‘Now?’ said Lymond. ‘Jockie’s Rob from Hartree and Fishy James from Tinto. Lord Culter’s orders?’
The broad feet on the cobbles didn’t shufflle; merely remained stolidly firm. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘You imagine,’ said Francis Crawford of Lymond, ‘that something five feet two inches tall with a rapier is going to disturb my pattern of life?’
‘No, Master. That’s to say—’ Jockie’s Rob was peevish enough to make that point. ‘No, sir.’ He didn’t need the warning pressure of Fishy James on his arm. The small, soft edge on the dressed-up man’s voice was enough. He had rarely met the younger one, back at Midculter, but he had heard about him. It beat him how the Master … how young Crawford knew their names.
‘Well,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘You’d better find him for me, hadn’t you?’
In the darkness, they looked at one another, and got no support. ‘For to question?’ hazarded Fishy James weakly, at length.
‘In order,’ said Lymond smoothly, ‘to apologize. And to receive from him, if he is now in any condition to give it, the message he has come here expressly to deliver.’
They found him in the horse box, quiet under the straw. He had a thin cut on one shoulder. Lymond dressed it while his two protectors, strangely subdued, kept lookout. Then, soothed, comforted and assuaged with linen and gold, the traveller made his succinct report.
‘Landfall safely at Dalkey, sir, the Prince of Barrow leaving direct for his home. Mr. Stewart accompanied Mr. Paris to O’Connor’s house, but O’Connor was away. They split two ways to find him, and after a while Mr. Paris comes back unsuccessful, having found out O’Connor is in the far north, and not due back for a week. Mr. Stewart didn’t come back at all.’
‘He was still searching for O’Connor?’ Lymond’s voice was merely disposing of an improbability.
‘No. He had taken a post-horse and got a ship. Mr. Paris thought he was making probably for Scotland. Then—’
‘Then—?’ said Lymond, and all the sharpness had left his voice.
‘Mr. Paris found that another ship had put in, off Dublin itself this time, and taken The O’LiamRoe on board, with a great trumpeting and bonnet-sweeping and twittering from the poop deck. There was a row of soldiers on the jetty to see himself off, and the sea gulls saluting their breastplates, it was a scandal to see. And O’LiamRoe in his best silken suit, an honoured guest.’
‘—Bound for London,’ said Lymond suddenly, hilariously, his blue eyes alight in the dark.
‘—Bound for London,’ agreed George Paris’s messenger sourly.
As always now, the reaction was almost more than he could bear. It took a major effort of will, after the messenger had gone and he had dispatched his brother’s two abashed nursemaids, to return to the inn for the drink which would smother it and let him go on. When he got there, braced for the buffeting jocularity which would greet his return, Francis Crawford found a fresh idea had already caught fire.
St. André had challenged the Prince of Condé, who led the Aztecs against the Turks, to swim his team from the Isle d’Or to Amboise: a challenge which, if you knew the currents under that smooth river, added an intriguing new chapter to the story of the key and the Marshal de St. Andre’s wife.
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’Engh
ien, 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.
III
Blois: Distress Is Not Released
For there are residences in which a distress is not released. If carried into concealment, if carried into a wilderness, if carried into a wood, if carried into a dark place; for these are the residences of thieves and outlaws. Until every distress is brought into light and manifestations, it is not released.
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 r
emote, 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.