Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [47]
Meanwhile, the ollave, of course, was still missing. It was one of the occasions when Lymond asleep wrecked the peace of mind of more people than Lymond awake. Lord d’Aubigny was if anything relieved. Robin Stewart became very short-tempered, but was persuaded to allow The O’LiamRoe, unruffled as usual, to take advantage of the relaxed atmosphere to visit his friends under guard. In the smouldering ruins of a major explosion, which left the child Mary’s face swollen with angry tears and Jenny Fleming in bed, boiled to rags in the seething vat of the Queen Mother’s rage, Tom Erskine was trapped by the Dowager’s remorseless determination that nothing whatsoever should prevent Thady Boy Ballagh from making the most suave, the most accomplished and the most glittering debut of the century at the French Court that night.
So, in the utmost secrecy, there was despatched to Thady Boy’s lodging a case of soaps, scents and jewels, a sword, a sword belt, a dagger, a paper for a horse of up to 150 crowns, and a set of garments stiff with gold buckles and embroidery. It lay sealed in his room all afternoon beside a similar parcel, of a soberer kind, containing a selection of garments from the King of France’s tailor. O’LiamRoe, returning at five from a successful series of visits, beginning with Michel Hérisson and ending with Mistress Boyle, found both boxes locked and untouched in the empty bedroom at the Croix d’Or, and beside them a litter of tattered black clothing.
Thady Boy Ballagh had returned, had climbed into his spare and salt-stained black suit, and abjuring even the modest standards of grace and hygiene enjoined on O’LiamRoe, had trailed off on foot to the Abbey Lodging of St. Ouen looking, as Piedar Dooly observed, like a potboiling of chimney sweeps’ handkerchiefs. For, where The O’LiamRoe had an obstinate humour all his own, Francis Crawford of Lymond had genius.
Each in its nest of gauze and gilt thread, of tissue and taffeta, swathed in silver and satin, in velvet and white fur sugared with diamonds, each face painted, each brow plucked, hair hidden by sparkling hair of raw silk, the well-born of France sat in waxlight and flowers like half a hundred candied sweets in a basket. Last at the last table, soggy gristle next the sugar plums, sat Thady Boy Ballagh.
Coming in with the Queen Mother’s train, Erskine had seen him at once, and noticed by the hardening of her face that Mary of Guise had also been taken aback. He sat, taking care not to meet his wife’s eyes, or the carefully restored face of Jenny Fleming. He was familiar up to and beyond the point of boredom with these affairs. Plain food was his preference and plain clothes his unfulfilled dream; below his solid face, fresh as prawn butter, the whitest velvet looked slatternly. He sat; rose again for the royal entrance; noted Lord d’Aubigny’s miraculous bow and the trumpeter who had drunk a little too much. There was a second, more brilliant fanfare, and the supper began. Erskine’s eyes, irresistibly, travelled once more down the table.
A weed in the fairest orchard of France, Thady Boy had been placed, with a malice both deadly and deliberate, next to the curled and painted, the earringed, the chypre-strewn young person of Louis first Prince of Condé. Brother of the Duke of Vendôme, Condé was at that time just over twenty, a Bourbon of the blood royal; spare, sallow and of an extraordinary agility despite the crooked shoulder which he quite simply ignored, having no need of either an incentive or an excuse. The Prince of Condé was a younger brother with the tastes of a king. Below the paint lay the potential greatness which was marking him already as a man to watch in the field. Idle, he was a force to be reckoned with, one of the four men