Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [152]
‘So you said. You would think sometimes, Robin, that he was the first man you had killed. Forget him. It was well done, and it is past. Now—’
The interview was ending. O’LiamRoe slid off his roof and escaped to where Dooly awaited him in the street, his body chilled, his stomach tight with the recollection of a sick man hurled to the ground under bucket after thrown bucket of water, of his dilated eyes and the free sound of his laughter.
It was a long ride back to Hackney, and The O’LiamRoe did not make it at once. He chose to go to an inn, a good long way from the Strand; and in the solitude of its common room in midmorning, with the rain beating on the oiled linen, did some elliptical thinking which came closer and closer, as the consoling tankards went down, to the vulnerable point he knew in his heart he would reach.
There, at last, he found his inexorable decision staring him in the face. His blue eyes vacant with solitary communion and drink, The O’LiamRoe mutinously recalled why he had gone back to Harisson’s house in the first place. ‘By Bridget, and the Dagda, and Cliona of the Wave, and by Finvaragh whose home is under Cruachma, and Aoibheal and Red Aodh and Dana the Moth—Cormac O’Connor, you have a power to answer for!’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe. And getting up, he found Piedar Dooly and in two hours’ hard work made all the necessary arrangements for his Firbolg follower to take ship to France, there to inform the Scottish Queen Dowager that Robin Stewart, the Archer, the likely author of all the attempts on her daughter and the murderer of Francis Crawford as well, was now in London seeking English help for a further attempt.
He sold Piedar Dooly’s horse and his own to raise ready money for the trip and saw him off by post-horse on his way to Portsmouth before setting off himself on the long, wet walk back to Hackney. Lady Lennox met him as he came in and commented, with her double-edged humour, on his state. He made some excuse. He had money enough in his room to buy a new horse; and he was not conspirator enough to be sure of smoothing his face at the moment before either of the Lennoxes, so disparagingly discussed by Robin Stewart and his friend.
Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, tall, splendid and tawny niece of King Henry, who had been a conspirator all her life, looked after the muddy, horseless figure, unattended by lackey, and changing her direction, moved into her boudoir. There, she summoned Graham Douglas, who had been with her from birth, who would spy for her and had killed for her, and told him pleasantly to follow every movement of O’LiamRoe’s.
Three weeks later, the Prince of Barrow, leaving a tedious Court function at Whitehall, rode through the red brick gate, past the tilting yard, round by the Cross at Charing and into the noble precincts of Durham House, the official residence of Raoul de Chémault, French Ambassador to the Court of King Edward, where he had himself announced.
Considering that he had been nearly flung out of France in the first place, and that he had since exchanged French hospitality for English with quite unseemly speed, it required a good deal of moral courage to accomplish this.
At the back of his mind was the plain hope that the Ambassador would refuse to see him. In this he was cheated. M. de Chémault, a thick, olive-skinned Latin from southern France with black hair and short legs, was nervously incapable of selection and saw everybody, even at night. O’LiamRoe was shown into a stolid English