Just before the King returned, Queen Catherine invited O’LiamRoe to one of her afternoon entertainments. The offence of the tennis court, it was clear, had been nearly effaced by his ollave; soon the last ban might be lifted. He attended, pink, smiling, verbose. The tumult of luxury entertained him: the blasts of chypre from the birds, the hissing farthingales and Hainault lace, the net stockings and gem-stuck pumps, the headdresses starched and spangled and meshed and fluted, the plucked eyebrows and frizzled hair, the lynx, genet and Calabrian sable stinking in the wet, the gauzy cache-nez drawn over nose and chin in the gardens and referred to in the careless vulgarity of the mode as coffins à roupies. Thady Boy, absent on this occasion, translated after.
Afterwards, he was presented to the Scottish Dowager. The meeting took place in her own rooms, and only Lady Fleming and her daughter Margaret attended. O’LiamRoe, who had been stubborn about changing his saffron for one of Thady Boy’s clever old women, was conscious, under the lightly detached calm, that she hadn’t even noticed the frieze cloak. The interview was formal and pleasant. At the end, with a suddenness which alarmed him, she thanked him in her firm, strongly measured English for creating and preserving the alter ego of Crawford of Lymond.
The Prince of Barrow had drawn a certain mild amusement from the idea of flouting authority. He had preferred to forget that if Lymond was the Queen Mother’s busy tool then so, to a certain degree, was he. As if guessing his thought, Mary of Guise said, ‘I am sorry he has proved a little … unorthodox.’
‘But, ma’am,’ said O’LiamRoe, touched on his dearest theory. ‘When a man draws the blood out of his heart and the marrow out of his bones to make an art, there’s little sense in bemoaning the frayed suit or the poor table or the angular manners. ’Tis the liberty of mind, and annulment of convention and a fine carefree richness of excesses itself sets the soul whirling and soaring.’
‘You’ve certainly hit on Thady Boy’s receipt,’ said Lady Fleming with asperity. ‘I should think his soul is whirling and soaring like a Garonne windmill. His habits are low enough.’
O’LiamRoe smiled, but the smile turned a little absent on his face. He had noticed a rag doll left asprawl on a cabinet, its linen split, its hair torn, its head limp. And in his stomach, smooth, clean, washed in wholesome juices and diligent as the churns in a dairy, something altered in beat.
Next day, the King came back. Archembault Abernaci stopped fussing with his cages in the outer reaches of the château gardens and retired to the town lodging he shared with his assistants, several bears and the saltimbanque Tosh. The donkey, foreseeing hard days ahead, brayed irritatingly from the castle terrace. Oonagh O’Dwyer, on her second last day in Blois, received her second last visit from O’Li mRoe. And the brothers of Bourbon and the other young gentlemen, released like puppies from the whalebone of Chambord, raced upstairs to Thady Boy.
By now, they expected something more than his music. He gave them freely an idea which had occurred to him at Neuvy and they embraced it instantly and fell to planning.
What he proposed was a race in pairs, from the cathedral hill to the castle, following a route determined by clues which some of the King’s Guards could lay. News of it spread uncommonly fast. By evening, with the Court settled to watch its after-supper wrestling, the Guard alone was seething with it; and Lord d’Aubigny, one of the few men on duty with long experience of such things, was clearly suspicious of the general air of vivacity. An Archer was brought in with a broken leg, and the hilarity increased. The King had not been made aware of the project—a natural precaution in this sort of race. It was Thady Boy’s idea that they should run it at nightfall, over the housetops of Blois.
The evening wore on. The wrestlers ended. The Queen rose; the King retired; and half the French Court, with torchbearers, Archers, men-at-arms, servants and a few discreetly cloaked women, melted out of the château precincts and uphill to the highest region of Blois. At its head, along with the Marshal de St. André and the Colignys and the young Bourbons and the young de Guises and the musicians, trotted Thady Boy Ballagh explaining, to their polite applause, why he wished to break his journey halfway in order to deliver a serenade.
The Hôtel Moûtier in the Rue des Papegaults, with its turrets and dormers, its fountain and its orange trees, its courtyard paved with Venetian mosaic and its small-paned windows with the marble sills, was built high in one of the precipitous lanes which plunged downhill from the Cathedral on the far side of Blois. All the way up from the Carrefour St.-Michel the walled houses faced each other, leaning together so close over brick paving and worn steps that dormer breathed into dormer and the inlaid chimneys mingled their juniper-scented smoke. Sometimes a man of property might bridge the street with his own windowed gallery. Behind the moving shadows of the trees, gargoyles and griffins and painted cherubim flickered in the lantern light from the courtyards. Here the rich merchants lived, the town officers, and the great officers and their families from this Court and the last. Condé’s own house was nearby; and the de Guises lived further down the hill nearer the foot of the castle plateau.
Although thickly crowded, the Rue des Papegaults was not noisy. Late at night, horsemen were rare. The sound of the hooves would patter like sea spray off the brick paving and walls; three streets away a group of riders would sound like the muted rumble of a storm. But most people kept inside after dark, or walked with swords and torchbearers; and a party intending to launch a serenade or run a race, if they valued privacy, would travel on foot.
Hélie and Anne Moûtier were leaving Blois next day to winter in the south, as was their custom; and Oonagh O’Dwyer, accordingly, was on the point of returning to Neuvy and her aunt. All her suitors free of duty at Court had come to the Hôtel Moûtier for her last evening in Blois, together with a good number of the friends of her host and hostess. Among them was Phelim O’LiamRoe, proving himself capable of a questionable branle and endless good-natured obstinacy.
By midnight the dancing was over, the wine had been drunk and the guests had departed. All except O’LiamRoe. Before the hissing, murmuring fire where Hélie sat, mouth open, hands clasped on unlaced doublet, fast asleep beside his young wife, O’LiamRoe stretched his mud-splashed shanks beside the brocade table and raised an eyebrow at Oonagh O’Dwyer, her black hair tumbled by the dance, who sat dreaming in a high chair. The firelight winked on the silver on the cloth at his elbow and touched on gilding and well-kept wooden panels, waxed against heat and smoke, and slid over the carving of the high chimney cope. Hélie Moûtier, even half-undressed looked what he was, a prosperous mercer; and Anne, now frankly asleep at his side, had her sleeves set with pearls.
O’LiamRoe turned. Oonagh, her head laid back in the deep velvet, was handsomely gowned too, but she wore it all like sea riches, prodigally and carelessly, leaving the rack to bring her fresh gifts tomorrow. The fire, merciless in its glare, printed two sleepless arcs in a face otherwise vacant of moulding. It was the first time since the Croix d’Or that he had ever had her undivided attention; and he spoke quietly, not to waken her cousins. ‘ ’Twas a queer thing, now, to come to France to pick a husband; and all the splendid Saxons and the susceptible Celts and the endless mixtures of the one and the other ye might come across in Ireland?’
In the revealing firelight a small muscle moved; but neither irritation nor animation showed in her voice, and she did not stir when she answered. ‘It is a better thing, surely, than sitting in a mud hut with salt herring and garlic and kale boiled in a soup bowl between your two knees? Why else are you here?’
‘My grief, for the change of company, surely,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Ever since our great lord Henry the Eighth of England and Ireland went to his account, it has been a thought crowded in the green fields, with the secret French emissaries, and the secret Scots emissaries and the secret Papal envoys, all anxious to lead the old country into the rare pathways of independence and light.’
Her head turned. ‘You have no truck, yourself, with independence?’
/> ‘My own self?’ said O’LiamRoe, shocked. ‘No, no. Politics are for the politicals, and the sons of Liam are content with a castle and a spread of heather and the chance of a good talk over a dried cod in the Slieve Bloom—leavened, you understand, with the occasional gadding to neighbouring heaths.’
Her black brows drawn in thought, she turned from him to the fire and, her grey-green eyes on the flames, considered the phenomenon. ‘You are happy under the rule of English Viceroys and the Star Chamber. It doesn’t disturb you to know that you can be sent to London and executed or imprisoned untried. The Scots occupy Ulster from the Giant’s Causeway to Belfast and James MacDonnell himself rules the Glens of Antrim beside ten thousand Hebridean Redshanks. You have no care. You are content with the garrisons and the debased coinage and the fact that no Parliament has sat in Ireland for seven years?’
There was a pause, broken by O’LiamRoe’s mild voice. ‘The last supreme King of Ireland, mo chridhe, was three and a half hundred years ago. And rig-domna I am not.’
The blood, rare under the white skin, suffused her face unexpectedly to the eyes. Hélie, sunk deeper in his chair, had begun to snore. Oonagh’s retort, across the rich table, was necessarily low. ‘You have no care for your country, none at all? I find it hard to believe.’
O’LiamRoe was gently reproving. ‘Ah, with all the great brains and fine lords fussing over it, what for should I add to the noise? Caritas generi humani I can understand; if you press me, I’ll lend it my passive support. But where would balance, where would detachment, where would proportion end up did no person stroll here and there outside the fence, and put his chin on the gate from time to time, to click his tongue?’ His tone was severe. ‘There’s no chance of inciting me, my dear. As the Pope said of Hippolito, “He’s crazy, the devil; he’s crazy. He doesn’t want to be a priest.” ’
He was unmistakably sincere. There was a blank interval, then she said accusingly, ‘Then why stay in France? It must surely be obvious—’
He broke in quickly. ‘It is obvious. But I have a plan to present you, between now and your wedding, with seven hounds with chains of silver and a golden apple between them—do I ever get them to you alive—so that when you race through the woods and fell your deer and see him undone and brittled there, you will bethink you of O’LiamRoe.’
The words were wry, but the tone, with whatever effort, was one of lightest amusement. Her mood opened to him suddenly, the white brow patterned with fine, dry lines which had not been there before, and her eyes searching his. ‘I have had dogs enough, O’LiamRoe; and lovers enough.’
‘You have no friends,’ he said, ‘man or dog. I had thought to be a small bit of both.’
‘What happened to Luadhas,’ said Oonagh, ‘is what happens to my friends. Your place—you have said it yourself—is outside the fence. Did I like you or did I love you, I would tell you the same.’
O’LiamRoe said, his voice light and his face rigid, ‘And do you like me or do you love me at all?’
Which was the moment Lymond selected to set the drums rolling. The skull-splitting crash rocketed bumping along the walled street, shaking the high houses into light. In the Hôtel Moûtier it sent Hélie tumbling, snorting to his feet; wakened his wife Anne with a gasp; and gripped Oonagh O’Dwyer like saltless frost in her chair, the moment, the mood, the answer all gone.
O’LiamRoe was the first to thrust his way to the balcony; the first to peer over the yard, where the little trees trembled black in the yellow lantern light and where the narrow causeway beyond was packed with young men, thick as seedlings, their diamonds, their boredom, their wit outrageous below upflung windows. The side drums in their midst rattled like cannonball and then stopped. There was a brief pause, a mighty inhalation; and the cog-mouthed trumpeters from the Marshal de St. André’s own suite split the night with a fanfare ripening like the Bishop of Winchester’s organ into a prodigy of praise.
Anne Moûtier saying ‘What is it?’ could hardly make herself heard; but O’LiamRoe answered directly, his voice neither mellow nor amused. ‘Several trumpets, a hautboy, a fife, a viol, two side drums, a trio of flutes, and that rare youth of two parts for whom the hazel trees stoop, Master Thady Boy Ballagh.’ Under the worldly stare of the Court, the pitiless serenade to Oonagh O’Dwyer was under full way.
Even then the blandly sportive intent did not strike home until she saw Thady Boy himself, conducting his clangorous consort from a gatepost. Her furious plunge into the house was stopped short by Hélie Moûtier’s wise arm. ‘No, child. If it’s not meant as a compliment, it’s meant as a test. Either way, it calls for good nature. Stay and smile.’
‘Smile!’ She stared at him, cold outrage sleek in her eyes. ‘At that pack of incompetent sow-gelders?’
‘There is no need. I shall stop him,’ said O’Liam Roe.
‘And make us both the butt of the palace?’ Her voice rooted him to the floor. ‘If I need a champion, you fool, I’ll choose someone better than the fat, white-fronted cat of the Breasal Breac’ He fell back; and the music went on.
Brumel they played, and Certon, Goudimel and de Lassus, Willaert and Le Jeune—all badly. The watch put in an appearance and hurried away, gold in hand. A word, an appraising glance from d’Aumale, from St. André, from d’Enghien, were enough for the angriest sleeper. O’LiamRoe, from the shadows, watched Oonagh’s straight back as she stood on the balcony listening. Presently she turned to him and, without apology, asked him for a service. He complied gravely out of his wisdom, honouring the impulse as he had once seen Luadhas do. Embracing the gatepost down below, Thady Boy was carolling in Gaelic.
‘To whomsoever of women we arrived
Of Scotland and of Ireland
She is the goat-haired woman
She is the rambler among rocks.…’
Her eyes flickered then; and O’LiamRoe, silently watching, was filled again with his rare, slothful anger.
Shortly afterwards she left the balcony, and the gates of the Hôtel Moûtier swung open, with good grace, to admit the performers to the courtyard for soup and wine. With them came the thirstier servants, some men-at-arms and several hopeful passers-by. The courtiers, losing interest, had moved on.
Exposed to all that crowded, craning street, Oonagh walked through the courtyard, giving soup with her own hands, the steam white in the moonlight. So, with the veil coiling between them, she met Thady Boy.
Smiling, flickering in the lamplight, his face was Quetzalcoatl’s again, maliciously observant. She set the bowl in his palms and spoke evenly. ‘Thank you, Master Ballagh. I was wondering how to bring the great folk of France to take notice of me.’
He dipped a long finger in the soup and held it up. ‘Larks’ tongues, is it? Ah, ’twas a cultural triumph for Ireland this night. Three flutes we had, mark you, and a flute is not at all cheerful at being out of his bed after nine o’clock at all, I can tell you.… Was that a whisker of O’LiamRoe I had a sight of up there?’
‘It was.’
‘My own lord and master. He will be a proud man this night. Is he not for coming down?’
‘He is not; and it is better for you, I can tell you, that he is not. Do you think he is pleased?’ said Oonagh.
Thady Boy’s actor face was crestfallen. ‘Is he not?’
‘He is not,’ said O’LiamRoe’s curt voice at his elbow. The Prince of Barrow, his back squarely to his ollave, went on: ‘Your cousins kindly pressed me, but after all I’d liefer not stay. There are things to be done and said which are better done at the château.’
Oonagh took one step after him and then halted. Thady Boy did not even do so much. When she turned back he was buried, intoning, in a pack of drunken trumpeters, and two of St. Andre’s men, dispatched from the road end, were trying to hurry him into the street. The race was due to begin.
Oonagh heard of it from a viol player, morosely returning his instrument to its bag. He was cold, tired, and humourless, and had no intention of waiting to see young men run
over housetops from the cathedral hill to the château in the dark. ‘They’re mad,’ he said. ‘They’re drunk,’ he added. ‘They’ll break their necks.’
‘That,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer dryly, ‘would be an excellent idea.’
The bald, moonlit square above the Rue des Papegaults was heaped with people, sliding and darting like iron filings stirring under a magnet, the smoke shadows and copper glare of the torches streaming across the face of the half-finished cathedral. Older Blois, hearing the noise and watching the gallants laughing below, had stuffed its ears and turned back to bed, muttering; but sycophantic Blois, and working Blois, and gambling Blois, as well as all the rival followings of the twenty competitors, were here in the square to see the race begin on the blue slate roof of the Inn of St. Louis.
Robin Stewart, returning unsuspecting from an errand for Lord d’Aubigny, was caught in the updraught and swirled to the top of the hill before he could stop himself, there crashing into the soft black spread of Master Ballagh. He found his arms gripped. ‘What Moses, I pray, called you? What God’s minister bade you rise?’ Thady Boy had spent some time in the inn. ‘I thought you were on guard.’
‘I am. I’m on my way back. What’s this rubbish they’re telling me? You’re never going to run that damned steeplechase in that state?’
The dark, sweaty face was reproachful. ‘What state?’
‘And at night. You’ll kill yourself. My God, don’t you know how the King loves St. André? If he falls and it was all your fault …’
‘If he fallsh—falls,’ said Thady, releasing him, ‘there’s a lady every five paces to catch him.’
‘Well, you don’t want to be killed. You’re coming with me,’ said Robin Stewart, and took firm hold of the ollave in his turn.
There was a wrench and a twist, and an empty doublet sagged from his hand. From the vine-covered walls of the inn Thady laughed, swung, and climbed until his untended, tousled head appeared black against the broad moon-washed sky. He called to Stewart. ‘Come up. I need a partner up here.’