Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [111]
He sat back on his heels. Among the silken down of his hair, the features were still not his own, and oddly held, as if broken against some unheeding obstacle, and clenched again into defect and misshapen pain. ‘You are very kind,’ he said; and it was impossible to tell whether or not he was being sarcastic. ‘But as it has not begun, it can be neither a beginning nor an end.’
He had moved himself out of her field of vision, whether for her relief or his own, she did not know. Lying quite still, her taut gaze on the sky, she said, ‘What is it? You had better tell me what it is.’
‘Nothing,’ he said. Her outflung arm was very white. On it, he could see the impress of his rough frieze, a pink trough of interlocking chainwork, where she had gripped him so hard. Her own dress was so fine, he bore no marks anywhere. He said conversationally, ‘It is the first time, surely, that my poor, negative principles have brought me anything so charming. I doubt I couldn’t bring myself to collect a revenue on them. I had thought them worth something less, or something more.’
Then she sat up; and he saw that she was pale, her brain behind frowning eyes following the possible burden of his. ‘I have nothing more to give that you would take.’
‘I would take honesty,’ said O’LiamRoe. And after a pause, ‘Or should I change my principles and turn firebrand first?’
He had been right. Her impulse had been kind. But it had not been selfless, and she was exceedingly proud. Her first reply to him died on her lips. Instead, she said, ‘Change them if you want to; why not? No one will ever notice the difference, and the exercise will surely do you some good.’
On the way home, she did not speak at all. Nor did O’LiamRoe make any attempt to put it right. And no one but he knew that under the thick frieze cloak, he was shivering.
By next day, he and Piedar Dooly were back in their old room at Blois.
Thady Boy, when they arrived, was out, fêting up river with the Court. Stewart’s ambitious plan to remove him had all too obviously come to nothing.
O’LiamRoe was aware that he himself had not been helpful. He could understand the exasperation, of even the dislike which he supposed had prompted Thady Boy’s ill-natured riposte of the serenade. It was the abuse of Oonagh’s good name and hospitality which he found regrettable. O’LiamRoe, from his detached side of the fence, rarely thought of anything as unforgivable.
So for the next few days he stayed in his room, seeing few people, quietly coming to terms with himself, and only smiled a little at the irony when a Gentleman of the King’s called to invite him to a royal banquet on the following day. Recognition had come at last. When the puppetry had palled and no reason but pride was left to hold him in France, the innermost door, long forced by Thady Boy, had opened to him also.
That same afternoon Stewart came back, rattling in his caked spurs and yellower in the face than usual. Finding Thady out he remained only briefly. He and Paris were leaving on the first stage of their journey to Ireland next day.
Then the Court returned, late at night and hilarious. O’LiamRoe was wakened by the arrival of Lymond with a whole drinking party, introduced thickly and meticulously, who then stayed until dawn. O’LiamRoe gave him Stewart’s message when at first light the rabble tumbled at last through the door, and Thady Boy kicked off his boots.
‘Oh God, yes of course. You took your bruises to Neuvy. I could almost hear them begging you to go home with me before the end of it. What did she offer you to leave her?’
He couldn’t have known. But the foul taste of it, the casual accuracy of the guess, made him feel suddenly