Piedar Dooly had been caught unawares. Unfolding hastily in a pentagon of angles, he jumped behind his master, whistling under his breath. ‘Heaven protect us, there’s some sense in the creatures,’ said O’LiamRoe’s familiar, scurrying along. ‘And where now, Prince of Barrow?’
The face that turned on his he hardly knew for Phelim O’LiamRoe, Chief of the Name, so angular was it with purpose and a kind of harsh and miserable anger. ‘The likes of you, fortunate man, will be going home to your bed,’ it said.
For a moment, in his surprise, Dooly dropped back. Then catching up, he put his question cautiously. ‘And yourself, Prince? Where do you be going?’
‘To the house of Cormac O’Connor, fellow. Where else?’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, artist in living, the very core and prototype of detachment.
It was already Sunday, the 20th of June; and the first grey-veiled light of the new day would hint soon at the trees in Châteaubriant park, and breathe on the dark confines of its lake.
V
Châteaubriant: Proof, Without Love or Hatred
Test is not easy without proof. Proof of certain necessity may be demanded with the Feine, without love or hatred.
What is the reason that there is more for them as foreign slaves than as Irish slaves? Is it that the Irish slave has greater hope of becoming free than the foreign slave has, and so it is proper, though there be more for him as a foreign slave than as an Irish slave?
THEY would not admit him: who would unlock to a foolish Irishman, a moonstruck compatriot, at half-past three in the morning? Mistress Boyle’s hollow-faced steward slammed the grille, and O’LiamRoe climbed two walls, forced a shutter and tumbled into the parlour where Cormac O’Connor lay felled and snarling in sleep among all the spilled ashes, where the night before he had rustled drunk from the table.
O’LiamRoe gazed at him with interest; then stepping over his buttocks, threw open the hithermost door.
Green moonlight filled a bedroom, unperfumed, undecorated, filled with a woman’s clothes and the scoured, herbal smell of the schoolroom. Without stopping, Phelim strode to the wooden travelling-bed, dim in the corner, where the sleeper, cramped under thin sheeting, lay drowned and veiled in the black weeds of her hair.
Next door, a candle still guttered. With a taper deftly lit, O’LiamRoe walked from bracket to bracket, from lamp to torchère in both bedroom and parlour, binding light upon light until the air gasped and glittered in a tourniquet of searing dazzle and Oonagh O’Dwyer, white face and black brows, white pillow and black hair, white elbows and black, sodden shadow where the sharp bones, urgent, pressed down the limp bed, stared at him dazed, with distended eyes black as flowers in her white face, and said harshly, ‘Is he dead?’
‘Tres vidit et unum adoravit. He’s before the fire, my dear, like a pricked pudding … if that is the he you mean.’ And his eyes, round, pale, innocent, dared her to deny it.
She obliged him, direct and stormy, without a second thought, both palms flat on the bedclothes. ‘You know what I mean. Why are you here? Is the Queen killed, then? Why has he sent you?’
‘ ’Tis pigeons you have got in your head. Sweet, fat pigeons,’ said O’LiamRoe warmly. ‘No one sends me, and the Queen is not killed yet. But Thady Boy Ballagh, ochone, is sent by royal command to be broken as whipping boy for his lordship of Aubigny, of unsullied fame, and no one but you and I, my love, no one but you and I can save that child now.’
The blurring of sleep was leaving her face; her eyes and brow and wide cheekbones clearing, precision restored to her spare, warm lips. He remembered them, as she threw a bedgown over her robed shoulders, her gaze going beyond him. ‘Mary Mother … Put out those lights! The child is nothing to me, and will be as easy in the grave.’
‘I put them on,’ said O’LiamRoe agreeably. ‘I want O’Connor’s fine brain to help us convince John Stewart of Aubigny’s royal patron that the man is a would-be assassin and, I should wager, half-mad.’
Slowly Oonagh spoke. ‘Aubigny has exposed Lymond as Thady Boy Ballagh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then accusing d’Aubigny won’t save him. His offences as Thady Boy alone would have him ended. You know that.’
‘Not,’ said O’LiamRoe, ‘if he could prove that his masquerade had the purpose of saving the Queen.’
‘Then go to the Dowager,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. ‘Or has she denied him?’ And as O’LiamRoe’s silence answered her, she widened her queer eyes and smiled. ‘And so do I. He is unlucky, our amateur, our sweet ollave.’
‘I would not have said that thing,’ said O’LiamRoe and, startlingly, she flushed. ‘In small things, yes. He will not ask the Queen Dowager to admit she called him to France to protect the small Queen. He will not call on me to admit I knew he was in France because of the Queen. That would be merely my word against theirs. He cannot suggest he came to France as his own master to do this work without accusing d’Aubigny, and he has no more proof against d’Aubigny than they have against him. So the word you and your friend here are going to give me will damn John Stewart and save the girl and deliver our sweet ollave, as you call him, all at once. As neat a conclusion as ever I saw.’
‘And when,’ said the woman in the bed, ‘did Francis Crawford become the friend of your soul?’
‘I was wondering myself.’ O’LiamRoe’s reply was perfectly equable. ‘I rather fancy ’twas when it came to me that the black roaring Irishman we had there was only half the actor in Francis Crawford; the rest was that unnatural animal being human for once.’
‘Do you think so?’ For a moment the green eyes, diverted, looked at him curiously.
‘I think the rope at the Tour des Minimes—and your regard for him—saved him. You have protected us both, hate us though you may. There is one thing still to be done.’
‘I do not hate you. Nor do I delude myself I can read his mind, human or otherwise.… Go over,’ said Oonagh, her voice, clear and low, reaching his ears on a note of sudden, desperate anger. ‘Go over; go home! Whatever my body may be, my mind is my own. Let him pat and prick your soul as he wishes. I will not be touched.’
Exasperated, O’LiamRoe raised his voice. ‘He has no wish to involve you.’
‘He is involving me this minute, fool that you are. Why else are you free? The rest of that person was human, do you say? A mhuire!’ said the black-haired woman, her dry eyes wide and bitter. ‘Dacent crathur, go home. He is beyond you, that sweet ollave with the love of every girl in the breast of his shirt.… We are the fools, struggling, planning, begging at foolish doors, giving suck to the craven from all our sunken stock of force and eagerness and passion, while you court a strange brat and pare rhymes in Latin.’
She stopped, and for a moment O’LiamRoe faced her in silence. Then, ‘Wait you,’ he said evenly. ‘Since you are so hearty in handing forth blows, let me slip in a small dab of a word. To watch you would be sorrow’s own fun; but it is coming to me that I would not at all fancy being ruled by King Cormac.’
She studdied him, her mind only half arrested. ‘The French King would be your monarch.’
‘You’re complete,’ said O’LiamRoe heartily. ‘The first thing Cormac O’Connor will do when he kicks out the English is to kick out the Frenchmen who helped him. Cock’s bones, if England can barely keep off her elegant knees, what hope has France, with Scotland to look to, and the Pope and the Emperor gnawing at all her fine frontiers?’
‘You would rather have England?’ said Oonagh with contempt. ‘Or your own self, perhaps?’
‘The Cross of Christ,’ said a rolling voice, a round-bellied orator’s organ, just a little hoarse with drink. O’LiamRoe backed. The sleeper had been roused at last. In the doorway, swaying gently, thick-veined brawn enclosed in soiled shirting, his smallcut eyes sparkling, hung Cormac O’Connor.
‘The Cross of Christ about us.… Are we having visitors, girl, and meself not advised? Have you pleased my dilsy, Phelim O’LiamRoe? She’s hard to please, but the kernel’s swe
et—as others know.… Ah!’ said Cormac, and strode forward to the woman straight-backed in the bed, the classical, obstinate jaw plain as a melon from ear to chin. ‘Ah, is it your old nightgown you have … will you not make the least set to please us … and the fine, white jewels you have?’
And bending, in one jerk he ripped apart bedgown and robe, baring her from elbow to elbow between his two fists.
She was made small and white, like the green-eyed morrow Lymond had called her, and on the veined skin the week-old bruises were faded yellow. ‘The darling you are!’ said Cormac easily, and turned. ‘A mhuire.… Look at his face! Sure, I woke up too early! Have you had none of the cream, Prince?… Have I given you an appetite?’ And looking from O’LiamRoe’s witless face to the stony one of the woman, he exploded into mirth.
She did not move; even when he flung the two torn edges of her nightrobe crossed and closed, and sank sprawling in her bedside chair, his beard stuck writhing skywards, his black head dug into her thigh. He said, still in a voice of laughter, ‘Or must you wait for a unicorn?’ and twisting, upside down, gave Oonagh a wink before returning to O’LiamRoe.
‘She sent to me—did you know, fine prince?—to set my mind at rest. She said “Cormac love”—and drawing her docile arm over his shoulder, he laid its long palm against his wet, bearded cheek—“Cormac, love, life is an illusion. The great lord of the Slieve Bloom is a blushing small virgin, one of nature’s doorkeepers. You have no rival to fear.” ’
‘Faith, you’re a modest man,’ said Phelim calmly. Throwing his battered cap on the nearest chest, he folded his arms and gazed at the two, his round shoulders comfortable against the wall. ‘Do you fancy that your fists will preach better than the honey tongue in your head? We are two reasonable men; and if you have the right of it, I just ask to be convinced.’ He stood at ease, the high collar hiding the slide of his gullet, and the folded arms over the fluttering ribs. ‘It would take a bold man, would it not, to claim the Six Titles?’
From Cormac O’Connor’s upturned throat came a fanfare of derision. The beard dropped, and the two knowledgeable eyes surveyed O’LiamRoe. ‘Ten years since, Henry proclaimed himself King of Ireland, and annexed us like a glove to the Imperial English Crown—“From henceforth, Irishmen be not enemies, but subjects.” ’ Cormac swore, and laughed again, looking at O’LiamRoe. ‘It hardly stirs your thick blood, does it, it barely lifts your snout from the bog to see the Lord Deputy mouthing orders at Kilmainham, and the bought earls meek as mice in Dublin Castle hall?’
‘Three hundred years under England is a long time,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Even a French invasion, save you, is only an old tune in a different key. Desmond tried to bring in the French thirty years ago, poor silly Ireland, to make war on Henry VIII, and Kildare himself boasted that he would do the same with twelve thousand Spaniards in his tail. Well, the great Earl of Kildare is dead, his family attainted, his heir a child with an Italian accent living in Florence these ten years. True for you, your own mother was daughter to the ninth Earl, your lands are gone, your father fast in the Tower, your ten brothers and sisters homeless or on alien soil; but ’Tis fifteen years since the English took Kildare’s son Tomas at Maynooth Castle and broke their pledged word to him; and three hundred and fifty years since an O’Connor was supreme monarch of Ireland.’
The black head had lifted, and Cormac’s brosy gourd of a face stared at the Prince. ‘There speaks the creeping son of the swamp. Fifteen years since Tomas an tSioda, my own mother’s brother, and five Géraldine uncles were murdered at Tyburn after they had surrendered in all good faith at Maynooth; and the heir to all Ireland escaping like a trickle of dirty water into the sea. ’Tis a throne for Gerald of Kildare that I and the woman there are after making.’
‘Does he speak English?’ enquired O’LiamRoe neatly.
The snarl of impatience echoed in O’Connor’s throat; but from behind him, Oonagh’s cold voice spoke for the first time since her lover had entered. ‘As much as the child Mary will speak,’ she said.
‘And will rule as freely, I take it,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘We’re become a nation of uncles. All Europe is a cradle of naked emperors lulled by a jackboot; Warwick and Somerset in England; Arran and de Guises in Scotland; the last of the Geraldines with us. Faix, two Earls of Kildare were Lords Deputy for England, and sore lords they were for both Ireland and her masters. “All Ireland cannot rule this Earl,” they told the Council, and “Then in good faith, this Earl shall rule all Ireland,” the Council replied. Young Gerald would be off the throne in a fortnight, in favour of some grand buailim-sciath such as yourself; and we should be tossed straight back into the midden of anarchy. Our royal tradition is broken. There is no living vein of divinity with us; there is no heritage but one of wind-seeded vivacity. Can you not rest,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, his oval face damp and rose-coloured, ‘and let the corn hear itself grow?’
Like sword cutting through glass, a high, hard voice said, ‘He loves them, the household of hell.’
Bundled cabbage-like in creased linen, the iron hair stiffly upholstered in two angry plaits, Theresa Boyle straddled the doorway, and her eyes on O’LiamRoe were shining with anger and hate. ‘He would kneel in his basket at an English lord’s hearth for a joke and a kind word; he would take the scarlet cloth and the silver cups they bring us wooing like savages, spurn the old Apish toys of Antichrist, yoke malicious mischief to his heart, reject the laws of six hundred years and customs eleven centuries old—’
‘Were I eleven centuries old, I would follow them,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Today I would follow the man who raised good beasts and crops, who mined his own land, and cut passes and made roads and ploughed up moor and bog and barbered the woods. I’d follow the man who carded and weaved and brought in new seed, who used his own dyes and set his own silver and made old men as well as laws and medicine and poems in Latin: old men in good, decent houses, making fellowship with their neighbours whether Celt or Irish-Norman or Irish-English; whether in the sea ports or in the Pale. We are a million people lightsome from birth to death as the froth of the sea, and leaving no more behind us.… Seize your battleaxe and lead out the MacSheehys,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, hardily, his fists nail and bone at his sides. ‘Turn kern against kern, gallowglass against gallowglass, live the past, murder the future; and I promise you, when you have extorted your living tax of cracked pride and savage frivolity, France or England or Charles in his little suit of Florentine serge will stroll whistling across the bare fields, kicking the stones.’
‘ ’Tis a glorious poem, so,’ said Mistress Boyle. ‘And yourself, Prince, has cut off your fine whiskers to make bowstrings? You’ll oppose us, Lackpenny?’
‘He is deserting us. Alas, the loss of it!’ said Oonagh coolly. ‘He is Francis Crawford’s new lover.’
O’LiamRoe did not even look at her; he answered Mistress Boyle direct, his mild face sober. ‘I am opposing you.’
‘In the name of God, what with?’ said Cormac O’Connor, and turned to Oonagh, and barked.
‘With force,’ said O’LiamRoe mildly. ‘I have sent word to the Slieve Bloom today. Do you land, with your French or without, you will get such a blow you will never need another.’
Nobody laughed. In the white, stark glare of the lights, in the antiseptic heat of the air, Mistress Boyle drew a sharp breath and was still; Cormac, his thick wrists outflung on the counterpane, lost his smile and Oonagh, behind him, rising to her knees with the night robe paged taut by the pillow, said ‘Phelim!’ and tugging the heavy stuff free, slid astonishingly to the ground and moving swiftly, caught his shoulder.
Swung round, he looked down into clear, grey-green eyes searching his own. ‘But Phelim—The meaty haunches who grunt and whack while the knowing ones smile and bide their time.… The world to be fairly divided among the small, calm men who watch and think …?’ They were his own words. ‘This is Francis’s doing?’
‘Equally I oppose Mary Dowager of Scotland,??
? said O’LiamRoe quietly, ‘should she lean her elbow on Ireland. Though I will help her to know what Francis Crawford would do for her daughter. Sad, sad is a recusant. I was the world’s bully at four, so they say. I have been made to learn a thing: that like a garden of windflowers, our nature is talk. But good talk has its roots in the earth; like a turnip it thrusts its feet in the soil and its head in the clear air, thrusts with vigour, moves, swells, ripens and is harvested.… I, a miscast, rambling thing, am ready to plough up this field.’
She had dropped her hand, holding his gaze with her own. ‘There is a death in it,’ said Oonagh.
O’LiamRoe smiled. ‘There was always death in it, since La Sauvée sailed. Your fears have come true, that is all.’
‘There is death in it. She is right.’ The harsh voice of Mistress Boyle spoke not to Oonagh but to Cormac. ‘God show you your duty.’
‘ ’Tis no duty with our philosopher’s maidservant here, but a pleasure entirely,’ said Cormac O’Connor, and he rose to his feet.
‘Get back, Phelim,’ said Oonagh.
O’LiamRoe did not move. ‘It’s this way will be best. My cousin is tanist heir, so. I have sent word, and he will do as I would. You can tell the King of France that Ireland is lost to him.’
She had her back to him, her eyes on Cormac, moving slowly from the bed. Her aunt stood still in the far doorway. ‘Escape while you can. Himself will kill you.’
‘Maybe,’ said O’LiamRoe.
Standing full in front of him, her voice sounded oddly dry. ‘Francis Crawford depends on your help.’
‘No offence in life,’ said O’LiamRoe, ‘but he depends on you, not myself. I am at my extreme end. Will you move, now?’
Cormac took another step, smiling. ‘Yes, move now, me darling slut,’ he said. ‘God bless you kindly, my brave black bitch, with no sweet oasis in her white body she would not have ready to bless the thirsty traveller with. Move, my delicate whore, and let me kill him.’ The steel was out of his scabbard, but O’LiamRoe had not drawn his sword—the mishandled, miswielded blade which he had never mastered and never bothered to use.