Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [10]
‘And every one of them watched,’ said Tom Erskine dryly. ‘Including my wife.’
‘I am aware,’ said Lymond distinctly, ‘that I am expected to do nothing in particular but raise the devil with ten pitch candles and a pipe of dead children. But I am prepared to spread my small benignities among my friends. I have time to spare.’
There was a pause, heavier perhaps than either man intended. Then Lymond raised his hand and laid it, unjewelled and unfamiliar, on the Councillor’s broad shoulder. ‘Go to Flanders and your contracts, and leave the orgies to me.’ He withdrew his gaze and turning, slipped over the window-sill. ‘Sweet Clotho, where are you?’
The night was dark. Tom Erskine, leaning out, saw the grim goddess suffer a flamboyant embrace; then the shadows moved, and the affronted fates were alone.
Later that same night a watchman, passing the Porc-épic, saw one of its latticed windows glow red. He hammered on the door; the kitchen boys roused the house, and cooks, ostlers and turnspits surged upstairs to The O’LiamRoe’s room.
The bed hangings were a whispering curtain of flame, and seams of fire had begun on the panelling. With brooms and carpets and pails they rushed to the bed, the bitter smoke in their eyes, and hurled the flaming cloths wide.
The bed was empty, but for a shrivelled, untenanted nightshirt.
The stabler himself, with Robin Stewart, led the wild search which went on while the fire died. They found Master Ballagh fast asleep in his cupboard bed reeking of aqua vitae; and left him there. They discovered The O’LiamRoe in the loft, curled up in the straw next to Dooly. He viewed with mild surprise the circle of lamplit faces above him, and as the agitated tale unfolded, slipped in his graceful condolences to the stabler. He had felt, he explained, a touch of cold between sheets, and had climbed out to join Piedar Dooly in his nest where, praise be, they were sleeping in no time as cosy as two new-laid eggs. He rose and, wrapped in his salt-splashed frieze cloak, went to look at the damage.
The cross-questioning, the accusations, the polite enquiries went on for an hour between the servants, the innkeeper, the night watch and O’LiamRoe before Stewart finally forced the incident shut and sent everyone off to bed. Two things only had emerged from it. The inn staff were probably guiltless, and were convinced that some wild Irish practice had started the fire. The O’LiamRoe had no idea who started it, and was enjoying the excitement too much to care.
When the throng had left him in his room, alone with a new bed and Thady Boy, aroused at last, to share it with him, Phelim O’LiamRoe threw back his golden head, yawned, and letting the frieze cloak fall where it would, climbed into bed. The ollave’s dark face watched him. ‘Saints alive! Was that the one nightshirt you brought to the fair lands of France?’
‘True for you. And wasn’t it the lucky thing I didn’t have it on me at the time? D’you think that was an accident?’ said O’LiamRoe from the pillow.
‘I do not.’
‘Oh, you don’t? And,’ said the Prince of Barrow, one mild blue eye unexpectedly open, ‘did you think the sinking this afternoon was an accident?’
The sweet-stringed timpan hardly bothered to look up. ‘I doubt it,’ he said, and drawing his outer garments carefully off, rolled them into a ball. ‘Your quarrels are your own affair. But I would say there is a lad or two anxious that you should not reach the King of France.’
The Chieftain stretched, clasping his hands behind his uncouth head. ‘I was wondering,’ he agreed. ‘Yet can I think of a single slieveen who would work at it the like of that. Take a peck at me, maybe, with a morsel of steel on a black night; but it’s mortal lazy the worst of them are in the Slieve Bloom.’
‘What about the English?’ suggested Thady.
‘True for you. They’re the boys for being uncivil at sea. But I think,’ said O’LiamRoe, grinning quietly on the pillow, ‘that the English would rather have me on their side, and alive, than two rows of teeth on the underside of a boat. How would