Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [108]
That day, Thady Boy hunted three-quarters drunk and came back with a slashed hand. It was Stewart, who, off duty, crossed the gardens to the postern and called at the house of Dame Pillonne to beg some balm from the keepers.
Abernaci was away. In his place, one of his friends in the trade sat in the jar-laden room above the brown bears, and returned Stewart’s greetings, and added, at the sound of his accent, a genuine welcome in the broad chanting vowels of Aberdeen. Detached from his donkey, Thomas Ouschart was a gentlemanly little man, with small bones and a pale face in spite of a lifetime of travelling. He had a cough which spoke sometimes of rough-dried bricks in a builder’s yard, and his calf muscles spoiled the particoloured set of his stockings. Stewart, his need riding him like a parcel of fleas, sat down and sent off a straight volley of questions about his personal attitude to ropewalking and the monetary expectations therefrom.
Tosh, a good-humoured man, answered plainly but was not in the least backward with a negative when the Archer touched on matters best left private. They got on well together; and the Aberdeen man, who had turned his hand to many things other than tightropes, mixed a very competent ointment from Abernaci’s store for Thady Boy’s hand, and then went rummaging neat-fingered for an empty jar in the piles of papers, bottles and wood shavings which covered every available surface.
Stewart, rising to help, said, ‘Mind, if there’s a scar on Thady Boy’s lute finger, you’ll have to answer for it to three Queens. So put the best you know into it, for God’s sake.’ He found a jar, cleared a space with a sweep of his arm, and sat down again.
Tosh, filling it, laughed. ‘If you believe Abernaci, there’s hardly room on him for a fresh-made scar anyway. You’ve seen his hands. And the galleys fairly made a show of his back.’
Robin Stewart sat still, his hands on his knees, his feet planted apart on the littered floor. After a pause he said, ‘I never heard he was on the galleys.’
‘I don’t suppose he’d go about describing it,’ said Tosh with passing irony. ‘But he’s got the brand on him. The cowardie saw it at Rouen, for one.’ He glanced at Stewart’s frowning face and grinned. ‘A queer customer, Thady Boy Ballagh. But aren’t we all? You’ll need to get him into a rowboat and see if he’ll show you his paces.’ He finished packing the balm jar in linen and turning, studied the Archer, lost in meditation. ‘It’s likely no secret. The fancy bitches up yonder’d find it thrilling, I shouldn’t wonder.’
He had no need to put Thady Boy in a rowing boat. Crisp in Stewart’s ears rang that decisive ‘On va faire voile’ which had commanded the struggling half-wreck of La Sauvée four months ago. He said, making his voice pleasant, ‘What else do you know about our Irish friend?’
But Tosh had only met the ollave through Abernaci, and told Stewart nothing else that was new. From the litter on the floor, the Archer selected an old, used woodblock and fiddled with it. He had assumed that Thady Boy’s history was all his, as well as his friendship. The ollave had been far from overflowing with his confidences, as The O’LiamRoe was, but he had not been reticent. And this violent and blighting episode in his life, for so it must have been, had not been entrusted to Stewart.
The Archer, stirring from his insubstantial dream of mutual confidence, waited for the familiar plucking of pain at his guts. Tosh was still talking when Stewart got up and, taking his leave a good deal more abruptly than was polite, strode off, forgetting his ointment.
When he went back for it later he found, to his relief, that the blunt little Aberdonian was out.
The Archer’s first impulse had been to go up and have it out with the ollave. Instead, he went directly to Lord d’Aubigny and presently got himself a mission which took him away from Blois for the six days before