Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [116]
As the King’s guest, the Prince of Barrow had to stay. He sat through the short farce, and a cushion dance, where Thady invented the forfeits, and some impromptu versemaking which defined the tone of the evening more harshly than anything so far had done. Thady Boy gave no sign of remembering that his employer was there. In between bouts of frenzy his bloodshot eyes were now perfectly glazed. He sat in disarray, regurgitating wind and brushing off minor, well-meaning helpers until a burst of vitality stirred him to movement again. Through it all, consistently, he drank.
It seemed unlikely that this could go on indefinitely. Yet there was no move to stop it; and O’LiamRoe suddenly had the feeling that all this had happened before, and that the evening was to be exactly delineated by Thady Boy’s capacity. By now everyone was restive, roused by the neurotic gaiety. Even with the coolest temperaments—Queen Catherine’s, Charles de Guise’s—some degree of involvement had been reached. The young men suddenly had become wild, and a series of violent Italian games had started. Thady Boy, now showing a marked tendency to slip quietly to the ground, was shaken awake and made to play. Sallow faced and unsavoury he clowned, his feet tripping each other, until presently he turned a somersault in his wine-soaked satin, fell, belched, and rolled soggily at O’LiamRoe’s feet.
A nimble, glowing, sleepily loving little person, springing out from among the heaped cushions, caught the ollave’s threshing arm, and with her own two white hands began to tug him to his feet. ‘Master Ballagh, juggle for me! Master Ballagh, I know your riddle!’ Lulled to sleep by the music, Mary, Queen of Scotland, had sunk nodding and forgotten by Jenny Fleming’s generously cut skirts and had awaked, rapt-eyed, to find her mountebank delivered clean at her feet.
With immense trouble, Thady Boy got on to his feet. He took a step, paying no attention to the little girl. He took another, and lines of worry engraved themselves on his lathered brow. ‘Dhia, my best right leg’s broken.’
She clasped her hands round his arm and swung on it, as she had at St. Germain, forgetting, in the sleepy strangeness of the hour, to bother with her royalty. ‘The monks and the pears? You said each took a pear and there were still two left?—I know why.’
Stiltedly Thady Boy was progressing down the room, one leg buckling short under him, worry crumpling his face. ‘My leg is broke … that’s for sure.’
Upturned to his, the pointed, fresh face lost the first brightness of her joy. She loosed one light hand to brush the red hair coiling at her brow and said, a thread of appeal in her broken childish French, ‘One of the monks was called Chascun. Am I not right? So that only one took a pear?’
He paid no more attention than if she had been a ewer-servant. Margaret Erskine, moving swiftly forward, caught the little girl by the shoulders and turned her completely away.
Thady Boy continued on his agonized march. His face hollow with worry, he plodded short legged to his friends, fell over, got up, was sick, was set on his feet, prodded, given more wine and made to walk. Limping, lurching and whining he knocked over a torchère, crashed into royal chairs and flattened a royal dog while Fernel, the royal physician, was sent for.
This was likely to be, O’LiamRoe saw, the accepted end of the entertainment. There was no doubt that they thought of him as their protégé: round him as he lay whimpering on the floor was a close circle of women and more than a few men, all eager to help. Catherine remained in her chair, faintly smiling, but the King, genuinely concerned, walked with his doctor to the injured man.
Fernel, his nightshirt showing underneath his doublet, displayed commendable patience. The shortened leg was examined all over and the boot drawn off, without finding anything amiss. Then the other leg was first prodded, then raised. Something red beaded to the rim of the leather and trickling, soaked into