Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [190]
The blood sticking about his burst clothing, his hopeless hair glued on his cheeks, his lip bitten, his eyes aching, his head ready to burst, Stewart stared at the graceful gesture, the cool splendour, the careless thief of success, and seizing the sword by its pommel, aimed at Thady Boy’s face.
Lymond was fresh, and moreover knew exactly what he was doing. The message he had failed to transmit, walking steadily to Robin Stewart, had been a warning against just this. He ducked, and brought his foot up in the same smooth, practised movement and Stewart, tripped, ended his lunge on the ground where, buffeted and bleeding, he rolled over and lay.
To a casual observer, nothing had occurred except Stewart’s collapse. Already the keepers were running on, and with them two or three Archers, in whose charge he nominally was. The cheering, except on the part of the townspeople, was dying away: excess in anything was ill-bred, and there was a need for collective speculation. The Queen Mother’s herald, moving easily over the grass to retrieve her highness’s scarf, was being given points like a greyhound, and probably knew it. Any hopes Lymond might have had of discreet anonymity on his second appearance in France had been decisively dashed. His second entrée, as it turned out, was quite as spectacular in its way as his first.
When he could walk, Stewart was taken to the King at his own request. Two tumblers were in the arena, along with a goat. From the height of the royal stand you could see plainly across to the drawbridge, where the sun shone on a cluster of admiring heads, the middle one yellow.
He had the King’s ear: filthy though he was, prisoner though he was, he had fought well. And the Queen, the Duchess, the Vidame, the Court all about him, were watching and listening too; only Lord d’Aubigny, in the last moments, had risen and gone.
Robin Stewart raised his voice, aiming it at the King, and at O’LiamRoe sitting beyond. ‘About the man calling himself Crawford of Lymond,’ said Stewart loudly and plainly, blood springing as the muscles jerked in his cut face. ‘There’s something this Court ought to know. The Prince of Barrow there will be my witness.’
He had their attention, at least. Within sound of his voice, conversation drawled to a halt; there was a second’s silence. The Constable broke it sharply. ‘You presume, sir. The gentleman is a herald of her grace the Queen Dowager of Scotland, and is no concern of yours.’
‘Is he no? Is he no? Then he’s a concern of yours, monseigneur, and a concern of the King’s, and a concern of everybody who doesna care to be made a fool of, whether he’s a pet of the de Guise family or a dressedup tumbler with a chapman’s tongue in his heid.… Ask The O’LiamRoe. Listen to the Prince of Barrow, then,’ said Robin Stewart, his voice an uncontrolled shout. ‘Tak’ tent o’ this!’
Mysteriously, like a simple-minded jack-in-the-box, O’LiamRoe’s face appeared at his side. The kind, oval face glanced over over the arena before O’LiamRoe said, ‘Death alive! Listen to what? The only soul I ever knew anything about was Thady Boy Ballagh, and him due for the block for mass murder now that our other suspect is proved white, white as the driven snow. Lymond? I met him in London. Aside from that, I know nothing of the fellow at all.’
In a single, ripe-vowelled breath out of Ireland, Stewart’s one, sweet hope of revenge had thus gone. For a moment, as he stared dizzily at O’LiamRoe’s steadfast, scarlet face, he was on the verge of denouncing Lymond regardless, in face of the ridicule and denial and the final, damning opposition of O’LiamRoe. He struggled with it, breathing heavily, while the translation was going on, aware that he was losing their attention. The King, his eye straying impatiently to the goat, said, ‘Eh bien, monsieur?’
Stewart opened his mouth.
‘Body of me, take him away,’ said the Constable briefly. ‘This is a man already half crazed. Who else would lift a sword just now against one who had just saved his life?’
The King said, ‘Did he do so?’ in the same moment as