Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [93]
Years of summer expeditions, of interminable chases, of public tournaments and duty matches with bow and stave had made the Archer physically as adept as his shambling frame and harried spirit would allow. With thought bludgeoned from his brain he concentrated on crossing to the balcony, foot here and here and here as Thady had done; and did the extra thing that last week, last month, last year he would never have dreamed of: he clung sweating to the wood and jerked the knife out, taking it with him in his last spring.
He arrived. The balcony windows were open, the shutters gaped and inside, very close, a woman’s voice said ‘Ah!—Ah! Assassin! Voleur!’
‘O faix, be quiet, woman dear,’ said the voice of Thady Boy Ballagh, cheerfully drunk. ‘For if you let out but one weeny screigh you’ll have eighteen of us here; and yourself with your teeth on the table and your hair on the bedpost and your sense just nowhere to be seen at all … God bless this good house and all belonging to it.’ Then, under Stewart’s horrified gaze he emerged, a halo of auburn curls straddling his black head and under his arm a prodigious roll of somebody’s tapestry.
The crowd below had reached the house now. Torches jogging they swarmed round its foot, their heads upturned to the night. With a flap and a crack the canvas flew out, to drop and fix itself on the spiked balcony. Then, as Thady held it secure, the Archer half scrambled, half slid down the soft matlike bridge to the balcony as leaping figures poured over the skyline.
D’Enghien began to descend the roof in their wake just as the Archer clenched the spiked slack in his fists and nodded. After one swift glance upwards, Thady gripped the strong cloth at either corner and dropped.
Like some forgotten flag, the tapestry with its load plunged between the two houses, stretched taut, kicked, and swung back with the strain. Above, hoarsely ripping, the fabric gave way at one spike. The others held. Jerkily, hand over hand, gripping the cloth with knees and feet, Thady began to climb up; and a moment later Stewart seized him. As d’Enghien and the Prince of Condé, dropping on to the balcony opposite, met a screeching beldame, bald as an egg, the ollave ripped the cloth free and flung it into the street. A moment later he was indoors and the window was empty but for the auburn curls of a wig, fluttering free on a spike.
The clue was easy to find. Thady Boy read it, grinned, and led the way upstairs. ‘Pierre-de-Blois next. How is Condé?’
‘Across. They’ve got some rope from his own house nearby. They ringed a spike with it and then pulled it in after them.’
‘Do you tell me,’ said Thady Boy, and under the sleek lids his blue eyes were graceless. ‘ ’Twould be an uneasy day in Heaven, now, if two mortal sinners such as that had the good of it much longer. Do you agree with me, Robin?’
Light, well-knit and agile in spite of the drink they were carrying, the Prince and his brother were capable of making expert use of their ropes; and each high-born gentleman, for his own reasons, was coolly intent on taking the lead in this race with as little obvious effort as possible.
The rope made for speed. The Rue Pierre-de-Blois was lined with a jumble of houses. Turrets and gables, flat roofs and sloping, balconies and galleries, machicolations and turrets met one another in a confusion of angles and levels sometimes easy, sometimes accessible by crawling, sometimes by leaping from chimney to chimney, and sometimes only feasible by rope.
Where the others, Thady and Stewart among them, had to make use of the bridges which now and then crossed the street, or descended a storey or more for a foothold, Condé and his brother swung across, looped to grilles, to chimneys, to butcher’s hooks straight to their object.
This time they were first at the clue. Reading it where they found it, by an inside window in the dim moonlight, they