat bronze pads of the breasts and round the taut horseshoe of the rib cage. Their eyes, cut round and small above the taut cheekbones, were hot and blank.

At first, O’LiamRoe and those around him heard only the music from the embrasure where the small drums thudded and the flutes whistled. Then under that, he began to hear laughter and exclamations, and one familiar voice; and between the leaping, silent, shifting figures he began to see three in particular, directly in front of the King, whose bearded mouth showed suddenly a flash of white laughter. Between the curled toes and knotted calves, a little flurry of feathers dived out, glinted and changed direction, like small, silvery fish in a shoal.