Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [153]
It was O’LiamRoe, who could tell more stories about the weather than anyone south of Antrim, who cut him short in the end. ‘The business I have is a queer one for an Irishman,’ said he. ‘But live comfortably with myself I could not, until I had told one of you. There is a man I met in France, a Scottish Archer called Stewart, who is now in England offering to do away with the young Scottish Queen when he gets back—and it would not be his first effort at that. And the Earl of Warwick himself, the clever fellow, is near accepting it.’
The Prince of Barrow, who had a low opinion of any kind of officialdom, had been ready for disbelief, or a cursory politeness which would have shown him the door. But Raoul de Chémault owed his finicky alertness to a lifetime of commissions, agencies and embassies over Europe, and knew better than to discount information from however unexpected a source. The doors were closed on himself, O’LiamRoe and the Ambassador’s secretary, and O’LiamRoe described, with wonderful brevity, the meeting he had overheard between Stewart and Brice Harisson, the letter Harisson had proposed writing to Warwick, and the meeting which had come of it. At that meeting, held at the Red Lion in St. Paul’s Churchyard the previous day, Warwick’s appointed agent had met Harisson, who had put the Archer’s proposal. And Warwick’s agent, so far from being indifferent, had brought Warwick’s command that both Stewart and Brice Harisson should come before him to discuss the plan further.
To overhear that had taxed all O’LiamRoe’s inventiveness. The wry pleasure he took from his success was mixed still with a fearful irritation: from time to time his clean, pink fingers wandered to his face. The fine baby skin of chin and upper lip was naked. Had Brice Harisson, idling in a book-filled corner of the Red Lion, met O’LiamRoe face to face, he would hardly have recognized him; for all the waving golden whiskers had gone. To that, and his long robes and the black, ear-covering hat of the professor, borrowed blithely from the physician at Hackney, O’LiamRoe owed his triumph.
He had heard Brice Harisson meet Warwick’s man, and had heard all that mattered of what they said. He had then watched them severally leave, and had left himself, only to be retrieved by a breathless shopkeeper laying claim to the new book absently tucked under his arm.
All this the French Ambassador heard. At the end, in his good English with an unexpected aptness of thought, he thanked O’LiamRoe, and complimented him. ‘All this will be made known to the King my lord, who will express his thanks better than I.’ He hesitated. A flicker of a glance passed between de Chémault and his secretary; then the Ambassador said, ‘You may guess our interest, monseigneur, when I tell you that M. Brice Harisson has already honoured us with a visit.’
The sandy brows floated. ‘Brice Harisson’s been here?’
‘Yes. Seeking my aid, and my interest with the Queen Dowager of Scotland to enable him to escape from his English employment and return to some well-pensioned office in Scotland or France. I assumed from what he did not say that he guessed Somerset’s day was reaching an end. In return,’ said de Chémault, watching his secretary marshal the stack of papers on which O’LiamRoe’s words had been taken down, ‘he has offered to sell me an unspecified political secret of some value.’
‘In other words,’ said O’LiamRoe, a rare disgust in his voice, ‘Harisson is planning to betray Robin Stewart to the French?’
‘From what you say, it seems likely. I have told him to give me time to make enquiries, and return. Now that I know what is behind his offer, I shall make it as simple for him as I can; thus the affair will solve itself. As soon as Harisson gives us positive proof of what this man Stewart has done, the Archer can be arrested.’ He