Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [172]
There was a little silence. Then Lymond moved, drew a sharp breath, and relaxed. ‘I have, Phelim,’ he said. ‘He won’t see me. And he is fasting to death.’
‘The devil choke him,’ said O’LiamRoe deliberately. ‘I am not going to France.’
It was an admission; as the words left him, he realized it. But Lymond took it no further. He merely said, staring still into the fire, ‘I’m not asking you to. I’m asking you to visit Robin Stewart in the Tower, and either to get from him the name of his patron, or force him somehow to see me.’
Retreating wildly, bruised already by the forces gathering about him, The O’LiamRoe said, ‘I thank you kindly, but I’ve had my true fill of secrets. With the whole force of these old Queens behind you, and Warwick half out of his skin in case the poor fellow dies, you can hardly fail, surely.’
‘I think not,’ said Lymond. O’LiamRoe could hear the hiss as the other man let go his breath; then with a movement on the surface perfectly easy, Lymond turned over at his feet and, lying still, his head invisible beneath his long fingers, said, ‘Tell me. Why would you not go back to France?’
So this was how it was coming. With a grimness new to him, O’LiamRoe said, ‘Let you be still. There is nothing more of this to discuss.’
‘We shall discuss no more than is necessary,’ the even voice said. ‘Why would you not go back? You must know that she tried to protect you. She tried to keep you from returning to the castle that night. And she offered you … almost anything you desired, I would guess, to go away from Blois. Your face told as much.’
The name of Oonagh O’Dwyer, lying like a banked fire under their words for these ten minutes past, had never yet been spoken. There was no need. Illumination and despair equally in his heart, O’LiamRoe said, ‘After the accident … she helped you too?’
Bronze as a penny in the firelight, the head at his feet moved assent. Then without looking up, Lymond said, ‘She knows for whom Robin Stewart was working—she was working for the same man herself. If Stewart dies, either you or I must go back to France and force her to tell us.’
‘No!’ said O’LiamRoe sharply.
The hands came down flat from Francis Crawford’s face, but he stared still at the rug. ‘No? Why not? She likes you. We must find out what she knows. Or the child dies.’
‘I have told you.’ O’LiamRoe’s own voice was colourless. ‘I will not go back.’
‘Why, Phelim? Why? Why? Why?’
Blazing, blue, the eyes fastened on him like live things in Lymond’s uplifted, white face. ‘Why?’
‘Because,’ said O’LiamRoe baldly and terribly, ‘she is the mistress of Cormac O’Connor.’
In the face below him there died slowly both the anger and the light. Other changes were there, but in the shadows O’LiamRoe could not see them: only the top of Francis Crawford’s head, held in his hand. Then Lymond spoke, without triumph, without indeed any emotion at all. ‘I didn’t know,’ he said, ‘whether you knew.’
The circle was complete. All the turmoil of feeling sown in him by the creature lying at his feet slammed and spouted in a gush of pure, boiling anger: the anger of abused innocence and hurt pride and stubborn blindness leaping back from the light. O’LiamRoe stuck out a booted foot, and with a jerk that nearly sent him on his own face, threw Lymond head and shoulders back to the light. ‘You’re so damned brilliant,’ said Phelim. ‘You know everything. It’s hard-set you’d be to give yourself a dull Saturday afternoon. We’re all puppets—not the old Queens only, but the rest of us, man, woman and child, looking the fools of the world.’
‘Not of my making,’ said Lymond. His eyes, in the full light, were animal-bright.
‘Ah, no, my fine, busy fellow. But you have them there, on their strings, all curled tight to your littlest finger; and you little heeding as you swing them what soul you may bruise. Francis Crawford knows all about