Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [191]
The royal brow cleared. ‘Stole your audience, did he? And receives a fine reward, I see. Below.’
They cleared him away, shouting. He had let them bring him to France for two reasons: to implicate Lord d’Aubigny, and to expose Lymond as Thady Boy. Because of the King, Lord d’Aubigny was still free. And as a direct consequence of that, he had lost his only corroborative evidence against Lymond.
O’LiamRoe wanted Lymond exposed and degraded; but he was too soft in the guts, it seemed, to make him suffer for another man’s crimes. Robin Stewart was not. He was not to face the wheel for the better part of a week. And before he died or after it, Robin Stewart would make sure that on Robin Stewart’s behalf, if on no other, Thady Boy Ballagh would suffer.
Gossip, bright-eyed and smiling, brought the news of this exchange to Lymond later in the afternoon and went away empty-handed. The final verdict on Robin Stewart he already knew. It meant that the affair of the Tour des Minimes and the spurious thefts were still attached to the name of Thady Boy Ballagh, and he was finding the evidence, despite his own formidable efforts, to be of a vaguely damning nature very hard to disprove. If this disquieted him, nothing of it showed to his companions of the afternoon. In the logis he shared with two others he received visitors and abstractedly exercised his charm.
There was nothing else he could do. In casting her pearls so casually before the enraged swine, the Dowager had not only risked his life. She herself made no further demands on his time; he was free, and in the absence of his afflicted tabard, in ordinary clothes. But so successfully had she marked him that he could safely go and see neither Abernaci, whom he had not met since his return, nor O’LiamRoe, whom he had last seen at Dieppe, until darkness fell.
Black Angers, from which all England was once ruled, was overflowing with the French Court and its outriders; with Scots, Irish, Italians and assorted Ambassadors, with officials, couriers, huntsmen, wagoners and other staff of the toiles, with experts on foraging and requisitioning, with prelates and physicians, with lawyers, archers and halberdiers, people’s servants, Gentlemen of the Household, musicians, pages, equerries, barbers, ushers, secretaries, hawkers, entertainers, prostitutes and officers of the college of arms. Among the throng, in a flattened way, were the Angevins themselves, making what profit they could out of the situation before the food supplies ran out and the Court passed from this grazing to the next.
It was a dark night, and the narrow streets, packed as they were, had only irregular lanterns: a discreet man who took care to avoid the liveried torch-bearing servants had every chance of escaping notice. Lymond arrived without incident at the small lodging where O’LiamRoe had taken a room; found the back door and a shutter which opened, and followed the sound of O’LiamRoe’s voice, discussing elephantine habits in Gaelic with another which was almost certainly that of Abernaci. Without knocking, Lymond opened the door and went in.
O’LiamRoe, who had only been filling time anyway, stopped abruptly in what he was saying; and Archie Abernethy, incognito out of turban and without his Oriental silks, split his dark, dry-seamed face in a grin. ‘I guessed you’d be here. Man,’ said Abernaci, ‘you’re looking a sight better set up than the last time I saw ye.… Yon was a lovely stroke at the pig.… It’s a case of finding proof against yon bastard of Aubigny, I take it?’
‘Yes. Well done, Archie. I wanted to see you. I’ll tell you why in a moment. Phelim—’
‘D’ye think,’ said Abernaci, who had something he wanted clear in his mind, ‘d’ye think he’d really try to harm her again? He would have to be wud.’
‘The smart answer to that,’ said Lymond patiently, ‘is that we are all mad. But in fact men who wreck whole ships and stampede elephants and destroy cavalcades of riders out of hand