Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [88]
Her black brows drawn in thought, she turned from him to the fire and, her grey-green eyes on the flames, considered the phenomenon. ‘You are happy under the rule of English Viceroys and the Star Chamber. It doesn’t disturb you to know that you can be sent to London and executed or imprisoned untried. The Scots occupy Ulster from the Giant’s Causeway to Belfast and James MacDonnell himself rules the Glens of Antrim beside ten thousand Hebridean Redshanks. You have no care. You are content with the garrisons and the debased coinage and the fact that no Parliament has sat in Ireland for seven years?’
There was a pause, broken by O’LiamRoe’s mild voice. ‘The last supreme King of Ireland, mo chridhe, was three and a half hundred years ago. And rig-domna I am not.’
The blood, rare under the white skin, suffused her face unexpectedly to the eyes. Hélie, sunk deeper in his chair, had begun to snore. Oonagh’s retort, across the rich table, was necessarily low. ‘You have no care for your country, none at all? I find it hard to believe.’
O’LiamRoe was gently reproving. ‘Ah, with all the great brains and fine lords fussing over it, what for should I add to the noise? Caritas generi humani I can understand; if you press me, I’ll lend it my passive support. But where would balance, where would detachment, where would proportion end up did no person stroll here and there outside the fence, and put his chin on the gate from time to time, to click his tongue?’ His tone was severe. ‘There’s no chance of inciting me, my dear. As the Pope said of Hippolito, “He’s crazy, the devil; he’s crazy. He doesn’t want to be a priest.” ’
He was unmistakably sincere. There was a blank interval, then she said accusingly, ‘Then why stay in France? It must surely be obvious—’
He broke in quickly. ‘It is obvious. But I have a plan to present you, between now and your wedding, with seven hounds with chains of silver and a golden apple between them—do I ever get them to you alive—so that when you race through the woods and fell your deer and see him undone and brittled there, you will bethink you of O’LiamRoe.’
The words were wry, but the tone, with whatever effort, was one of lightest amusement. Her mood opened to him suddenly, the white brow patterned with fine, dry lines which had not been there before, and her eyes searching his. ‘I have had dogs enough, O’LiamRoe; and lovers enough.’
‘You have no friends,’ he said, ‘man or dog. I had thought to be a small bit of both.’
‘What happened to Luadhas,’ said Oonagh, ‘is what happens to my friends. Your place—you have said it yourself—is outside the fence. Did I like you or did I love you, I would tell you the same.’
O’LiamRoe said, his voice light and his face rigid, ‘And do you like me or do you love me at all?’
Which was the moment Lymond selected to set the drums rolling. The skull-splitting crash rocketed bumping along the walled street, shaking the high houses into light. In the Hôtel Moûtier it sent Hélie tumbling, snorting to his feet; wakened his wife Anne with a gasp; and gripped Oonagh O’Dwyer like saltless frost in her chair, the moment, the mood, the answer all gone.
O’LiamRoe was the first to thrust his way to the balcony; the first to peer over the yard, where the little trees trembled black in the yellow lantern light and where the narrow causeway beyond was packed with young men, thick as seedlings, their diamonds, their boredom, their wit outrageous below upflung windows. The side drums in their midst rattled like cannonball and then stopped. There was a brief pause, a mighty inhalation; and the cog-mouthed trumpeters from the Marshal de St. André’s own suite split the night with a fanfare ripening like the Bishop of Winchester’s organ into a prodigy of praise.
Anne Moûtier saying ‘What is it?’ could hardly make herself heard; but O’LiamRoe answered directly, his voice neither mellow nor amused. ‘Several trumpets, a hautboy, a fife, a viol, two side drums, a trio of flutes, and that rare youth of two parts for whom the hazel trees stoop, Master Thady Boy