Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [141]
The next time he woke to the light of a different day. The straps round his body were still in place; but the windows were wide on a sunlit balcony and the candles, sourly smoking, had been freshly doused. From the violent paradisaical dreams he remembered, and the heavy, throttled sense of incipient pain, he knew that the taper fumes had been used to keep him asleep.
The peace it had brought him was probably the best treatment his abused and broken body could have had. But it had been done, of course, for her own ends. Nothing had ever deceived Lymond about Oonagh O’Dwyer. He watched her now as she sat, unaware of him, by the fire where she and O’LiamRoe had talked before his own unforgivable serenade, her cheekbones shadowed, her high, full brow bright with clear light; the two fine half-arcs of sleeplessness, of high-tempered strain, like a tread in snow beneath her two eyes; her hard, mobile lips shut. He said, his voice carefully preserved, ‘Who are you waiting for? Your aunt?’
Her hands closed together, a cage of white bone. Then, leaning back, she settled her gaze on the low, temporary bed, the bracing only visible in the brittle line of her jaw. Worn by solitariness and unconceded fears and an absence of sleep she was more than ever a beautiful woman with no time for beauty. She said, choosing her words this time with cold care, ‘If it were, you would be dead.’
There was no sound from inside the house: no clanking of pails, no kitchen chatter, no footsteps on the stairs. It was an empty house, then, and her aunt did not know. Beyond the balcony, the cast of the rooftops was familiar. He thought of the Tour des Minimes and wondered what the tale of injured had been; but decided against wasting questions. He said, ‘You and the gentleman attempting to kill me have parted company?’
Oonagh smiled. ‘You might say that we disagreed on a minor point,’ she said. ‘But don’t run away with the idea that you’re going to be freed. For his purposes and mine you are as well imprisoned as dead; and what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’
Lymond lay still, trying to think. A long time ago, in Scotland, Mariotta had told him about Oonagh O’Dwyer. Even before Rouen and O’LiamRoe’s shame in the tennis courts he had been wary; yet she had resisted every effort to draw her, while hardly troubling to conceal that she knew who Thady Boy was. The man she had wished out of the way had been O’LiamRoe. Robin Stewart and his master, too, had tried to assail O’LiamRoe in the belief that he was Lymond. She knew better, but she had not enlightened them.
But then, Stewart had been allowed to discover Lymond’s identity and, it must be assumed, had told his principal; the accident at the Tour des Minimes had resulted. And Oonagh, who disliked coercion, and whose prevarication over O’LiamRoe had just come to light, knew of the scheme and had decided in advance, typically, not to save him … but to rescue him if he lived. So that the gentleman whose demands she resented, and Robin’s master, were the same.
Who? She had not said. Think again. Her aunt did not know of the rescue. If he himself was lying, as he guessed, in the empty Hôtel Moûtier, Oonagh could not be free to come here very often. And the only servants of her own were an elderly maid and two grooms. She did not propose to risk freeing him, yet now he was awake, how could she keep him? Delicately he tried her. ‘Are you not afraid that your gentleman friend will discover your act of mercy and even trace us both here? My disappearance from Amboise must have had its element of mystery. Dead bodies don’t walk.’
‘Sick people talk too much,’ said Oonagh. ‘And so do the habitually intemperate. The mind of my gentleman friend, as you call him, works on well-defined lines. He thinks you have disappeared, I would guess, because your own people have taken a step or two to protect themselves from exposure. He would think it an act of God in his favour.’
‘Do I take it,’ said Lymond, ‘that he will transfer