Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
From Cormac O’Connor’s upturned throat came a fanfare of derision. The beard dropped, and the two knowledgeable eyes surveyed O’LiamRoe. ‘Ten years since, Henry proclaimed himself King of Ireland, and annexed us like a glove to the Imperial English Crown—“From henceforth, Irishmen be not enemies, but subjects.” ’ Cormac swore, and laughed again, looking at O’LiamRoe. ‘It hardly stirs your thick blood, does it, it barely lifts your snout from the bog to see the Lord Deputy mouthing orders at Kilmainham, and the bought earls meek as mice in Dublin Castle hall?’
‘Three hundred years under England is a long time,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Even a French invasion, save you, is only an old tune in a different key. Desmond tried to bring in the French thirty years ago, poor silly Ireland, to make war on Henry VIII, and Kildare himself boasted that he would do the same with twelve thousand Spaniards in his tail. Well, the great Earl of Kildare is dead, his family attainted, his heir a child with an Italian accent living in Florence these ten years. True for you, your own mother was daughter to the ninth Earl, your lands are gone, your father fast in the Tower, your ten brothers and sisters homeless or on alien soil; but ’Tis fifteen years since the English took Kildare’s son Tomas at Maynooth Castle and broke their pledged word to him; and three hundred and fifty years since an O’Connor was supreme monarch of Ireland.’
The black head had lifted, and Cormac’s brosy gourd of a face stared at the Prince. ‘There speaks the creeping son of the swamp. Fifteen years since Tomas an tSioda, my own mother’s brother, and five Géraldine uncles were murdered at Tyburn after they had surrendered in all good faith at Maynooth; and the heir to all Ireland escaping like a trickle of dirty water into the sea. ’Tis a throne for Gerald of Kildare that I and the woman there are after making.’
‘Does he speak English?’ enquired O’LiamRoe neatly.
The snarl of impatience echoed in O’Connor’s throat; but from behind him, Oonagh’s cold voice spoke for the first time since her lover had entered. ‘As much as the child Mary will speak,’ she said.
‘And will rule as freely, I take it,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘We’re become a nation of uncles. All Europe is a cradle of naked emperors lulled by a jackboot; Warwick and Somerset in England; Arran and de Guises in Scotland; the last of the Geraldines with us. Faix, two Earls of Kildare were Lords Deputy for England, and sore lords they were for both Ireland and her masters. “All Ireland cannot rule this Earl,” they told the Council, and “Then in good faith, this Earl shall rule all Ireland,” the Council replied. Young Gerald would be off the throne in a fortnight, in favour of some grand buailim-sciath such as yourself; and we should be tossed straight back into the midden of anarchy. Our royal tradition is broken. There is no living vein of divinity with us; there is no heritage but one of wind-seeded vivacity. Can you not rest,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, his oval face damp and rose-coloured, ‘and let the corn hear itself grow?’
Like sword cutting through glass, a high, hard voice said, ‘He loves them, the household of hell.’
Bundled cabbage-like in creased linen, the iron hair stiffly upholstered in two angry plaits, Theresa Boyle straddled the doorway, and her eyes on O’LiamRoe were shining with anger and hate. ‘He would kneel in his basket at an English lord’s hearth for a joke and a kind word; he would take the scarlet cloth and the silver cups they bring us wooing like savages, spurn the old Apish toys of Antichrist,