Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [132]
Unhurried, Thady Boy played two bars of a lament. ‘I do not, the silly creature that he is. I told him myself he had every reason to get out of France.’ Two used blue eyes looked at her over the smallest pipes. ‘Is it pining you are?’
The air died on him. A silence fell, explicit of impatience and anger; then, whistling an air of supplication under his breath, Ballagh changed his fingering and accompanied himself on the silent keys until, relenting, she pumped again. ‘I thought,’ he said above it, ‘that with O’LiamRoe gone, there might be hope for me.’
The melody hesitated, then acquired such volume that the silver candlesticks rang. ‘Where you’re concerned,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer, ‘O’LiamRoe gone makes no difference at all.’
‘Does it not, so?’ Thady Boy was unperturbed. ‘Strange news, my dear. You are moving in high circles, it seems.’
She did not answer. For a time, he played and she pumped in the thought-filled silence. The little, arched room was empty; though beyond the robing room and out in the passages the normal stir of the household could be heard. The quick notes of the organ ran about the oratory, over the white stone and the Ghent tapestries and the polished wood, then vanished all at once. She had the bellows still working automatically in her fists, but Thady Boy had taken his hands from the keys and was watching her in the wheezing silence.
Her arms were aching, and she knew that the red showed, rising, under her thin skin. She rose, standing over him from the advantage of the table. ‘And we are to lose all this steaming banquet of wit? Why so set on leaving us now?’
Thady Boy, sideways on his stool, was hugging his knees. ‘As the song says, “A grey eye looks back towards Erin; a grey eye full of tears.” ’Tis a queer thing, for a creature so silly, but there’s a craving on me that won’t be gainsaid, to set eyes once again on Robin Stewart. On Ash Wednesday I go; and between now and then is all the time left for this great land to produce its best to impress me. Would you say,’ said Thady, his eyes bright, ‘that I have a chance of being impressed?’
Her hands on either side of the gilded posts, she looked at him with a closed face. ‘I cannot say.’
‘Can you not?’ said Thady Boy, and reaching up, freed her wrist-lace from a beading. ‘It’s no manner of use, is it? What a pity.’
She snatched her boy’s hand away, and unaided sprang down from the platform. He rose. ‘I told you. O’LiamRoe made no difference,’ said Oonagh. Facing him, she was breathing fast from the jump. ‘Do you think I haven’t escorts enough? That I can’t take my pick, then? I hear there’s a fine lord come to Court now, rich as they are made, to take his young brother back home. Nursemaids must come dear in Scotland these days.’
Thady’s hand on the keyboard didn’t move. ‘He will succeed, no doubt,’ he said, a small thread of amusement barely kept out of his voice. ‘’Tis a dour race for certain sure, but his lordship is a tolerable specimen, with a taste for Irishwomen, withal. You might do worse than trust yourself to that one.’
If he had expected to bring her into the open, he failed. Her eyes were contemptuous. ‘That’s a futile custom if you like. Lord Dunghill’s heir is never plain Billy Dunghill, but the Master of this, or the Master of that. Lord Culter’s heir, I believe, is called the Master of Culter, who cannot even master himself.’
Francis Crawford, once Master of Culter, pondered a moment on this piece of sarcasm. At length, gravely—‘A pity,’ he agreed. ‘But people do make allowances. And after all, the Master of Culter, my darling, is lying there in his cradle at Midculter, just seven weeks old.’
He had risen as he spoke, and lingered, smiling angelically at the arched door, now opened. ‘So whatever you do,’ Thady Boy said, carefully explanatory, his smile sweeter than ever, ‘it