Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [175]
O’LiamRoe brought out the name flatly. This tale, told to a man he had no time for, and searching into the personal minutiae instead of the great verities which were his proper concern, was the hardest thing—perhaps the only hard thing—he had ever done in his life. Stewart, listening, felt whisper within him, as in the old, difficult days, the sardonic, bitter flame of accusation and jealousy. He said, ‘You were fair away with yourself over that cold-faced kitty, weren’t you man? God …’ And feeling again the strong hands holding him, that vital, glorious night on the rooftops in Blois, ‘You and me—we’re damned ninnies both. She’s O’Connor’s whore … she tried to kill you. You know that?’
Schooling the naked, baby’s face, O’LiamRoe said, ‘She tried to kill O’Connor’s rival.’
‘Ye should have whipped her,’ said Robin Stewart, with a faint and sluggish contempt. ‘Whipped her and taken the woman and O’Connor’s place both. You have men and land and a name of your own; you’re as good a man as Cormac O’Connor to rule Ireland, if rule Ireland you must.’ From the stark threshold he was crossing, advice was easy and problems were light.
‘There is no wish on me to rule Ireland,’ said The O’LiamRoe with, astonishingly, the vehemence of utter honesty in his voice. ‘I wish only to be rid this day of the devil on my back.’
The colourless grain of the starving man’s skin moved; the lids lifted; the Adam’s apple moved convulsively and the dry lips opened. Robin Stewart laughed. ‘He’s sucking the blood from out of you as well, the bastard, isn’t he? What do you want me to tell you? I’d make a rare teacher, so I would, on how to handle Crawford of Lymond. An empty sack won’t stand, man. And I’m empty, scoured, drained and cast aside. Do you fancy the road? It’s easy taken. You put faith in one other man of Crawford’s sort, or maybe two, and you end up here.’
‘You dealt with Harisson,’ said O’LiamRoe.
Stewart’s eyes, in their darkened cavities, were fleetingly bitter. ‘Because I was meant to. They stood aside, Warwick’s men, and let it happen. So that Harisson and his evidence needn’t trouble him any more. D’you think I haven’t had time to realize that?’
‘But you settled the score,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘If you did no more with the others who cast you aside, there’d be little in it to complain of.’
‘It’d be grand, wouldn’t it, if it were as simple,’ said the sick man’s slow voice. ‘With me, ye ken it’s never simple. If there’s a man I would fain send to hell, there’s another that would pluck cream and kisses out of the sending. God give him lack … My curse on Francis Crawford is my silence.’
Nothing showed in O’LiamRoe’s blue eyes. He said, ‘I am sorry. I had come to beg for your tongue. It seemed to me that once you and I were back in France, there are a powerful lot of people who would be shocked to know that the fine herald Crawford was the fellow who fooled the whole Court of France as Thady Boy Ballagh.’
Low behind the extinct spirit, something was burning. ‘Expose him?’
‘Why not? Himself will be waiting for you in France. And it would give that great champion,’ said O’LiamRoe, ‘some small thing to think about other than the moral aptitudes of his fellow men.’
With a sharp effort, the rickle of bones that had been Robin Stewart, Archer of the Scots Guard of the Most Christian Monarch of France, struggled up in his chair. ‘Who would believe me? Unless yourself … Would you back me?’ he said.
‘With the four quarters of my soul,’ O’LiamRoe replied. ‘Provided that you denounce the man you have been working for, too.’
There was a long pause. ‘Whatna man?’ said the Archer slowly.
‘Father in Heaven, how would I know?’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘But it’s an open secret, you may as well know, that there’s someone, and I dare say you and he would as soon do each other an ill turn as not. I’ve a mind to see that child safe, and she won’t be, with another of your adventurous brotherhood abroad. I’m not asking you for his name. But denounce him, tell all you know