Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [15]
‘The Cross o’ Christ about us,’ said Mistress Boyle at length, sinking back in her chair. ‘But the great, gorgeous butterfly you’ll be among those quiet worker bees up at Court.’
‘Not so quiet,’ said Lord d’Aubigny, reasserting himself. ‘Antechamber’s full of Scotsmen, arguing like the damned. Half of them have seen Mason already.’
‘Mason?’
‘Sir James Mason, the English Ambassador. That small girl will be lucky if the Scottish throne waits for her to grow up. There are some of her mother’s nobles who would prefer a fine post under England to a shabby one under a Scottish queen. Are you uncomfortable, O’LiamRoe?’
‘No, no,’ said the Chief, sitting up quickly. ‘Only there is a kind of glitter in my head that has come straight off my eyeballs. Is there a dryad in the room?’
A woman had come in from her chamber. All her life, she had made men dumb by her presence, and she was young yet. Pausing, not shy, she stood by the rain-drenched window, and you could see she was Irish as a Murrúghach—not the wide-shouldered, fair Milesian, but dark and neat-boned, with neck and shoulders a single stem for an oval face, wide at the cheekbones and light-eyed, with the black hair piled in pillows and coils about her crown and ears, and on the nape of her neck and down her back. She was dressed in dark blue, with no jewels; and when she saw them all on their feet, curtseyed to Mistress Boyle and Lord d’Aubigny, and stood waiting again.
Stewart of Aubigny, his fingertips together, watched her with a connoisseur’s eye. Thady Boy, liverish and morose, stared, unloosing his dark, stubbled jaw. Nor did O’LiamRoe acquire any pretensions to grace, but he rose, and his long-lashed blue eyes were wider and steadier than before.
‘Ah, the devil, bad end to the girl!’ screeched Mistress Boyle, spinning round, and ropes swinging, skirts swaying, she pounced on the newcomer, her face hot with delight. ‘Pay no heed to them, Oonagh. It’s a party of Irish come to Court; the very same kind of silly fowl you left in Donegal. You’re not to look twice at them. Gentlemen, my niece Oonagh O’Dwyer, over from Ireland to stay with her old aunt awhile and pick the flower of the French Court for a husband if I have my way. Oonagh, my child, The O’LiamRoe, Chief of the Name—ah, don’t curtsey too close, you’ll step on his whiskers … and Mr. Ballagh, his secretary. You should hear him. He can rhyme rats to death like Senchan Torpest himself.’
With a soft flush of blue wool, the girl sat, her calm gaze on the Irishmen, and said in Gaelic, speaking impartially between them: ‘They have been sparse in the woods, the ollaves, for this time past. Is the season on us again?’
With the change of language, the warmer impulses of chatter were halted. In a little silence, Master Ballagh coughed, and as O’LiamRoe glanced at him he plumped down, settling his shiny trunk hose in his chair, and said politely in English, ‘The ratio, now I think of it, is one ollave per inhabited and manured quarter of ground. Do you miss them, it may be that the other conditions are lacking.’
The young woman’s light eyes turned to O’LiamRoe. ‘The Prince of Barrow, as I heard it, had a bard called Patrick O’Hooley.’
‘You heard right,’ said O’LiamRoe composedly. ‘ ’Tis like the Birach-derc, now. Put Patrick O’Hooley on a boat and show him the blessed Saint Peter himself, and it would stretch four stout men with hooks to lift the lid of his eye.’
She was contemptuous. ‘He gets seasick.’
‘He does, too, and him a bard only, without lawful learning but his own intellect; whereas Master Ballagh here is a comely professor of the canon, a stream of pleasing praise issuing from him, and a stream of wealth to him. But would you grudge it, and the epigrams pouring off him like a man straight from the Inishmurray sweating-house?’
The talk