Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [170]
There was a tiny silence. Then O’LiamRoe saw her take a quick breath, her eyes flying to Francis Crawford, but Crawford was not looking at her. Between Lennox and Lymond there passed something unsaid: a single, white-hot flash of enmity that could be felt. Then with a curious, smooth-looking twist, Lymond got to his feet. ‘Do these things matter?’ he said.
‘Dhia, they matter to the lucky ones, so,’ said O’LiamRoe placidly. ‘There’s Lady Fleming, now. The news came down from Scotland just yesterday, and the whole court agog. A boy, it is. A fine, bastard boy for the great King of France.’
It was well meant; but although he knew quite a lot, the reaction found him nonplussed. Standing still at his side, his clothes aflame in the sun, his eyes half-closed against the glare, Lymond turned, and laying the herald’s baton deliberately down, stood empty-handed before the Countess of Lennox. Her face pale, her eyes sparkling, she laughed. ‘The Flemings? Whores to a woman,’ she said.
Her husband, O’LiamRoe saw, had moved away. Francis Crawford said nothing. But his gaze, even and cold, continued to hold hers until, in the end, the woman’s eyes shifted. ‘Some love for a living,’ said Lymond. ‘And some kill.’ And raising the corpse of the monkey in his jewelled hands, he laid it in her arms like a chrisom child, and bending the golden head, bowed.
They left together in the end; O’LiamRoe outwardly calm over a jumble of uneasy emotion, fidgeting to be free of this rare and troublesome ghost but chained, for the hour at least, by the burden of a vague and indefinable debt. In the street Lymond, his page dismissed, said, ‘There is an inn not very far away. I don’t suggest that you stay there, but we could rent a room for an hour and talk. I’m sorry you had to witness so much private unpleasantness, as well as my sudden resuscitation. I might have guessed she wouldn’t have told you.’
He paused again and said, ‘If you were enjoying your stay, I must apologize again. But they have fallen out with Warwick, and in fact would have found it unwise to keep you much longer. But you probably have gathered a little about all that.’
‘A little,’ said O’LiamRoe. After a moment he said, ‘Is it far, this inn?’ And when Lymond did not answer him, he said, ‘Give me your reins.’ But at the touch of his hand the other man, withdrawing suddenly, said, ‘Good God, no. It isn’t far. The chimney pots there, over the trees.’ And they rode on after that, separately in silence.
It was O’LiamRoe who sent for food and wine and O’LiamRoe, in the end, who ate, discoursing at gallant length in his most prodigious blossoming of whimsy, on every topic in heaven and earth open to a literary-minded Celt in their private room at the Swan. In between eating, he scowled at Piedar Dooly who, in between serving, scowled at the bleached and resurrected ollave, blazing with undeserved riches that would have dazzled the Pope, who lay on his back before the jumping wood fire, his tabard off, his head sunk in a cushion, juggling absently, over and over, one-handed, with a crown and some testons.
O’LiamRoe, who had expected to find him a good deal less formidable lying flat like a schoolboy under his feet, became aware, as he ended his meal, that Lymond was merely waiting for him to finish. The Prince of Barrow got up, remarked, ‘Piedar Dooly, let you look for a fine lady scowler somewhere else down below,’ and as the door slammed, came and curled his comfortable unhandy person at the end of the hearth.
‘Talk away,’ he said. ‘So long as this thing is quite clear. A week on Tuesday, ’Tis the Slieve Bloom for me. Neither England nor France, I find, is quite to my taste.’
The little coins showered through the thin fingers. Trapping the crown piece, Lymond flipped it sideways into the flames and lay