Queens' Play (35 page)

To this, Lord d’Aubigny, leader for the day, had added refinements. The route was to be reversed. Mexicans and Turks, heralded by a nearly sober young captain with curling hair, would seek admission to the King’s castle of Amboise, would foregather at the top of the Tour des Minimes, and racing down the spiral carriage ramp for which the Tower was famous, would debouch over the drawbridge on to the shore and across the near arm of the river to finish midstream at the Isle d’Or, where they now were.

The nearly sober young captain, who had to ingratiate himself with the Queen Dowager and the King’s commander, had gone; and to keep him nearly sober, an Archer called André Spens had gone with him.

In due course the rest of the grotesque party followed too, howling, over the second bridge, Thady Boy in the thick of them. He was not, by then, thinking very clearly, part of his mind being distantly occupied with analysing the significance of what he had just learned. Another part, philosophically, recognized that the crisis he had been waiting for was probably on him, and that he had sent his brother’s men home. The rest of him did not care; for by then he was blessedly, exceedingly drunk.

He retrieved the mask from Lord d’Aubigny who seemed, with reason, to have lost his fancy for it, and tried and failed to order his vagrant senses as they rode up the incline from the bridge and through the Lion Gate into the castle.

By then, the mist had risen higher, glooming off the dark river like pillowed figures. Mattresses of fog lay round the castle and behind them the lanterns showed faded, with cannibal rainbows, hazy
and parched, all around them. Below, the river stirred, black and sluggish in the raw night air.

But no one crossed the Loire swimming that night. The tragedy happened in the castle itself, where all the Scottish Court gathered under the great awning outside the King’s lodging to watch the cavorting, careless delinquents of the King of France’s train.

The two processional towers of Amboise, up which carts and gun carriages could crawl, climbing the steep, cobbled slope, winding round and round a newel post itself nearly thirty feet wide, could take four horsemen abreast on its slopes. Tonight, it was empty. All down the steep ramp, coiling from palace to shore, torches flared beside the tall windows, night-black slits in the twelve-foot walls, hung with arras, and the fog, curling up from the river, past the convent, filling the moat, drifting smokelike through the wide, crested door, climbed the damp walls below with soft fingers.

At the top, the horses jostled in the wide courtyard, lining up, breaking line and reforming. The still-lanterns made fireflies of their jewels; the cloaks swung, hissing, like thick-winged birds; a scimitar flashed; the awning cords, draught-borne, lifted weblike as quipus; a conch blew, and St. André’s face, earringed and turbaned, melted
in
the queer, slanting glare into an eminently fungoid growth, throwing disjointed shadows.

Richard, watching in silence beside the Queen Mother, his face disciplined to be still, saw the Vidame, nearly too drunk to ride, thickly rallying his forces; Laurens de Genstan, heavily scented in red brocade, groping for his gelding’s dropped reins; Lord d’Aubigny, half wishing himself elsewhere and half pleased to be exercising his higher sensibilities; and last, merging into the night, an odd and gruesome mask at his saddlebow, the slack form of his brother being thrust forward to Condé’s green feathered side.

A handkerchief was raised. As it went up, Lymond turned, vaguely, towards the faceless body of Scots and raised a hand in a perfunctory wave. In the obscure light his face was both fuddled and strained, as it had been two weeks ago in his room. He looked half-stupefied; but impulsively Richard waved back. Then the white linen dropped, and the surging body of horsemen leaped for the ramp of the Tour des Minimes.

Like heifers pouring, knee on shoulder, through the Martinmas hurdle, like dolphins soaring, back under belly, in a jubilant pack, like Aztecs, like Muslems, like rich and wanton young men, the horsemen choked the wide gateway and rushed over the lip, manes, hair, cloaks flying, to drop down the steep slope of the ramp.

Crushed by flank, saddle and stirrup, rough-dragged by the stone wall, jamming the broad spiral from wrenched arras to arras, the riders flowed down, skidding, struggling in a sluggish miasma of
damp and ordure and sweat. And as the open night flashed behind them, and the thick walls curled, and the high, groined roof whirled twisting from their feet to their heads, the noise deadened all thought.

Unknowing, every man shouted. Bits clinked, harness jangled, horses neighed; hooves, striking out, clashed on stone or metal or flesh and rattled fiery on the cobbles below, knitting with their own echoes a mesh of unendurable sound to drive the mind mad. In the lead was an Archer, followed by Condé and de Genstan. Thady Boy came next, riding by instinct in the tumbling avalanche; and d’Enghien, who had been watching him, pressed to his side. The Vidame and St. André followed, and a dozen others. D’Aubigny, his handsome face concentrated, flew with the remainder behind.

Already, stumbling, slipping, thrust over-violently from the way, some riders were down. As the staircase unwound, yellow, hazy with fog and smoke, steeper and steeper, faster and faster, impelled by the loosening fabric of their numbers, by the ramrod of impetus, the wild young blood of France on its splendid horseflesh flew like peacocks, short-reined, teeth bared, saddleback hard on the spine, the thick air swirling at their backs.

The rope was stretched across before the last bend. Laurens de Genstan, leading, could never have known why he fell. His hands spread, he was hurled sideways, one foot still trapped; and hit the wall with an impact whose violence, in that inferno of sound, was all in mime. He died, his powdered face shining with blood; but his horse lived to kill the next man who hurtled downhill into his great, threshing shoulders and his iron foot. Then, like a torrent lipping a rock, the oncoming horses smashed uprearing against the heaving barrier of the fallen, and fell broken and sliding down the ramp.

Among them, his reins running hot through d’Enghien’s snatching hands, was Francis Crawford of Lymond: crashing, rolling, sliding to lie broken-slack, a mess of scarlet-stained feathers, like a week-old kill in some queer, spiral mews.

In the falling douche of horse and humanity, the torches in one entire volute of the stair had gone out, abandoning it to night and the white fog. Piled like marionettes, splintered men on broken horse, the last were luckiest except for those, rushing down in the dark, who somersaulted over the thick and struggling mass and slid below, ricocheting and crumbling at each bend. The debris, human and material, stretched downhill a long way.

Richard was among those who, in the flickering hazed light of new torches, began the heart-stopping work of rescue from above and from below. Richard saw them all taken up, one by one; dragged, carried, laid on improvised stretchers. St. André, the precious St. André, had fallen soft, cushioned by a rival’s green feathers and the dead rump of a horse, and had a gashed leg; that was all. The
Vidame, groaning, was taken off half-unconscious with a broken collarbone and a wrenched knee. De Genstan was dead. D’Aubigny was unconscious, his clothes bloodstained, but his pulse was steady; d’Enghien also was badly bruised, but otherwise safe. The Prince of Condé had fallen nimbly enough, but had been crushed twice, once by his horse and then by St. Andre
’s
. His hip was broken, and one of his arms; whatever else could not be learned, as he fought off any effort to help him, half-unconscious and screaming. Two more men were taken out, their faces covered. Richard bent over them both, and lifted the cloths. Both were strangers.

At some point, Tom Erskine had appeared at his side. As, one by one, the horses were dragged off and killed and the riders in all their blood-soaked disguises were pulled and shifted, Richard and he worked unsparingly, looking always for one man. More torches were brought. They lit what was best left unlit: the sodden marc of the avalanche; the horsemen who had borne the full weight of the fall. It was Richard who knelt and took the dead hands in his, the unremarkable hands, square and bony and plump, cut by their own jewels, and then laid them each time gently back in their place.

The last horse was removed. Men with candles turned over the looming bundles of cloth, the cloaks, the horse trappings, the over-robes which littered the slopes, black and greasy with blood. The lackeys came out and gathered these up, and the Tour des Minimes was empty but for the fog and the blood: empty, although they visited it again, disbelieving, after climbing up to look again among the rows of hurt, of dying and of dead.

In the end, dirty, stained and exhausted, they and all Lymond’s wild young disciples understood only one thing. Thady Boy Ballagh, who had been seen to fall hurt by half the riders about him, was no longer there.

Gone too was the man who, looking down at the death lying about him, had exclaimed, unheard in the uproar, contempt in his reflective, soft voice, ‘…
Ta sotte muse, avec ta rude Lyre!
The devil give you his bed now, Master Thady Boy Ballagh!’

Every doctor and every apothecary in Amboise was at the castle that night; and next day the Constable came too, sitting, thick-veined hands over straddled knees, listening to St. Andre’s white-lipped account. For this time the assassins had been careless. The planned accident, the perfect picture of a chance stumble bringing inevitable result, had been destroyed at the very start by the fact that the murderers, frightened, had abandoned the trip rope stretched from side to side of the ramp.

While suspicion grew, faint and thickening like the river fog, Richard and Tom Erskine searched in vain for any trace of Thady Boy. With infinite care, preserving at all costs his masquerade, Richard visited the mahout Abernaci. The Keeper had been all night at Blois and knew nothing.

Then, five days after the disaster, Tosh appeared, pulling his donkey and trailing his ropes, and a group of Scotsmen, leaving thankfully behind them the makeshift hospital that was Amboise castle, walked down to the bridge where, watched by a throng, the lower end of one of the funambulist’s great cables was being lashed.

Richard was not among them. It was George Douglas who after a while returned to his lodging, and catching Culter just back from one of his tiring, unexplained rides, said casually, ‘Relax, my dear man. Your teeth will rattle like sounding-bones if you wear yourself out in this fashion. Leave your obscure pursuits and go and see Ouishart. He is quite a remarkable man. He ought to be wearing the mask instead of that unfortunate donkey. Quetzalcoatl, lord of the Toltecs.’

‘The
donkey’
s wearing a mask?’ This was, he knew, the Douglas method of imparting information; but even so, he felt himself redden with the shock. ‘An Aztec mask, good God?’

Sir George smiled. ‘A great, grinning thing in mosaic, with gold ears. It used to have inlays and teeth too, by the look of it, but someone’s tried hard to smash it to bits. Presumably the donkey. Go and see it. You’ll laugh.’

He went; but hardly to laugh. Struggling through the crowd, he found the grotesque thing, bound crudely to the beast’s furry head, cracked and blackened with the glaze of some stain. It was the mask Lymond had had at his saddlebow, at the start of that fated night’s race.

And Tosh’s news, delivered with practised discretion, was disastrous. For he himself had found that much-advertised mask that morning—not in the castle, not in its precincts, not in the town of Amboise at all. He had found it in Blois, trampled underfoot by spectators like himself, in the crowded courtyard of Hélie and Anne Moûtier’s empty house. And before him, a roaring torch, hidden in sheeted flame forty feet high, was the Hôtel Moûtier on fire.

No one could have entered then and lived. Tosh, after searching fruitlessly in the neighbourhod for any traces of Thady Boy, had sent messages to Abernaci and had set off himself to the Scottish Court at Amboise with the news, bearing the mask as his grim badge.

That night, Erskine used all his powers short of physical force to prevent Richard riding openly to Blois. And he kept vigil at his side
as Lord Culter sat, sleepless before the red fire of his fine chamber at Amboise, trying to fathom the truth. Witness after witness among the riders in the Tower had told how Thady Boy had been injured. How then had he found his way from Amboise to the Hôtel Moûtier in Blois? Had he in fact gone there to hide? For if so, it seemed probable that he had died there, in that inexplicable fire.

A
VOICE, somewhere, was speaking. What it said was not easy to follow. Indeed, thought the man in the bed, it would be stupid to try. Beyond the barrier of understanding were wakefulness, frustration, even pain: a world as remote as the remote, unremitting voice which seemed to repeat itself, over and over again.

It was a voice no one could have called soothing, an impatient voice, an acid voice even. ‘Your eyes are open,’ it said sharply. ‘Look at me. You can see. You can have opium again later, if you want.…’

That, thought the man in the bed sardonically, was kind. Memory, pricked into action by pain, recalled vividly just what had happened at the Tour des Minimes. Condé’s horse, he remembered, had plunged towards him as he fell. There had followed a series of memorable impacts and, he had assumed, death.

He did not appear to be dead. His leg was splinted, and it hurt him to breathe however, and there were bandages, he could feel, round his ribs. Through the aftermath of strong drugs he could recognize the irritating torpor of bloodlessness. God. Richard, or Tom Erskine, or whichever waxen-faced nursemaid was going to patch him up this time would have to work hard.… Sheer anger, sudden and life-giving, fought with his weakness and mastered it. Explosively, Francis Crawford of Lymond turned his head.

Above him, misty in a grey daylight, her hair like a veil, her own eyes caught wide, was Oonagh O’Dwyer. Had he looked, he could have seen his own reflection, startlingly, in her mirrored gaze. As it was, the voice had stopped. For a breath or two, there was silence; then she moved, and he saw a painted ceiling in the place where she had been. Then, reflectively, she resumed somewhere out of his sight, her movements sheathing and unsheathing her voice.

‘And are you not the stubborn man to awake?’ she said. ‘And I longing to know how it feels to be feeble, and in my debt?’

Oonagh O’Dwyer. And as she knew, he would meet that kind of challenge in any state short of dissolution itself. Pitching his voice for clarity and not for strength, ‘To be vigorous and in your … debt would be nicer. Did you bring me here?’ he said.

She came back and looked down, her voice crisp. ‘I dislike being coerced. I decided that if you lived, I should bring you away. You were fortunate, lying near the foot of the Tower, and I had a boat waiting in the fog, and two to help me.’

‘How long is it since then?’

‘Have you really no idea?’ She laughed. ‘You have been helpless for five days, Mr. Crawford.’

Five days!
His brain recorded the surprise, and then deadened under the thundering onslaught of pain. The room had gone again, and the face above him was queerly detached, the painted leaves filling her hair. But he met her contemptuous stare and held it as long as he could, until he began to cough, the iron stale in his throat, and the dark came quickly and coldly again.

The next time he woke to the light of a different day. The straps round his body were still in place; but the windows were wide on a sunlit balcony and the candles, sourly smoking, had been freshly doused. From the violent paradisaical dreams he remembered, and the heavy, throttled sense of incipient pain, he knew that the taper fumes had been used to keep him asleep.

The peace it had brought him was probably the best treatment his abused and broken body could have had. But it had been done, of course, for her own ends. Nothing had ever deceived Lymond about Oonagh O’Dwyer. He watched her now as she sat, unaware of him, by the fire where she and O’LiamRoe had talked before his own unforgivable serenade, her cheekbones shadowed, her high, full brow bright with clear light; the two fine half-arcs of sleeplessness, of high-tempered strain, like a tread in snow beneath her two eyes; her hard, mobile lips shut. He said, his voice carefully preserved, ‘Who are you waiting for? Your aunt?’

Her hands closed together, a cage of white bone. Then, leaning back, she settled her gaze on the low, temporary bed, the bracing only visible in the brittle line of her jaw. Worn by solitariness and unconceded fears and an absence of sleep she was more than ever a beautiful woman with no time for beauty. She said, choosing her words this time with cold care, ‘If it were, you would be dead.’

There was no sound from inside the house: no clanking of pails, no kitchen chatter, no footsteps on the stairs. It was an empty house, then, and her aunt did not know. Beyond the balcony, the cast of the rooftops was familiar. He thought of the Tour des Minimes and
wondered what the tale of injured had been; but decided against wasting questions. He said, ‘You and the gentleman attempting to kill me have parted company?’

Oonagh smiled. ‘You might say that we disagreed on a minor point,’ she said. ‘But don’t run away with the idea that you’re going to be freed. For his purposes and mine you are as well imprisoned as dead; and what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’

Lymond lay still, trying to think. A long time ago, in Scotland, Mariotta had told him about Oonagh O’Dwyer. Even before Rouen and O’LiamRoe’s shame in the tennis courts he had been wary; yet she had resisted every effort to draw her, while hardly troubling to conceal that she knew who Thady Boy was. The man she had wished out of the way had been O’LiamRoe. Robin Stewart and his master, too, had tried to assail O’LiamRoe in the belief that he was Lymond. She knew better, but she had not enlightened them.

But then, Stewart had been allowed to discover Lymond’s identity and, it must be assumed, had told his principal; the accident at the Tour des Minimes had resulted. And Oonagh, who disliked coercion, and whose prevarication over O’LiamRoe had just come to light, knew of the scheme and had decided in advance, typically, not to save him … but to rescue him if he lived. So that the gentleman whose demands she resented, and Robin’s master, were the same.

Who? She had not said. Think again. Her aunt did not know of the rescue. If he himself was lying, as he guessed, in the empty Hôtel Moûtier, Oonagh could not be free to come here very often. And the only servants of her own were an elderly maid and two grooms. She did not propose to risk freeing him, yet now he was awake, how could she keep him? Delicately he tried her. ‘Are you not afraid that your gentleman friend will discover your act of mercy and even trace us both here? My disappearance from Amboise must have had its element of mystery. Dead bodies don’t walk.’

‘Sick people talk too much,’ said Oonagh. ‘And so do the habitually intemperate. The mind of my gentleman friend, as you call him, works on well-defined lines. He thinks you have disappeared, I would guess, because your own people have taken a step or two to protect themselves from exposure. He would think it an act of God in his favour.’

‘Do I take it,’ said Lymond, ‘that he will transfer his attentions now to my brother?’ He was not employing much finesse.

There was, he noted the briefest pause. Then she said, ‘He is unlikely to move in any direction until he has traced Robin Stewart.’

And that meant that Stewart’s disappearance had surprised his own principal, surprised and worried him. Was he afraid Stewart would betray him? Or had he merely been counting on Stewart to blame if any future scheme went wrong? And how had this unknown
gentleman—God, he must beg this woman to tell him his name—how had he learned that Stewart had vanished?

The pain, drawing together its forces, began to concentrate in a kind of white haze. He said disingenuously, ‘But Stewart, surely, should be due back by now?’ and knew instantly, by her face, what her rejoinder would be. She smiled. ‘Oh come, my dear. George Paris serves anyone who will pay him. Did you think your little interview at the Isle d’Or was going to be exclusive?’

Her voice was thin; the sunlight darkening. There was not much time. Sacrificing everything to precision, his voice spiderlike in his own ears, Lymond said, ‘If this man is exposed, he will drag you down with him. If he is not, he will turn on you sooner or later in self-defence. Tell me his name and let me deal with him. This is my training and my vocation; and no one else can do it. I promise you that. Give me your discretion. You have a unique power. You can do something here and now that will give you in hundreds and thousands the posterity you will never have of your own. If you wait, you lose everything. I promise you that, too. And losing it, what will you be?’

She had risen as he was speaking, a lighted spar in her hand. Shielding it with her palm she crossed to one side of the pallet, then the other, and delicately lit the fine tapers. A sweet and sickly odour stirred in the room. Then she stood, head tilted, and looked at him, the heavy coiling black hair all bronzed by the light.

‘… What shall I be?
Like Thady Boy Ballagh, surely,’
she said in her worn, bitter voice; and lying open-eyed and still under the smoke, Francis Crawford did not reply.

At the door, Oonagh turned. ‘I would sooner let Phelim O’LiamRoe deal with any secret of mine than I should entrust it to you. You will stay here until I bring someone to see you, and whatever he thinks fit will be done. If you escape to your Scottish friends, I shall inform the French King where you are. If you escape to your French friends, if you are seen abroad in the street, if you move from this room, you will be tried for heresy, theft and high treason. The catch-thieves have been searching Amboise and Blois for you since last week. Every boat leaving Nantes has been watched. They have indisputable proof that the trip-rope accident at the Tour des Minimes was conceived by you. They have found royal jewels in your room and are already questioning your identity. Even without further evidence, the slightest investigation into your credentials will be enough to have you hanged for a spy. A fascinating situation. Think it over next time you are awake.… Good night. Sleep well,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer.

She had made only one error. The news she had just given him roused nothing but a sense of challenge and an instant, reluctant
admiration. But what she had said just before had set free his cold, quick, terrifying temper. His legs and left arm were strapped down to the bed, but his right arm, slung because of the collarbone and wrist, was quite free. Violently, belabouring the pain for one instant back from his senses, he pulled the arm from its sling and struck the nearest torchère at his side as hard as he could.

It succeeded better than he had blindly hoped. The floor had been left piled thick with dry rushes. The oily tapers, rolling, bestowed a rosy carpet of fire which lit all the bright waxen wood, and the wrench of the cracked clavicle, sagging with its own weight, forced him, gasping, into blackness. Oonagh, no more than two steps from the door, saw the dark head buried in the dragged linen, the hand falling, lit by the fire. Then she screamed, once for her groom, and plunged back into the room.

The flashing pain, as they cut his strappings and dragged him free, roused him for a moment; and he opened his eyes on her angry, feverish face and laughed. Then they had him through the door. Behind, the room had become golden red, a fierce and beautiful monochrome, with detail of bed and chair and table, hangings and woodwork in frail skeletal tracery of gold on gold, red on red. The fire, as they came downstairs, was beginning to show on the ceiling below.

The house was built of wood, and so were many of its neighbours. Already the street was roused: from the burning balcony black smoke rolled over the courtyard. Outside, someone smashed the lock of the gates and, bucket in hand, ran for the well.

The house was supposed to be empty. Oonagh could not be found there with Lymond. Nor, carrying him, could they escape unobserved. Under cover of the thickening smoke they abandoned him near a door, in a wing untouched as yet by fire, with Oonagh’s cloak for a blanket. In a heap, flung there where she brought him from Amboise, were the clothes he had been wearing that night. For a moment she checked, then picking up the Aztec mask she tossed it into the courtyard, to influence fate as it would. Then breathlessly she turned, and slipping through the thick smoke, escaped unseen with her servant to melt into the gathering crowds in the streets round about.

Behind her, Lymond lay still. Oddly, he could hear very well: a single, conscious sense left to him, like the threadlike limb of a crane fly, trapped under a stone. As he lay on the stone flags every sound from the courtyard reached him with great clarity: slippered feet running on the cobbles, the squeak of the pulley, the thin, silvery sound of spilled water jolting from a full pail. Voices shouting. Windows creaking. The rumble of a handcart bringing more water, at speed. A dog barking, very high and fluting, like an owl.
And near him, the hollow roar of the spreading fire, spitting and exploding on its fissile diet, extinguishing the home of Hélie and Anne Moûtier.