Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [215]
It was Piedar Dooly, who had no delicacy in matters of the heart, who informed him that Oonagh O’Dwyer had been at the château all night, and that her aunt was fit to swell up and blacken with rage. Châteaubriant was a small place. Issuing to seek balm for his raw soul, he met Lymond, on his way back from escorting his night’s companion to her home.
The fair, agreeable face and modest fortune about the clothes inflamed the Prince of Barrow beyond the point of caution in a public street. He said, ‘And had she any good in her now, or did she deserve the pasting she will be having from her other lover this morning?’
He expected a blow; he urgently wanted a fight. But after a second’s hesitation the other man only said, ‘She has told me nothing. Unfortunately. Phelim, go and get drunk.’
And he did.
There were a number of others at the Cher Saincte on the same errand. Its rooms, public and private, were filled with refugees from the nerve-storming, playing-card propriety of the Ambassage. The Archers not actually on duty, of which there were few, were forced indeed to share the same parlour as the Swiss Guard off duty, which had already led to some stridency.
Newly returned from a mission to Nantes, and by no means the quietest of that company, Lieutenant André Spens hardly noticed the beggar’s urchin at his elbow at first. It was not until the all-important words pierced the din that he jumped a little, thought, and after excusing himself with a few well-chosen oaths and a telling improvisation, followed the child out of the inn.
Half an hour later, in someone’s tumbledown shack outside the town, Lieutenant Spens came face to face with Robin Stewart, whom he had been instructed to befriend, keep in touch with, and eventually to kill. The delight on the lieutenant’s well-shaven face was only equalled by the pleasure on Robin Stewart’s, who was about to forestall him.
It was typical, even at this hour, of Robin Stewart’s farcical and humourless affairs that some two hours later the same urchin should return, with the same errand, to the crowded Cher Saincte; and finding the Prince of Barrow totally senseless in drink, should persuade Piedar Dooly to accompany him instead.
For his final dramatic intervention in the world’s affairs, Robin Stewart had taken residence in a stone and turf erection he had found in a forest clearing near Béré, just outside Châteaubriant and a little to the northwest. There, untroubled by monkish ghosts, dragons or nymphs, he had lived by his bow for ten days; a thing which gave him no trouble, but which gave a little extra savour, like garlic in the bowl, to his present relative affluence.
To Piedar Dooly, however, grim and silent, locked in his passionate Irish soul, the journey through the tepid summer trees with their market-day smell was something to get over quickly, so that he could return to where his master lay curled like a record roll on a rented table pushed in a cupboard. Storage of the eminent incapable was routine to the Cher Saincte.
He gazed acidly at the balding ground, the patch of sky, the fence, and the crumbling house, built for a hermit or a herdboy at acorn time; and when Stewart came to the door he observed nothing significant about his person or about the single room into which he was ushered when the Archer with a coin and a word had sent off the boy. Dooly said, ‘It’s cosy you are for a dead man, surely, and will make a beautiful corpse. Himself is busy.’
Gently Stewart hitched his long bones on the deep windowsill. ‘The lad says he’s fou’,’ said the Archer without rancour, but with a thread of contempt unconcealed in his voice. ‘It’s not to be wondered at. Anyway, you’ll do. I can’t get hold of Mr. Crawford … that was Thady Boy, ye ken. Him. He’s not at the castle. And I’ve a message for him about the Queen.’
The little man, barely