Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [174]
But he was not, and it was true. Afterwards, his wrists bandaged, a guard brought, sulkily, to watch the door, he had lain in the window and watched them leave, down below. Markham had come out first, half-turning, fussily expatiating; and then a silvery head he did not know. They had gone off together under the trees: Markham and his slender companion—the latter with a stick, Robin noticed, in his hand. Then unexpectedly the limping figure had turned, and in the uplifted face, drained of colour by the wide, pale sky, he had seen the ghost of Thady Boy Ballagh. For the moment, he had the illusion that the searching eyes looked straight into his; then presently the fair head had turned and the man he, Stewart, had poisoned walked steadily away.
He had sent O’LiamRoe now, presumably to gloat, perhaps to persuade him to tell the thing that Warwick had promised him his life to keep quiet, perhaps to try to force him to live until he could be gratifyingly punished, in France. Warwick’s offer to suppress his confession had no meaning for Stewart; he was going to die anyway. But he saw no reason to oblige O’LiamRoe with that or anything else.
So the Prince of Barrow entering the small, lived-in room with its heavy table, its stools and its boxes, its camp bed set up in a corner, its barred sunlit window, its pale fire, was conscious of the worn, inexorable barrier of Robin Stewart’s enmity even before the door was locked fast behind him, leaving them quite alone. But he spoke steadfastly; only his vowels were perhaps a shade rounder than usual. ‘I want your help,’ O’LiamRoe said, ‘to trim a bowelless devil named Francis Crawford until there’s a human place on his soul to put the mark of grace on.’
This was, of course, a trick. Sunk in his chair, his eyes fallen on bone, the folds pressed dark and moist in his wrecked face, Stewart lay without speaking while the Irish nouns buzzed in his ears like bees laboriously moving a hive.
For a long time he did not listen at all. The voice swung to and fro, like sealight on driftwood, without affecting him, crushed hard as he was in the blackness, his nostrils crammed with the endless, sliding rubble of his failures and his inadequacies. Robin Stewart had resented all his life the fact that he, of all others, was always imposed upon; that he had been forced to work hard for all he possessed, without the magical mercy of accident or fortune to make smooth the path.
Three times, from this undeserved isolation, he had found another man to broach the gap into the golden world of smooth affairs and easy friendships, and three times he had been abandoned and betrayed. And now he knew, with dry finality, that these things happened, not because of what he was not, but because of what he was. He was a painstaking fool with less than average gifts, who had been led to believe that hard work would take you anywhere you wished to go.
It did, if you were a person of ordinary, likable disposition, whose talents could be made to grow. His lay stopped within him, mean and static and immalleable, and would never alter while he lived. He did not care to live. Then he realized, as the warm, patient rubbing of O’LiamRoe’s voice went on, that the Prince of Barrow was relating, slowly, clearly and without expression, the whole story so far as he knew it of Lymond’s mission in France. And as it continued, it came to Robin Stewart, with the first dull stirring of thought, that here was a fellow victim.
O’LiamRoe told him all he knew, all that a night’s hurtful thought had made plain to him. Lymond had used him and had dispatched him, in his own lordly way, when his usefulness was done; administering a passing kick of adjustment