Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [235]
‘She suffers the child in man,’ said Lymond. ‘I would guess, because she thinks with his shoulders in the clouds, his head must see further than other men. But in time—’
‘She finds his eyes are shut,’ said the short man, and threw
‘Or that she has been invisible for so long that he has forgotten she is there. The clear skies above all that cloud no longer bewitch her. She looks for a man with a God-sent vocation, a brilliant vocation but a different vocation, who will either put her before it … or change it for her.’
‘And then she will leave her first lover. It sounds unlikely to me,’ said the tall man, and threw in his turn.
‘It is beginning to sound unlikely to me,’ said Francis Crawford after some thought. ‘What about another song?’
Much later, when the short guard was asleep and Lymond, stretched prone on his face, lay open-eyed and abstracted in bed, the tall man swung his chair to the floor, saying, ‘But would she be happy with him?’
The fair, bloody head jerked round. ‘What? Who happy with whom?’
‘With the other. If he altered his ideals, would the woman stay even with him?’
‘Christ,’ said Lymond. ‘Mild and eloquent Balder, the woman would never even think of him. His office is purely to sunder; neither he nor any man has power to do more than that.’
‘Then where is his reward?’ said the tall gaoler, and began to swing rhythmically again.
‘Round as Giotto’s “O”,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘His reward is nothing, nullity, negation, an absence, a lack. His golden reward, equal to its own weight of shaved beard, is this, that the lady did not accept him.’
‘She is ugly?’
‘She is beautiful as the tides of the sea,’ said the pleasant voice from the bed. ‘Warm, silken and fathomless; and familiar with mysteries.’
‘They all are, the bitches,’ said the tall man, and went on rocking, slowly, in silence.
The Inn of the Trois Mariés, outside St. Julien-de-Vouvantes and nine miles from Châteaubriant, had brought Maître Gaultier as close to his clients at Court as the congested billeting situation would allow. He was not disturbed, confident in the belief that a needy gentleman will sniff out a usurer, as the mastiffs of Rhodes were said to distinguish Turk from Christian by the smell.
The O’LiamRoe, launched upstairs with the first sunlight, was given audience without question; but Georges Gaultier’s listening face was vacant. He heard the Prince of Barrow through, hummed a line of some obscure monody, his patched eyebrows scaling his brow, then disappeared without excuse.
Ten minutes later O’LiamRoe found himself greeting the tall, brooding figure and eaglet face of the Dame de Doubtance, seated at a little spinet and picking out with one thin, tight-cuffed claw the notes of an astonishingly bawdy song O’LiamRoe hoped she had never heard sung. Clearly Gaultier had conveyed all his news. The flat, downturned mouth tightened, then moved as she swung round for his bow. ‘The woman is a fool.’
He faced her out, all his clothes whitened with dust, and dust in his wild golden hair. ‘You will never see a braver,’ he said.
‘And you are a fool,’ said the Lady harshly. ‘She has the gift, that black-haired woman, and she gave herself like carrion, to feed her own pride.’
‘She has left him.’ His face thinned with sleeplessness, O’LiamRoe kept his temper.
‘Left him? Dotard, schoolboy, unleavened bread, can you believe I speak of Cormac O’Connor?’
Erect, drawn to her full height, she peered down at him from her archaic headdress, the golden plaits thonged on her breast. ‘Ah, you are pleasant,’ she said. ‘Many a starving man will come to you, seeing you starving and able to laugh. You appear pleasant, as drowning leaves in a pond.’
Anger had gone. ‘He has shown me,’ said O’LiamRoe.
‘He has shown himself; that is all that matters,’ said the Dame de Doubtance. ‘Artus Cholet lives with the woman Berthe at St. Julien. The house is thatched; with St. John over the door.’ Still speaking, she reseated herself, the long robes shifting, and resumed at her spinet.
Stiff-backed, O’LiamRoe stood