Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [136]
The same light fell on Thady Boy. As the inn door banged open and his shadow sprang black on the loosebox door, the small man cried again. They had him by the collar by then, his sword gone when Lymond reached them, his skin boots making no sound, and threw the spurred man off with a twist to the shoulder that made him gasp. The other turned too; and in the second of grace, the beleaguered traveller ducked, twisted and ran.
The attackers took one step to follow, and then halted as Lymond just above the threshold of sound, requested them searingly to stand still. Voices came from the inn door. Someone shouted, and someone else answered. There was a pause, as the silent night was consulted. Then, without troubling to hunt unduly for trouble, the speakers went in. The door banged, and shortly after the shutters closed, plunging the yard into darkness.
‘Now?’ said Lymond. ‘Jockie’s Rob from Hartree and Fishy James from Tinto. Lord Culter’s orders?’
The broad feet on the cobbles didn’t shufflle; merely remained stolidly firm. ‘Yes, sir.’
‘You imagine,’ said Francis Crawford of Lymond, ‘that something five feet two inches tall with a rapier is going to disturb my pattern of life?’
‘No, Master. That’s to say—’ Jockie’s Rob was peevish enough to make that point. ‘No, sir.’ He didn’t need the warning pressure of Fishy James on his arm. The small, soft edge on the dressed-up man’s voice was enough. He had rarely met the younger one, back at Midculter, but he had heard about him. It beat him how the Master … how young Crawford knew their names.
‘Well,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘You’d better find him for me, hadn’t you?’
In the darkness, they looked at one another, and got no support. ‘For to question?’ hazarded Fishy James weakly, at length.
‘In order,’ said Lymond smoothly, ‘to apologize. And to receive from him, if he is now in any condition to give it, the message he has come here expressly to deliver.’
They found him in the horse box, quiet under the straw. He had a thin cut on one shoulder. Lymond dressed it while his two protectors, strangely subdued, kept lookout. Then, soothed, comforted and assuaged with linen and gold, the traveller made his succinct report.
‘Landfall safely at Dalkey, sir, the Prince of Barrow leaving direct for his home. Mr. Stewart accompanied Mr. Paris to O’Connor’s house, but O’Connor was away. They split two ways to find him, and after a while Mr. Paris comes back unsuccessful, having found out O’Connor is in the far north, and not due back for a week. Mr. Stewart didn’t come back at all.’
‘He was still searching for O’Connor?’ Lymond’s voice was merely disposing of an improbability.
‘No. He had taken a post-horse and got a ship. Mr. Paris thought he was making probably for Scotland. Then—’
‘Then—?’ said Lymond, and all the sharpness had left his voice.
‘Mr. Paris found that another ship had put in, off Dublin itself this time, and taken The O’LiamRoe on board, with a great trumpeting and bonnet-sweeping and twittering from the poop deck. There was a row of soldiers on the jetty to see himself off, and the sea gulls saluting their breastplates, it was a scandal to see. And O’LiamRoe in his best silken suit, an honoured guest.’
‘—Bound for London,’ said Lymond suddenly, hilariously, his blue eyes alight in the dark.
‘—Bound for London,’ agreed George Paris’s messenger sourly.
As always now, the reaction was almost more than he could bear. It took a major effort of will, after the messenger had gone and he had dispatched his brother’s two abashed nursemaids, to return to the inn for the drink which would smother it and let him go on. When he got there, braced for the buffeting jocularity which would greet his return, Francis Crawford found a fresh idea had already caught fire.
St. André had challenged the Prince of Condé, who led the Aztecs against the