Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [171]
‘Enough,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Or even too much, depending on how you look at it. I didn’t care for the look of the Irish pages they have. I admit the Slieve Bloom isn’t Upper Ossory, but it would be a sad, unnatural thing to beget a silly foreign creature like those to sit at my fireside and table.’ He paused, and then said, ‘They are in a queer taking, surely, over this man Stewart. Why should they not wish him convicted?’
Lymond, who had turned, moved his eyes back to the fire. ‘Because Warwick is working hard towards a closer alliance with France; and he greeted with just a little more warmth than he would have anyone know Stewart’s offer to dispose of Mary in return for cash and favour and a nice little manor somewhere. He must, sooner or later, hand him over to France. But Warwick has probably offered at least to hold back all the English evidence against Stewart, if Stewart keeps quiet. There is no other proof worth speaking of, and Stewart can always claim that Harisson was mad. He might have a chance.’
‘Well, God save you. Whether they can prove it or not, the French won’t let him out of their sight,’ said O’LiamRoe easily. ‘There seems little need to chew up your tongue on that score, unless it’s dead set you are on flaming swords and the like. Did you suspect Stewart in France, now? Was that why he poisoned you?’
An odd expression, half-understanding, half-rueful, rested for a moment on Lymond’s face. Then he said, ‘I did. But that wasn’t why he tried to kill me.’
‘Why then?’ O’LiamRoe, speaking in idleness, recalled suddenly Stewart on his knees, in that bedroom in Blois.
‘He had found out who I was. He knew, you see, that it was one of us. He guessed at the wrong one.… But you knew that, Phelim.’
He had known. Open-eyed, staring across the fireplace to the blank plaster wall, he saw the flaming curtains of the Porc-épic, the tennis court, the looming galliasse, the helmeted footpads jumping out of the shadows in a dark street in Blois. But his roused understanding showed him the edge of something else too, which fumblingly he tried to disentangle, his face blank as the wall. Lymond said quickly, ‘But the point was that the attacks didn’t stop when you and Robin Stewart left. They simply transferred to me.
‘Since, at the end of it, I was supposed to be dead, I let it appear that I was dead. And to make quite sure that I should inconvenience no one any longer, the rumour has been put about that I was the author of the accident in the first place. Hence Lennox’s kindly suggestion that I should find it difficult to re-enter France. We shall see. In fact, apart from the Erskines, the Queen Dowager and my brother, and one or two allies, only one person that matters knows for sure that I’m not dead.’
Lymond had not moved. He spoke into the fire, lucidly as O’LiamRoe had heard him sometimes in the early days demolish some wild argument of Michel Hérisson’s. Yet the Irishman, his soft hands clasped firm on his knees, felt his stretched nerves begin to play with his breathing. He said, striving to push it all aside, ‘You are saying there is another man in it, who wished the little Queen dead?’
‘I’m sorry,’ said Francis Crawford, and turning, looked with reflective eyes at the flushed fair face of O’LiamRoe. ‘I’ve given you no reason, I suppose, to think me other than bent on sport or revenge. But the facts are these. Robin Stewart had an employer. I hoped to draw him away from this man, and failed. Whether of his own accord, or because the two quarrelled, Stewart abandoned his principal and fled home to try to sell his services elsewhere. Whatever happens to Stewart, somewhere in France there lives still a man who has sworn to try to make away with the little Queen. Stewart knows who he is. So does one other person who might talk. I have to choose which to … persuade.’
O’LiamRoe