Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [79]
With King, Queen and Constable had come the nursery. Mary was delighted to see them. In the old days she had enjoyed sleeping with Elizabeth and Claude, but she liked sharing her room with Aunt Fleming even better and was looking forward to mentioning it.
The death of the leveret had been a two days’ agony. After it, on her charming uncle’s advice, the small Queen was taken, her face still white with crying, to see and thank O’LiamRoe.
She was only seven. Halfway through, the speech came to an end; and she stood before him, breathing heavily, her lip transfixed by her teeth and a tear in each lid. The Prince of Barrow, who had been suffering an embarrassment almost as acute, instantly knelt, stumbling slightly, and said, ‘What is on you, Princess? There goes Luadhas, hunting with the old gods and the noble champions at the great Feis of Samhantide, with golden Cormac himself, without blemish or reproach; and after, Bran and Luadhas and Conbec lie all at the King’s feet, fed and sleeping. For this day, to be sure, the wolfhound and the little hare have shared the two sides of a dish of new milk; and when we have years and years on us they will be running yet up there on the blue speckled Curragh, with their pink tongues and their sharp, young, white teeth. Thady Boy there will tell you.’
Lymond did not speak. Watching O’LiamRoe from the fireplace, he and Margaret Erskine, who had brought her, had already exchanged all their news; she had no wish to provoke him further to speech. The towering, icy rage of the Queen Mother after the hunt had been easier to bear than Lymond’s smooth tongue. Here was another attempt to endanger the Queen and her friends. On the face of it, a travel-split cage explained the hare’s escape from the menagerie; coincidence explained its presence there in the woods. It was Lymond, combing the bushes on his own, who had found the anonymous game bag afterwards, not far from where the hunt had paused during the final stint. Stiff, roughly perforated, offensive with crotel, it showed by a torn buckle where someone had wrenched it off in his haste, and then abandoned it. So the hare had been carried throughout the chase, it now seemed, its bag probably cloaked; and had been released just there, deliberately, to do what harm it could. And but for the dog, braver than anyone could have calculated, the trick might have succeeded.
Since that day, the tourniquet of their duties about the Queen had tightened. By Lymond’s laws they were bound now, in an unbreakable fence about the Queen. There was no second of the day when an Erskine or a Fleming was not at her side. Only Jenny, popular, resilient, was exempt, while they waited for the shadow of death or accident to fall again.
O’LiamRoe, silent on the subject of Luadhas, struggling perhaps himself with an unaccustomed need for privacy, was ignorant and content to be ignorant of his ollave’s affairs. And since Mistress Boyle, in her positive, eccentric way, had apparently forgotten the whole episode, he resumed his relationship with the lady and her niece, adopting with pleasure their wide circle of friends and finding in Oonagh, now and then, a trace of courtesy lacking before.
Fresh, night-long cronies from the Franco-Irish circle at Blois in turn visited him, and so did the English and some of the Scots. The big room shared by Prince and ollave was seldom empty of convivial company disputing hotly in French, Irish, English, Latin. Occasionally Thady Boy’s sardonic voice was heard, and O’LiamRoe’s face would admit a certain avuncular pride. Thady Boy could talk. And he was a pet of a listener as well.
Barred himself from the ultimate presence of the sovereign, the Prince of Barrow missed the solid hard work which was making Thady Boy indispensable at Court. At levée and reception, at ball and after sport,