Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [147]
He had taken over the safeguards for the young Queen, but nothing had happened for weeks. Lymond was not, could not be dead, or Abernaci at least would have told them. But how badly he must be maimed, to enforce this isolation, this enervating silence, was a thought carried bitterly, day and night. And any reappearance had been made impossible by this new attack: the extraordinary revelation, in the most circumstantial detail, of theft and perfidy.
To Richard, at least, that condemnation, astonishing as it had been, had brought a queer kind of relief. In some respects, at least, Francis was safe, if only from himself. And it was proof incontrovertible of something he and Erskine had sometimes doubted: that Stewart’s sponsor was not overseas; nor had Stewart been working alone in the hope of selling his services unsolicited. It was proof that there was another mind here in France behind Stewart’s, and that of someone actively concerned with the plot.
With Erskine eagerly at his side, he had followed every possible clue. They went to Neuvy to see the Irishwoman, Oonagh O’Dwyer, whom Thady Boy had serenaded in the house so mysteriously burned. She was not there. She had joined the Moûtiers, her aunt informed them, in their southern home; and firmly she refused to give the direction. ‘Is it not enough to be pitied they are, and their house burned by vagabond jugglers from over their heads?’
She and Oonagh had been living at Neuvy all through the Tour des Minimes accident and later; the Moûtiers, it seemed plain from their neighbours, were unequivocably harmless and well known. For all they knew, Richard bitterly recognized, Lymond might have struggled there by himself, knowing the house was deserted, guessing for some reason that he was about to be exposed or maligned. They were hamstrung by their ignorance, as Lymond himself must have planned. For in their ignorance lay their safety.
Meanwhile the Queen Mother, the young Queen at her side, made no plans to return to Scotland; and the French Court, with impenetrable charm, continued to make her harried stay pleasant.
It was not the lustrous pleasance it had been. No one in Blois put the whores on cows’ backs again and whipped them through the town. Lent passed at Blois and Amboise and ended, still, sour and withered, without laughter or lampoon or quick, scurrilous song. Thady was dead and better dead; and every occasion lacked him.
Everything they did wore a different cast. What had been vulgarly clever, in the light of bare exhumation looked bleakly coarse; what had been vivid looked vulgar; what had been witty looked common; what had been forthright looked outrageous. Etiquette—edged etiquette—came heavily back into place; there were ripostes which were overwitty and reactions which were over-sullen. A sense of acute spiritual discomfort hung over the flower of France, the aftermath of its brilliant flare of indulgence. If Thady Boy had come back—a Thady Boy even absolved from the treachery imputed to him—they would have had him beaten from the room by their valets.
IV
London:
Wolves All Around Him
A cow-grazer of a green is a man who grazes his cows upon a green on every property, between wolves all around him; and this is his wealth.
LIKE St. Patrick, who requested the protection of God against the spells of women, druids and smiths, The O’LiamRoe took instant remedy for his ills. Flinching from the unkind pastures of France, he retreated home but found there only a mirror for the amour-propre so fundamentally hurt. The Lord Deputy’s offer came pat. England was glad to invite him—rumours of French invasion were at their height again. It seemed, for a moment, a sardonic triumph to carry his patched self-esteem into the world of affairs on the opposite side.
To begin with, he had been delighted. Englishmen,