Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [228]
THEY would not admit him: who would unlock to a foolish Irishman, a moonstruck compatriot, at half-past three in the morning? Mistress Boyle’s hollow-faced steward slammed the grille, and O’LiamRoe climbed two walls, forced a shutter and tumbled into the parlour where Cormac O’Connor lay felled and snarling in sleep among all the spilled ashes, where the night before he had rustled drunk from the table.
O’LiamRoe gazed at him with interest; then stepping over his buttocks, threw open the hithermost door.
Green moonlight filled a bedroom, unperfumed, undecorated, filled with a woman’s clothes and the scoured, herbal smell of the schoolroom. Without stopping, Phelim strode to the wooden travelling-bed, dim in the corner, where the sleeper, cramped under thin sheeting, lay drowned and veiled in the black weeds of her hair.
Next door, a candle still guttered. With a taper deftly lit, O’LiamRoe walked from bracket to bracket, from lamp to torchère in both bedroom and parlour, binding light upon light until the air gasped and glittered in a tourniquet of searing dazzle and Oonagh O’Dwyer, white face and black brows, white pillow and black hair, white elbows and black, sodden shadow where the sharp bones, urgent, pressed down the limp bed, stared at him dazed, with distended eyes black as flowers in her white face, and said harshly, ‘Is he dead?’
‘Tres vidit et unum adoravit. He’s before the fire, my dear, like a pricked pudding … if that is the he you mean.’ And his eyes, round, pale, innocent, dared her to deny it.
She obliged him, direct and stormy, without a second thought, both palms flat on the bedclothes. ‘You know what I mean. Why are you here? Is the Queen killed, then? Why has he sent you?’
‘ ’Tis pigeons you have got in your head. Sweet, fat pigeons,’ said O’LiamRoe warmly. ‘No one sends me, and the Queen is not killed yet. But Thady Boy Ballagh, ochone, is sent by royal command to be broken as whipping boy for his lordship of Aubigny, of unsullied fame, and no one but you and I, my love, no one but you and I can save that child now.’
The blurring of sleep was leaving her face; her eyes and brow and wide cheekbones clearing, precision restored to her spare, warm lips. He remembered them, as she threw a bedgown over her robed shoulders, her gaze going beyond him. ‘Mary Mother … Put out those lights! The child is nothing to me, and will be as easy in the grave.’
‘I put them on,’ said O’LiamRoe agreeably. ‘I want O’Connor’s fine brain to help us convince John Stewart of Aubigny’s royal patron that the man is a would-be assassin and, I should wager, half-mad.’
Slowly Oonagh spoke. ‘Aubigny has exposed Lymond as Thady Boy Ballagh?’
‘Yes.’
‘Then accusing d’Aubigny won’t save him. His offences as Thady Boy alone would have him ended. You know that.’
‘Not,’ said O’LiamRoe, ‘if he could prove that his masquerade had the purpose of saving the Queen.’
‘Then go to the Dowager,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer. ‘Or has she denied him?’ And as O’LiamRoe’s silence answered her, she widened her queer eyes and smiled. ‘And so do I. He is unlucky, our amateur, our sweet ollave.’
‘I would not have said that thing,’ said O’LiamRoe and, startlingly, she flushed. ‘In small things, yes. He will not ask the Queen Dowager to admit she called him to France to protect the small Queen. He will not call on me to admit I knew he was in France because of the Queen. That would be merely my word against theirs. He cannot suggest he came to France as his own master to do this work without accusing d’Aubigny, and he has no more proof against d’Aubigny than they have against him. So the word you and your friend here are going to give me will damn John Stewart and save the girl and deliver our sweet ollave, as you call him, all at once. As neat a conclusion as ever I saw.’
‘And when,’ said the woman in the bed, ‘did Francis Crawford become the friend of your soul?’
‘I was wondering myself.’ O’LiamRoe’s reply was perfectly equable. ‘I rather fancy ’twas when it came to me that the black roaring Irishman we had there was only half the actor in Francis