Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [150]
And, opening his purse, O’LiamRoe took out an écu and pressed it into Brice Harisson’s neat hand at the door. ‘Drink my health in a noggin on the way to your appointment,’ he said. ‘Our hides are stinking and our cheeses unkempt, but our loving hearts are strong and golden and shining like kingcups in the peat, and you look lonesome, little man.’ Only when he reached the stables and found his two hands hard clenched, did O’LiamRoe realize that he had been prepared for actual physical assault.
Piedar Dooly had been looking for him. As he entered the comfortable, manured warmth of the stables the Firbolg sank one wiry hand into his shrunk satin and, hoarsely whispering, tugged him aside. O’LiamRoe, intent on leaving Brice Harisson’s premises before Harisson himself entered the yard, cut him short in terse Gaelic.
Then he saw where Piedar Dooly’s free hand had pointed, and the meaning of it reached his brain. There were four animals in that stable: his own, a mule, a fine mare in Harisson’s colours, and a hack, whose mended harness and saddle, accoutred for campaigning, were as familiar to him as his own. He had ridden behind it from Dieppe to Blois, had stared at it, sliding next to his own on shipboard, down the Seine and the Loire, had watched it at the ill-fated cheetah hunt and had accompanied it to Aubigny and back. It was Robin Stewart’s.
O’LiamRoe, who seldom disliked anyone who could supply him with amusement, had found it unusually hard, even before the day of Luadhas, to tolerate the Archer’s uneasy ways. Unsettled at present himself, he would have abandoned the ménage with some firmness had several thoughts not come into his head.
First, the sheer unpleasantness of the scene in the house had recalled that other scene over two months before in his ollave’s reeking bedchamber at Blois. He had told Oonagh O’Dwyer that authority made monsters of mankind; but he had seen what authority abandoned could do.
Robin Stewart had been sent to Ireland with George Paris to bring Cormac O’Connor to France. Instead, he was here in London with one of Somerset’s men, who was at great pains to conceal it. England and France were not now at war; but they were hardly close friends; and certainly not close enough to account for an Archer of the Guard in intimate talk with a Government official, albeit one at present slightly outmoded. Harisson, of course, was Scottish like Stewart; and he was, O’LiamRoe remembered, certainly one of Stewart’s old friends. But then, what part in all this did O’Connor play, whom Stewart had been directed to fetch?
It was this last irresistible question, in the end, that led Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, never a man to hoard dignity and always trusting to a bright tongue to make his queerer paths smooth for him, to ride noisily out of the yard, followed by Piedar Dooly and the sharp eye of the steward, and, dismounting down the street, to leave the horses with his follower while he slipped over two walls and down an alley, soothed an inquisitive dog and dodged at last into the garden behind Brice Harisson’s stylish Strand house.
There, by a process of elimination, he located the study window. It was open, and there was a porch roof just below it. In the purple gloom presaging a brisk March downpour The O’LiamRoe seized a barrel and, tearing his stockings, ripping his breeches and sticking an elbow clean through the skin-tight silk of his sleeve, hitched himself up and made ready to listen.
They were speaking in Gaelic. Stewart, nearest the study window, was not sure of his; more than once he stumbled, filling in with French or with English. Harisson’s was impeccable. O’LiamRoe could hear him lightly questioning, commenting, occasionally dissenting. His manner, in staggering contrast to his reception of the Prince himself, was quiet, intimate and understanding; and in the very aptness of its handling of all Robin Stewart’s quirks argued a very long friendship indeed. He said now, his singing Gaelic nostalgic to O’LiamRoe’s listening ears, ‘All the same, Robin, why the boat? The Thames itself