Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [90]
Robin Stewart, returning unsuspecting from an errand for Lord d’Aubigny, was caught in the updraught and swirled to the top of the hill before he could stop himself, there crashing into the soft black spread of Master Ballagh. He found his arms gripped. ‘What Moses, I pray, called you? What God’s minister bade you rise?’ Thady Boy had spent some time in the inn. ‘I thought you were on guard.’
‘I am. I’m on my way back. What’s this rubbish they’re telling me? You’re never going to run that damned steeplechase in that state?’
The dark, sweaty face was reproachful. ‘What state?’
‘And at night. You’ll kill yourself. My God, don’t you know how the King loves St. André? If he falls and it was all your fault …’
‘If he fallsh—falls,’ said Thady, releasing him, ‘there’s a lady every five paces to catch him.’
‘Well, you don’t want to be killed. You’re coming with me,’ said Robin Stewart, and took firm hold of the ollave in his turn.
There was a wrench and a twist, and an empty doublet sagged from his hand. From the vine-covered walls of the inn Thady laughed, swung, and climbed until his untended, tousled head appeared black against the broad moon-washed sky. He called to Stewart. ‘Come up. I need a partner up here.’
‘Don’t be a fool. Come back.’
‘Afraid?’
The Archer tightened his thin lips. ‘Come down, you fool. Let the others be killed if they want to. It’s not your damned country.’
‘Or yours. Show them what your country is like. Come on up.’
A crude catcall from below reached them both. Stewart began to say, his upturned eyes white in their horny sockets, ‘It takes a lot more courage not to do a crazy thing than it does to fall in with the—’
Crisp, pod-shaped and fiend-inspired on the ceiling of Blois, Lymond kicked off his shoes in two shining arcs into the packed causeway far below. Then he knelt, hand outstretched. ‘Friend Robin.… Come running with me.’
He went.
It was a night Robin Stewart would recall all his life. It was a night memorable too for the Prince of Barrow, striding home with Piedar Dooly at his back, struggling with a new emotion and an untoward rebellion of the mind, and unmindful of the shadows shifting unseen in corners. Memorable for Jenny Fleming, in her pretty room at the castle, where she was not lying alone. And memorable, at last, for Oonagh O’Dwyer, sitting alone and unseeing for half that long night in the Hôtel Moûtier before a dead fire.
V
Blois: Wickedness Is the Rule
The King is exempt from liability for accidents caused by a chasm that he may have in his green. If the chasm be one that could have been made safe by levelling or filling, up, but was not, wickedness is the rule respecting it.
FEW of those running ever finished the course. But ten pairs started, moonlit and insubstantial as fawns on the slanting roof of the Inn of St. Louis, in their white shirts and long hose and brief, elegant trunks. Below, the narrow streets were knee-deep in discarded velvets, and the gutters sparkled with shoes. Then St. André leaned over and shouted for torches.
Like fireflies they sprang into the air, the red sparks jerking and darting below; and the young men on the roof caught them, cursing and laughing, and sprang erect, each pair with a cresset held high.
Thady Boy caught his last. Within the sluttish casing, the indulgently fat body, Robin Stewart recognized the white blaze of vitality which had struck at his manhood at Rouen, at St. Germain, at Blois. It drove him to make one final attempt. Stone sober—alone of the twenty—he stretched out an arresting hand. At the touch, Thady wheeled, read his face,