Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [256]
That O’LiamRoe had recognized also, in the two hours he had waited. He sat down now heavily, with a fierce emotion that was very near pleasure, and watched Francis Crawford pass in through the door.
Mors sine morte, finis sine fine.… Dim through the mesh of birdsong in the trees, the bell for Nones boomed and stopped. No sound came from the hut. What was he doing?
At Châteaubriant, the conference must be under way. Soon it would be over, and Lymond, the hero of the day, Lymond would be missed.
What was he doing? Contemptuous, angry, defensive, whatever his mood, you would expect him to turn and come out, and make of O’LiamRoe his first audience. But still he did not come.
Presently, his own heat gone, his heart shrunk in his throat, his hands cold, O’LiamRoe got up and went in.
Nothing was changed. Stewart lay in death as he had fallen; the man for whom he had waited was not likely to rouse him now. The carefully spread table was the same, and the pack. Then he saw Lymond, at the deep side window, his hands clasped before him on the sill. On his face, a little averted, were none of the more dramatic aspects of anger or remorse. He stood staring down at his linked hands as a man might, merely considering a disturbing problem, had you not seen Stewart’s blood on his shirt, and his knuckles and nails yellow-white with presssure on the cold whitewashed ledge. He did not move, although aware surely that O’LiamRoe had come in. The Prince of Barrow, suddenly in deep water, hesitated, his well-fed body too tight an envelope for his lungs and his heart.
Once, philosophy in hand and irony buried as best he could, he would have walked forward confidently and dealt with this. As it was … What Lymond’s philosophy might be, he did not know. In irony he could outmatch himself, in width of vision he was, he suspected, his peer.
What was there left to say? Take him by the shoulder, said the O’LiamRoe of a year ago, the small parchment figure, complacent in its two dimensions, and say, kind but firm, ‘When you got his message, it was already too late. There was nothing before him, anyway, but exile and the gallows. He was not even worth saving. He was a murderer. He was a man who thought of himself only, who, if it suited him, would brush anything from his way, busy, unthinking—even a child … even his friends … even you.’
It was the new O’LiamRoe who answered grimly. ‘But the issue is quite other. The issue is that Francis Crawford set out to capture the mind of this man, and having used it, dismissed it like one of his whores. Had the message come in time, he would quite probably have ignored it. To say that he did not realize how far Stewart was his was no justification; he should have made it his business to know. Nous devons à la Mort et nous et nos ouvrages. That, thought O’LiamRoe bleakly, was one piece of French at least he had learned to understand.
‘Thinking hard, Phelim?’ said Lymond suddenly, and turned. ‘There must be some excuse you could mention.’ His face was brutally composed, his eyes wide open in the gloom.
‘You learn,’ said O’LiamRoe’s voice quietly, of its own accord.
‘I do not,’ said Lymond without expression, his eyes on the thin, badly jointed shoulders on the floor. Presently he said, ‘I seem to be armoured with scythes no one can see. Every breath I draw seems to twist some blameless planet from its orbit.’ And after a moment, ‘I suppose you are right. A cell is safest; or a tower, or a bog. To discuss the world of men, and laugh at it, or even pray for it. But not to meddle with it.’
O’LiamRoe braced his tired bones. ‘Pause,’ he said, ‘for a sympathetic groan of assent. From Will Scott of course, at the very least. And from the shade of Christian Stewart. From Oonagh O’Dwyer. And certainly, the man at your feet.’ And cutting short, again, the blank pause which followed, he said sardonically,