Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [235]
Listening in silence, the Irishmen shuffling beside him, Adam Blacklock wondered if any other man there knew that they spoke of Oonagh O’Dwyer. Nicolas de Nicolay had called her a green-eyed morrow, and had told, too, of the misery of her life with this same Cormac O’Connor, and the blue bruises she wore from head to foot when she had sailed for Malta. Yet the tears stood in Cormac O’Connor’s eyes, although Lymond’s remained blue and openly contemptuous. Francis Crawford said, ‘Of course. I had forgotten we had something in common. You know, by the way, that if you start a disturbance here, you are liable to be arrested?’
The Irishman smiled, and his big hand, covered with coarse pelt, fondled the hilt of his sword. ‘It would be worth it,’ he said.
‘And your six friends? Do they think so?’
‘This is between you and me,’ said Cormac O’Connor.
‘And George Paris,’ said Lymond, smiling again with his lips. ‘That well-known friend of Scotland and France. You have a redhead with you these days, I’m told. Yes? Then don’t give her my address when the Queen Dowager sends for you; that’s all I ask.’
But already the big hand on the sword-hilt had tightened, and the wet, round eyes narrowed. ‘I should maybe remember my sweet Christian mother, and forget the wrongs others have done me? Is there ill-will in you?’
‘Candidly,’ said Lymond, ‘I don’t want to be arrested either. Suppose we let the dead rest, and you come and drink to red hair with me?’ And warily, side by side, they entered the inn, pressing through a jocular crowd, while O’Connor’s six men, the wounded one stumbling among them, shuffled off to the yard and Adam Blacklock, putting up his sword in some surprise, found himself the centre of a little group who righted his table, brought him food and besought him to throw them, one by one.
‘How was it done?’ said Lymond later when, O’Connor gone and the tavern emptied for the evening audience, they had the common-room nearly to themselves. ‘How is anything done with that kind? Fear and self-interest, that’s all. His betrayal of Paris is the coin he proposes to use to buy himself out of the insurance swindle. I left him in doubt about whether, in fact, the Queen Dowager doesn’t know about Paris already. He isn’t sure how much I know, but equally he isn’t sure that, if he has picked me up rightly, he hasn’t lost the only bargaining power he had to get the Queen Dowager’s favour. It was,’ said Lymond gravely, ‘a very ambiguous conversation.’
‘In these surroundings, it would seem quite plausible,’ said Blacklock. The cunning of it shook him a little, as always. He said, ‘You haven’t exactly made him a friend, but you’ve certainly tamed him. And if he thinks the Queen Dowager knows all about Paris, he won’t be very anxious to present himself at the palace now.… And yet he would have killed you, at the start.’
‘He may change his mind,’ said Lymond. Lying back in his chair in the flickering candlelight, waiting for Graham Malett to call, he sounded lazy as a cat. ‘Or have it changed for him. That’s your little task. Watch him for me. As for killing me—’
Lymond paused, and Adam thought, Of course. The expertise of St Mary’s. Alone, O’Connor would have had no chance. And through him ran again the frisson of pleasure he had felt at his own sweet automatic response to violence, and the pang of fear that always followed, because of that joy.
‘As for killing me,’ Lymond was still saying, half to himself, ‘O’Connor could have done it all right, in that first second, come hell or Adam Blacklock … if he had loved Oonagh enough. With one arm, with twenty against him, he should have run me straight through.’
For a moment, Adam was speechless. Then he said, ‘Did you believe that when you came out of the inn at my back?’
Francis Crawford