Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [86]
Afterwards, he was presented to the Scottish Dowager. The meeting took place in her own rooms, and only Lady Fleming and her daughter Margaret attended. O’LiamRoe, who had been stubborn about changing his saffron for one of Thady Boy’s clever old women, was conscious, under the lightly detached calm, that she hadn’t even noticed the frieze cloak. The interview was formal and pleasant. At the end, with a suddenness which alarmed him, she thanked him in her firm, strongly measured English for creating and preserving the alter ego of Crawford of Lymond.
The Prince of Barrow had drawn a certain mild amusement from the idea of flouting authority. He had preferred to forget that if Lymond was the Queen Mother’s busy tool then so, to a certain degree, was he. As if guessing his thought, Mary of Guise said, ‘I am sorry he has proved a little … unorthodox.’
‘But, ma’am,’ said O’LiamRoe, touched on his dearest theory. ‘When a man draws the blood out of his heart and the marrow out of his bones to make an art, there’s little sense in bemoaning the frayed suit or the poor table or the angular manners. ’Tis the liberty of mind, and annulment of convention and a fine carefree richness of excesses itself sets the soul whirling and soaring.’
‘You’ve certainly hit on Thady Boy’s receipt,’ said Lady Fleming with asperity. ‘I should think his soul is whirling and soaring like a Garonne windmill. His habits are low enough.’
O’LiamRoe smiled, but the smile turned a little absent on his face. He had noticed a rag doll left asprawl on a cabinet, its linen split, its hair torn, its head limp. And in his stomach, smooth, clean, washed in wholesome juices and diligent as the churns in a dairy, something altered in beat.
Next day, the King came back. Archembault Abernaci stopped fussing with his cages in the outer reaches of the château gardens and retired to the town lodging he shared with his assistants, several bears and the saltimbanque Tosh. The donkey, foreseeing hard days ahead, brayed irritatingly from the castle terrace. Oonagh O’Dwyer, on her second last day in Blois, received her second last visit from O’Li mRoe. And the brothers of Bourbon and the other young gentlemen, released like puppies from the whalebone of Chambord, raced upstairs to Thady Boy.
By now, they expected something more than his music. He gave them freely an idea which had occurred to him at Neuvy and they embraced it instantly and fell to planning.
What he proposed was a race in pairs, from the cathedral hill to the castle, following a route determined by clues which some of the King’s Guards could lay. News of it spread uncommonly fast. By evening, with the Court settled to watch its after-supper wrestling, the Guard alone was seething with it; and Lord d’Aubigny, one of the few men on duty with long experience of such things, was clearly suspicious of the general air of vivacity. An Archer was brought in with a broken leg, and the hilarity increased. The King had not been made aware of the project—a natural precaution in this sort of race. It was Thady Boy’s idea that they should run it at nightfall, over the housetops of Blois.
The evening wore on. The wrestlers ended. The Queen rose; the King retired; and half the French Court, with torchbearers, Archers, men-at-arms, servants and a few discreetly cloaked women, melted out of the château precincts and uphill to the highest region of Blois. At its head, along with the Marshal de St. André and the Colignys and the young Bourbons and the young de Guises and the musicians, trotted Thady Boy Ballagh explaining, to their polite applause, why he wished to break his journey halfway in order to deliver a serenade.
The Hôtel Moûtier in the Rue des Papegaults, with its turrets and dormers, its fountain and its orange trees, its courtyard paved with Venetian mosaic and its small-paned windows with the marble sills, was built high in one of the precipitous lanes which plunged downhill from the Cathedral