Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [14]
He stopped dead. ‘Before we leave, O’LiamRoe, we’ve a call to make first. There’s a countrywoman of yours in the house, a charming lady who’s going to Rouen for the Entry. She hoped to see you before you left.’
‘Oh?’ said O’LiamRoe.
‘Madame Baule, she’s called. Married a Frenchman years ago—he’s dead—and keeps a most unusual house in Touraine. A delightful person, an original; cherished, I assure you, in every well-bred home she visits. But of course, you know her,’ said Lord d’Aubigny, sweeping the two Irishmen incontinently into a side passage.
‘Do I?’ said O’LiamRoe weakly.
‘From the lady, I certainly assumed so. Here, I think.—Yes, the lady herself certainly knew all about you. Come along.’ And he scratched at the door. It opened, and he pushed the Prince of Barrow inside. ‘Here he is: The O’LiamRoe, lord of the Slieve Bloom, and his secretary. Madame Baule, late of Limerick. You two, I’m sure, are acquainted.’
Had he known it, Lord d’Aubigny was being amply rewarded for his embarrassments of a short time before.
On the wreathed marmalade figure in the doorway fell the pinlike scrutiny of two round, pale eyes in a firm, weatherbeaten face packed with teeth. There was an impression of piled, plaited hair, caterpillar-heaped with ornaments, of a square neck filled with nooses of jewellery. A broad hand gripped his lordship’s silvery sleeve. ‘Boyle!’ screeched a voice high as a bat’s, thin, jolly, encouraging. ‘Boyle! You can call yourselves d’Aubignys all you want, John, my darling, but keep your expatriate, hand-licking tongue off a good Irish name.… O’LiamRoe!’
‘Madam,’ said O’LiamRoe politely, and quite subdued.
The ropes swung and jangled. ‘You’ve the sorrow’s own whiskers on you, have you not?’
‘There’s worse at the back of me,’ said O’LiamRoe apologetically. ‘It’s two great-six-nights since I was clipped.’
‘Hum! I would never forget those whiskers,’ said Mistress Boyle in a light scream. ‘They would put nightmares on you, the moustaches alone. O’LiamRoe, we have never met, but here’s my hand to you. You may kiss me.’
It was a sight; and Robin Stewart, had he been there, would have been afraid to see the woman hooked there for ever, in uncurried skeins round his clavicles, had they not come suddenly apart, Mistress Boyle saying with composure, ‘Whirroo, that’s Irish blood you’ve brought with you past the ninth wave.… We were worn thin as a cat’s ear waiting for it … o’n aird tuaid tic in chabair, as the old tale has it. And who’s the cailleach-chearc there at your back?’
‘Ah.…’Tis a bard out of Banachadee. My little, weeshy ollave, Mistress Boyle.’
‘Death alive! What’s your name, man?’ she screamed at Thady Boy. The secretary edged away. ‘Ballagh, mistress.’
‘One of the tinker tribes, surely. And you take no offence at the name cailleach-chearc?’
‘Buddha,’ volunteered Thady Boy unexpectedly, ‘was born in an egg. A fine duty, a mhuire, to lay on a henwife. The henwives are queens and kings, to be sure, in that country.’
‘But that country, a mhic, was not Ireland.’
‘Indeed, when was a god born that way in Ireland?’ said Thady politely. ‘With the loud-mouthed hens there are, and the folk with their two keen ears, one engaged for the hen and the other for the boil on the cooking water?’
She screamed like a kittiwake. ‘Oh! Oh! You have a sharp knife at your hip here, O’LiamRoe, and God attend you; for it’s the quick tongue and the clever tongue that’s all these poor French worship, the heathens, and heaven knows the Leinster pudding-brains that have shamed me this year. Sit and tell me of home. Is your mother well?’
So, innocently, was ushered in a formidable interrogation on the social history of Limerick and Leix. Stewart of Aubigny, half-listening, thought that between them, the two seemed to know more of genealogy and gynaecology both than any Scotsman