Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [29]
A girl stepped back out of an open doorway, laughing, and Francis Crawford sidestepped softly and went on his way. More even than Lyons, than Avignon or Paris, Rouen’s women were notorious. A mocking voice called after him, and below the mask, momentarily was the twitch of a smile.
Very soon after that, he vanished altogether for a moment; and when he took the cobbled crown of the street again, it was in the portly, potbellied, unmasked and alcoholic person of O’LiamRoe’s secretary.
Robin Stewart saw him wander along the Rue St.-Lô, pass the Palace of Justice and stop looking up at the newly finished tower of St. André. The church lantern shone on the ollave’s Adam’s apple and upturned, stubbled chin and Stewart himself glanced up at the tower. He laid a hand on Thady Boy’s shoulder.
His purpose, in a muddled way, was to give comfort; his need was to receive it. Thady Boy Ballagh turned round slowly, and said, ‘Well, well, Mr. Stewart. The Orcades flowed with Saxon gore this day, and Thule became warm with the blood of the Picts, and icy Erin wept for her heaps of slaughtered Scots. We’re to take the next boat home on Thursday, you’ll have heard.’
‘If I had my way of it, those dewy young madcaps at Court would hang like catkins on a willow tree. It’s plain to anyone the insolence was unintentional.’
‘And yet, do you know, I have an awful feeling that O’LiamRoe himself had a wee, little suspicion, a hint, a first trickle of a notion, that it was maybe the King he was facing after all,’ said Thady Boy placidly. ‘He wasn’t very sure of being courtly, but he knew he could make a smart success of being outrageous.—Were you going somewhere?’
Robin Stewart recalled suddenly that he had been struck before with this man. ‘I was going just a step up the road,’ he said, ‘for a word and a drink in the back parlour of a friend of mine. Would it interest you?’ He grinned with sudden candour. ‘You’ll need to make the most of your days left in France.’
Which was exactly the opinion of Francis Crawford of Lymond, accepting.
The house to which he had been so impulsively invited was not far off: a handsome, dormered merchant’s mansion behind a high wall, entered by a door recently widened. Outside, Robin Stewart stopped dead in his bony, marionnette’s walk to discuss Master Ballagh’s religion. ‘Have you strong views, maybe, on Lutherism and all yon trash?’
Thady Boy’s eyes were twin pools of maidenly blue. ‘I have strong views on nothing at all, a mhic, save women and drink, and maybe money. I can content me barefoot or bareheaded, and keep Lent or Ramadan, such little weedy views on religion do I have.’
‘Aye, well. The fellow we’re to visit is a sculptor. A retired sculptor. And an inventor. He whiles invents machines, you understand.’
‘Like Leonardo.’
‘Like Leonardo,’ agreed Robin Stewart with great promptitude, and knocked on the gates.
They were not admitted at once. There was a whispered colloquy, and a short wait; then a man with a lantern appeared and led them through the inner courtyard and into the house, talking amicably in good English as they went. They passed, at his direction, up a narrow wooden staircase and at the top stood dazzled in the light of a door already open. Two powerful hands reached for them; two powerful arms hauled them inside; and a rolling bass voice intoned, treading strongly, like monks at a vintage, on the mangled accents of Paris and Perth: ‘Robin! My sweet conscience, my great buck in velvet, touch me at your peril. I’m all swelled like a foxglove with the gout, and damned glad to see you. Bring him in, whoever he is, and sit down.’
Michel Hérisson was a big man, with loose white hair lit by the spare wax candles behind, and powerful hands rubbed by the hafts and handles, the wood and metal and stone of his profession into premature cracked monuments of themselves. Shouting cheerfully, he made them free of a comfortable, chair-scattered room with a fire at one end, where three or four Scots and French, already gathered,