Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [209]
He had not only waited, damn him. He had taken half the Court to her. Transfixed on her balcony, full in the public eye, she had been forced to ask O’LiamRoe’s help. Piedar Dooly, unwatched, had slipped from the Hôtel Moûtier to the castle, and in response to her message, Robin Stewart had come to receive her news and bear it to d’Aubigny. And even that had played into Lymond’s hands, for it had brought the Archer to run with him on the rooftops and had nearly suborned him from his purpose. She wondered, briefly, if her borrowing of Piedar Dooly that night had been mentioned by O’LiamRoe; and then dismissed the thought from her mind. It was the hour for harshness and for strength: neither symptomatic of Phelim O’LiamRoe. She said, ‘There is nothing I can do.’
The whole width of the room lay between them; there was no sound. Then Lymond said calmly, ‘Let us try a little sentiment, then. Queen Mary is eight years old.’
‘She is eight, and has food in her mouth and down in her bed, a nurse to dress her and a great chest for her jewels. The jewel of an Irish child is a handful of meal.’
‘And a rebellion under Cormac will bring plenty?’
‘It will bring freedom. The rest will come.’
‘You talk as if Mary were free,’ said Lymond. ‘Her death will set brother against brother in Scotland as it has already with you. Can you look no further than one nation and one man?’
‘You do not know me,’ she said.
‘I know your pride. As your lover shrunk in stature his cause had to grow. A humbler woman would have knifed him.’
She stared at the blur of his face in the twinkling dark, her rage bursting its self-imposed locks. ‘Then there are two of us,’ she said hardily. ‘A man of smaller vanity would have killed him before she had need.’
‘Thinking death the only division. I could not imagine,’ said Lymond, ‘ever so insulting you. In any case, you are committed to your cause, are you not? You would need only another Messiah. The Prince of Barrow, perhaps.’
‘Perhaps.’ Under the heavy damask the sweat was cold on her skin; her eyes, open in the scented darkness, ached with the strain of the fight; her lashes dragged like fire from their roots.
For it was a struggle. She was under no illusions. He meant to have the help she could give. His moderation was a debt he owed to other women, not to her, and eventually it would break.… Placed between these steely levers, face to face with her own mind, she must use what weapons she had. Choosing her words, she said, ‘… But that you would frighten him out of it. No matter. Ambitious princes in Ireland are as thick as the sands of the sea. Any one of them will do.’
Deeply she had planned this inevitable duel of theirs; her blood heavy in her veins she waited to hear him reply. The silence went on, drowning the shallow murmurs of talk and laughter, the remote beat and pipe of music outside. Then Lymond said, ‘So you have never loved.’
Oonagh said, ‘Have you?’
He did not answer. Instead he said, his voice attuned to a deeper breath, so that her hands closed suddenly, ‘There is a man already half-awake in O’LiamRoe. I should not prevent you. How could I?’
She let him hear the contempt in her voice. ‘And in the loving leaf-beds of France I should let drop the starved skull of a nation, and watch it roll into the weeds? Show me the man, awake or half-awake, whose lips could teach me to do that!’
Her own words chimed in her head. They sounded unconvincing, the words that were meant to persuade as the spade persuades the deep earth. Standing in that dark room, gambling mind and body against this silken, disembodied voice, she had begun, strong as she had made herself to be, to tremble. She had to wrench from him her secret, her identity, her pride all intact, and to buy security for Cormac in the future. Oh, God … she thought furiously, shaking. How frigid was he? Mary Mother, how much wooing must she do?
She had thought herself open as a sounding board to every move of his body;