Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [173]
‘I was sorry for the unchristian drouth on you, and the slack hand on your duty. When did you decide to put pity on me for that? And why? When you used the small girl herself, pricking Robin Stewart, or O’LiamRoe, to tumble them like sheep’s knuckles the way you would want? I would not wonder,’ said O’LiamRoe, his bitterness flooding his voice, ‘did Robin Stewart kill himself this day or the next. You have roused your bright words before him the like of a king, and you a halflin gallowglass in the top folly of youth, with a tongue to make the blood leap from the bone only.… She nursed you well, did she?’ The deepest place of his hurt, unaware, burst into words. ‘And you two laughed over your secrets?’
‘She held me bound and drugged in the Hôtel Moûtier for Cormac O’Connor to deal with. Nothing but violence would make her talk about her share or his.’ Deeply breathing, lying still on his elbow, face averted, the other man hadn’t stirred.
‘And since you cannot cast me now in the role of lover, violence is what you are planning to use?’
There was a pause. Then in a voice unlike his own, ‘I have my duty,’ Crawford said.
O’LiamRoe swore. Swearing, he got stumbling to his feet, and striding over the floor, picked up his hat and his cloak and the bag Piedar Dooly had not yet unpacked, flung some coins on the table and returning, stood astride the golden head and the holland shirt and the long hose as Vervassal reclined still, watching his rings frosty in the light, his face groomed and inexpressive, pastured by the costly jewels in his ears.
‘Robin Stewart was little joy ever to me, or to himself, I would suppose; but there is not the least heart in me to see him rolling fish-cold and choking in the great, godly stream of Francis Crawford’s duty. I will go to the Tower. There is money on the table,’ said O’LiamRoe, in one of the rare, consciously wounding attacks of his life, ‘to pay for your keep this evening. I cannot afford more than one night of you.’
VII
London: Pledge to Fasting
He who does not give a pledge to fasting is an evader of all: he who disregards all things shall not be paid by God or man.
He is a man who has lost his patrimony, who does not possess anything visibly or invisibly, and the supply of whose stores is chaff. He is not entitled to be advised, in sickness or in cure; and his meals even are empty unless he steals, or unless he sells his honour in the same way. His green is empty to him too, unless a person gives him something for God’s sake. His freedom too is empty; and his honour-price.
THEY had put Stewart in one of the tall towers, in a thick flagged stone room with a window and a fire, for he was an Archer, a political prisoner, and the citizen of a friendly power.
To The O’Liam Roe, climbing the worn stairs with Markham, the Lieutenant, the place smelled less of despair than of a sort of threadbare vanity—the damask powder over the dirt. Markham was muttering about the conditions: ‘He’s suicidal. How do they expect me to keep him in a room like a boudoir? I’ve had to put one of my best men in to live with him, wasting his time.’ Then, as O’LiamRoe was silent, the Lieutenant said irritably, ‘I hope at least you’ll have more success than the last man they sent. When we got in, the prisoner had slashed his wrists. Blood everywhere. The fellow had to leave without setting eyes on him, and we had all the mess to clear up.’
Lymond hadn’t told him that. Heavily, his accustomed insouciance dead within him, O’LiamRoe wondered just how he had expected to rescue Stewart from the egotistical shadow of Francis Crawford when disillusionment itself was the reason for Stewart’s despair. Then Markham stopped in front of a door and put his key in the lock.
Stewart had heard the voices, dreamlike, as a child in bed hears older children speak and laugh in the free air outside. He recognized O’LiamRoe’s, but this time he was tired. For three days he had refused his food and