Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [87]
Although thickly crowded, the Rue des Papegaults was not noisy. Late at night, horsemen were rare. The sound of the hooves would patter like sea spray off the brick paving and walls; three streets away a group of riders would sound like the muted rumble of a storm. But most people kept inside after dark, or walked with swords and torchbearers; and a party intending to launch a serenade or run a race, if they valued privacy, would travel on foot.
Hélie and Anne Moûtier were leaving Blois next day to winter in the south, as was their custom; and Oonagh O’Dwyer, accordingly, was on the point of returning to Neuvy and her aunt. All her suitors free of duty at Court had come to the Hôtel Moûtier for her last evening in Blois, together with a good number of the friends of her host and hostess. Among them was Phelim O’LiamRoe, proving himself capable of a questionable branle and endless good-natured obstinacy.
By midnight the dancing was over, the wine had been drunk and the guests had departed. All except O’LiamRoe. Before the hissing, murmuring fire where Hélie sat, mouth open, hands clasped on unlaced doublet, fast asleep beside his young wife, O’LiamRoe stretched his mud-splashed shanks beside the brocade table and raised an eyebrow at Oonagh O’Dwyer, her black hair tumbled by the dance, who sat dreaming in a high chair. The firelight winked on the silver on the cloth at his elbow and touched on gilding and well-kept wooden panels, waxed against heat and smoke, and slid over the carving of the high chimney cope. Hélie Moûtier, even half-undressed looked what he was, a prosperous mercer; and Anne, now frankly asleep at his side, had her sleeves set with pearls.
O’LiamRoe turned. Oonagh, her head laid back in the deep velvet, was handsomely gowned too, but she wore it all like sea riches, prodigally and carelessly, leaving the rack to bring her fresh gifts tomorrow. The fire, merciless in its glare, printed two sleepless arcs in a face otherwise vacant of moulding. It was the first time since the Croix d’Or that he had ever had her undivided attention; and he spoke quietly, not to waken her cousins. ‘ ’Twas a queer thing, now, to come to France to pick a husband; and all the splendid Saxons and the susceptible Celts and the endless mixtures of the one and the other ye might come across in Ireland?’
In the revealing firelight a small muscle moved; but neither irritation nor animation showed in her voice, and she did not stir when she answered. ‘It is a better thing, surely, than sitting in a mud hut with salt herring and garlic and kale boiled in a soup bowl between your two knees? Why else are you here?’
‘My grief, for the change of company, surely,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘Ever since our great lord Henry the Eighth of England and Ireland went to his account, it has been a thought crowded in the green fields, with the secret French emissaries, and the secret Scots emissaries and the secret Papal envoys, all anxious to lead the old country into the rare pathways of independence and light.’
Her head turned. ‘You have no truck, yourself, with independence?’
‘My own self?’ said O’LiamRoe, shocked. ‘No, no. Politics are for the politicals, and the sons of Liam are content with a castle and a spread of heather and the chance of a good talk over a dried cod in the Slieve Bloom—leavened, you understand, with the occasional gadding