Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [167]
The same, blue, space-filled eyes were perfectly able to hide this discovery. He did not interrupt the little silence that fell. The ladies whispered, the silver dust from the silks moved and danced in the sun, and the Countess’s monkey, slipping its tether, flew unnoticed along the long silken wall from shining table to table top and, reaching the end, hung poised from a painting and leaped, its pink fingers outspread, for the great stucco architrave above the white double doors. It was sitting there, its eyes bright, its gold chain tinkling, when the doors opened on the announcement that the herald Vervassal was waiting outside.
She had got rid of her women. Only O’LiamRoe remained by Margaret Lennox’s side as the doors reopened and in the shadows a man came to stand, fair, lightly made and dimly sparkling, like crystal half-seen in the dark, a young page carrying a baton at his back. Then he moved out into the fine room and the monkey, shrilling, dropped on to the cloth of gold tabard, thick and dazzling as the sun on the sea. ‘Hallo! A family welcome,’ said Lymond. ‘How kind, Lady Lennox.’
Contemplating all this cool symmetry, O’LiamRoe was pleasurably startled. Heralds, in his experience, rarely addressed ladies of royal birth with quite so much edge. He looked at the Countess. Her unusually bleached good looks which he had been admiring a moment before had given way to a sudden queer heightening of her splendour. She drew a long, unsteady breath. The air, which had been alive as an eel bath with brilliant unchosen words, became abruptly quite dead. Sensing it, on a queer Celtic wavelength of his own, O’LiamRoe felt his skin prick. Turning, he look at Vervassal again.
The shrillness of temperament you might have suspected from that opening sentence was not in fact there; rather there was, nearly concealed, a sort of residual power, clear as blown glass, piercing and concentrated as a needle of ice. O’LiamRoe became conscious that the man was looking at him, and turned away. The herald’s gaze turned to Lady Lennox, who, O’LiamRoe could not know, saw none of these things: saw an untouched boy’s face of eight years before and another, more recent, with the new hammer-shapes of leadership plainly on it. And now here was a face she had never quite seen, circumstances she did not know, an intellect she recognized, an illness he could not easily hide, pressed and frozen together into a detachment as dark and icy as O’LiamRoe’s, for example, was shallow and warm.
For all these reasons, for the surge of a blind force within her that she had throttled all these years before and abandoned for dead, Margaret Lennox looked back at Lymond and was silent. O’LiamRoe, glancing back and forth inquisitively, met the curious, direct gaze again, was taken and vaguely disturbed by what he saw, and smiled.
The blue eyes glinted. The herald, drawing the monkey gently on to his hand, said, ‘La guerre a ses douceurs, l’hymen a ses alarmes. You are forgetting your duties, Margaret, in all this excitement. Won’t you introduce me?’
It was the quality of the voice, a timbre it had held even when most abysmally drunk, that held O’LiamRoe paralyzed where he stood. His heart gave a single loud beat that drove it straight into his stomach, and he felt his whole comfortable interior recoil, leaving his exposed skin naked and cold.
The words, miraculously, brought Margaret back her balance. Using her strong, steady voice like a weapon, ‘Mr. Francis Crawford,’ she said, ‘The O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, and lord of the Slieve Bloom in Ireland.’
‘I am honoured indeed,’ said this unknown resurrected Thady Boy Ballagh with exquisite courtesy, his gaze dropped to his hands. ‘But, my God, it’s a damned silly name for a monkey.’
And then, as he dizzily came to realize, except as a whetstone O’LiamRoe was forgotten.
Sitting straight, for once, in his chair opposite the Countess, Phelim saw the fair man take a seat, the monkey bounding from his fingers like a ball, and observed