Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [148]
To his own startled amusement, he was staying in the Hackney mansion of the Earl and Countess of Lennox. Shuttling curiously between Whitehall and Holborn, Greenwich and Hampton Court at the tail of the Court, O’LiamRoe had more than once met the pallid, pouch-eyed Scottish Earl, with his light hair and his air of faintly bewildered suspicion. Then, a little later, he had met Lennox’s wife Margaret, too, and she had suggested that he should come for a spell as their guest.
At the back of O’LiamRoe’s mind lay something he had once heard about his late ollave and Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. He made no effort to pursue it; for together with France, O’LiamRoe had abandoned Thady Boy and all his affairs.
In the forefront of his mind, however, was one other vivid fact. Matthew Stewart, Earl of Lennox, was older brother to John Stewart, Lord d’Aubigny. And thus, at second or third hand, O’LiamRoe might have news of the only person in the whole Court of France for whom he felt sympathy—the threatened Scottish child Queen Mary. He had gone, therefore, to Hackney with the Lennoxes.
It had disappointed him. The family were often away. Like himself, they were summoned regularly to Court, in spite of their religion, which he suspected was stubbornly Papish; for Margaret was a full cousin of the boy King and indeed, had she not been disinherited by her uncle King Henry, might have had a strong claim to be next heir to the throne not only of England but of Scotland, where her mother had been Queen, and where her husband’s great-grandfather had also reigned.
There were other difficulties. The busy barons at the Court, while polite, had no spare time for him; the Irish he met were all busy lisping about their pensions and their farms; and he was tired of amusing himself with brisk, politically minded Englishmen with prejudices to sell.
Even now, riding through Cheapside to vist the Strand, he was distressed, unreasonably, because among the bawling, huckstering, hurrying crowds, no heads turned as he passed. For England he had abandoned his saffron and frieze; and with it, the raffish, engaging detachment which had served him so well had somehow slipped away. It was too late now to aspire to the splendid hauteur of the wealthy chief ones whom he had diligently baited all his life. Under the soft body and the sandy pelt there lurked horrifically, transparent as a jellyfish, a grey, inferior personality, with whom he might have to live all his days. The O’LiamRoe had sloughed off Francis Crawford, but he was not happy in his new skin.
Among the rich mansions backing on the Strand, with their bowered gardens running down to the river, was the little house rented by Michel Hérisson’s younger brother, with its elegant door, its tall, paned windows and its striking rooms betraying the static elegance and oddly edgy effect of a house furnished for entertaining, not for living in.
To this house, followed by Piedar Dooly, the Prince of Barrow was riding, in a last effort to find in this famous city of London a warm, uninhibited and friendly face to give him relief. With him he carried a letter from the big Rouen sculptor.
Arriving, he was amused and in no way chilled at first by the contrast between Brice Harisson’s style of living and the openhanded carelessness of the sculptor, with his boisterous unofficial club and his illegal printing. He saw Piedar Dooly and his two horses led off quickly and quietly to a splendid small stable; and after a succession of liveried encounters, found himself waiting in a leather-hung parlour for his host.
What little O’LiamRoe knew of this only brother of Michel’s was promising. Scottish by birth, unmarried, adventurous, Brice had been