Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [231]
‘Were I eleven centuries old, I would follow them,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Today I would follow the man who raised good beasts and crops, who mined his own land, and cut passes and made roads and ploughed up moor and bog and barbered the woods. I’d follow the man who carded and weaved and brought in new seed, who used his own dyes and set his own silver and made old men as well as laws and medicine and poems in Latin: old men in good, decent houses, making fellowship with their neighbours whether Celt or Irish-Norman or Irish-English; whether in the sea ports or in the Pale. We are a million people lightsome from birth to death as the froth of the sea, and leaving no more behind us.… Seize your battleaxe and lead out the MacSheehys,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, hardily, his fists nail and bone at his sides. ‘Turn kern against kern, gallowglass against gallowglass, live the past, murder the future; and I promise you, when you have extorted your living tax of cracked pride and savage frivolity, France or England or Charles in his little suit of Florentine serge will stroll whistling across the bare fields, kicking the stones.’
‘ ’Tis a glorious poem, so,’ said Mistress Boyle. ‘And yourself, Prince, has cut off your fine whiskers to make bowstrings? You’ll oppose us, Lackpenny?’
‘He is deserting us. Alas, the loss of it!’ said Oonagh coolly. ‘He is Francis Crawford’s new lover.’
O’LiamRoe did not even look at her; he answered Mistress Boyle direct, his mild face sober. ‘I am opposing you.’
‘In the name of God, what with?’ said Cormac O’Connor, and turned to Oonagh, and barked.
‘With force,’ said O’LiamRoe mildly. ‘I have sent word to the Slieve Bloom today. Do you land, with your French or without, you will get such a blow you will never need another.’
Nobody laughed. In the white, stark glare of the lights, in the antiseptic heat of the air, Mistress Boyle drew a sharp breath and was still; Cormac, his thick wrists outflung on the counterpane, lost his smile and Oonagh, behind him, rising to her knees with the night robe paged taut by the pillow, said ‘Phelim!’ and tugging the heavy stuff free, slid astonishingly to the ground and moving swiftly, caught his shoulder.
Swung round, he looked down into clear, grey-green eyes searching his own. ‘But Phelim—The meaty haunches who grunt and whack while the knowing ones smile and bide their time.… The world to be fairly divided among the small, calm men who watch and think …?’ They were his own words. ‘This is Francis’s doing?’
‘Equally I oppose Mary Dowager of Scotland,’ said O’LiamRoe quietly, ‘should she lean her elbow on Ireland. Though I will help her to know what Francis Crawford would do for her daughter. Sad, sad is a recusant. I was the world’s bully at four, so they say. I have been made to learn a thing: that like a garden of windflowers, our nature is talk. But good talk has its roots in the earth; like a turnip it thrusts its feet in the soil and its head in the clear air, thrusts with vigour, moves, swells, ripens and is harvested.… I, a miscast, rambling thing, am ready to plough up this field.’
She had dropped her hand, holding his gaze with her own. ‘There is a death in it,’ said Oonagh.
O’LiamRoe smiled. ‘There was always death in it, since La Sauvée sailed. Your fears have come true, that is all.’
‘There is death in it. She is right.’ The harsh voice of Mistress Boyle spoke not to Oonagh but to Cormac. ‘God show you your duty.’
‘ ’Tis no duty with our philosopher’s maidservant here, but a pleasure entirely,’ said Cormac O’Connor, and he rose to his feet.
‘Get back, Phelim,’ said Oonagh.
O’LiamRoe did not move. ‘It’s this way will be best. My cousin is tanist heir, so. I have sent word, and he will do as I would. You can tell the King of France that Ireland is lost to him.’
She had her back to him, her eyes on Cormac, moving slowly from the bed. Her aunt stood still in the far doorway. ‘Escape while you can. Himself will kill you.