Queens'' Play by Dorothy Dunnett
Piedar Dooly had been looking for him. As he entered the comfortable, manured warmth of the stables the Firbolg sank one wiry hand into his shrunk satin and, hoarsely whispering, tugged him aside. O’LiamRoe, intent on leaving Brice Harisson’s premises before Harisson himself entered the yard, cut him short in terse Gaelic.
Then he saw where Piedar Dooly’s free hand had pointed, and the meaning of it reached his brain. There were four animals in that stable: his own, a mule, a fine mare in Harisson’s colours, and a hack, whose mended harness and saddle, accoutred for campaigning, were as familiar to him as his own. He had ridden behind it from Dieppe to Blois, had stared at it, sliding next to his own on shipboard, down the Seine and the Loire, had watched it at the ill-fated cheetah hunt and had accompanied it to Aubigny and back. It was Robin Stewart’s.
O’LiamRoe, who seldom disliked anyone who could supply him with amusement, had found it unusually hard, even before the day of Luadhas, to tolerate the Archer’s uneasy ways. Unsettled at present himself, he would have abandoned the ménage with some firmness had several thoughts not come into his head.
First, the sheer unpleasantness of the scene in the house had recalled that other scene over two months before in his ollave’s reeking bedchamber at Blois. He had told Oonagh O’Dwyer that authority made monsters of mankind; but he had seen what authority abandoned could do.
Robin Stewart had been sent to Ireland with George Paris to bring Cormac O’Connor to France. Instead, he was here in London with one of Somerset’s men, who was at great pains to conceal it. England and France were not now at war; but they were hardly close friends; and certainly not close enough to account for an Archer of the Guard in intimate talk with a Government official, albeit one at present slightly outmoded. Harisson, of course, was Scottish like Stewart; and he was, O’LiamRoe remembered, certainly one of Stewart’s old friends. But then, what part in all this did O’Connor play, whom Stewart had been directed to fetch?
It was this last irresistible question, in the end, that led Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow, never a man to hoard dignity and always trusting to a bright tongue to make his queerer paths smooth for him, to ride noisily out of the yard, followed by Piedar Dooly and the sharp eye of the steward, and, dismounting down the street, to leave the horses with his follower while he slipped over two walls and down an alley, soothed an inquisitive dog and dodged at last into the garden behind Brice Harisson’s stylish Strand house.
There, by a process of elimination, he located the study window. It was open, and there was a porch roof just below it. In the purple gloom presaging a brisk March downpour The O’LiamRoe seized a barrel and, tearing his stockings, ripping his breeches and sticking an elbow clean through the skin-tight silk of his sleeve, hitched himself up and made ready to listen.
They were speaking in Gaelic. Stewart, nearest the study window, was not sure of his; more than once he stumbled, filling in with French or with English. Harisson’s was impeccable. O’LiamRoe could hear him lightly questioning, commenting, occasionally dissenting. His manner, in staggering contrast to his reception of the Prince himself, was quiet, intimate and understanding; and in the very aptness of its handling of all Robin Stewart’s quirks argued a very long friendship indeed. He said now, his singing Gaelic nostalgic to O’LiamRoe’s listening ears, ‘All the same, Robin, why the boat? The Thames itself is a public place to speak with a man like Warwick. It was sure that he would refuse to hear you.’
Stewart swore. ‘Did I not try every other way? The messages never reached him. I knew he was sailing to Greenwich that day. The rest was easy.’
Harisson’s voice was still agreeable. ‘Were you plain with him?’
‘I said I had news for him that would do great good to England, and that because it was secret, I wished that he would speak to me alone.’
‘And—?’
‘He said he did not mean to discuss anything forced upon him by intrusion. I was to think myself lucky not to be put in the river and carried to Newgate; and if I had had anything to say, I would need have written him in the proper way. But he was interested.’
‘He does not sound interested.’
Stewart’s aggressive voice was smooth with complacency. ‘He was, then. I lifted the edge of my cloak and showed him the Archer’s insignia.’
For the first time, Harisson’s voice sharpened. ‘Who else saw this?’
‘Not anyone. Good God, is it foolish I am? The boat was full of servants and officials—not anyone who knew me at all. Then they waved to a ferryboat and threw me off. But the next letter I will write, by God, he will read.’ His voice, in his excitement, had risen. ‘Now is the time. I know it. A fresh message, Brice. We shall ask him to speak to us. And if he will not do that, we shall suggest place and time for a meeting with any man he may appoint. He cannot refuse. And once he knows what we offer, our fortune is made. That brat Mary married to France would mean a French menace at the Scottish Border for all time; whereas if she were dead Arran would likely rule Scotland, and Arran favours the English and could be got for a groat. Warwick might even get them persuaded to let Lennox rule—he’s got a good enough claim.
‘As it is—’ Stewart’s voice, hoarse with enthusiasm, pounded on. ‘As it is, Mary’s a downright threat to the English throne. If the Catholics came back into power, France might well incite them to push her claims here to the crown. She’s the granddaughter of Henry VIII’s sister. Considering the mess he made of his marriages, you could say her claim was as strong nearly as his daughter Mary’s.’
‘Or that of the Earl and Countess of Lennox?’ Brice Harisson mused. ‘I was thinking you had taken your offer first there.’
‘Well, then,’ said Stewart. There was a long pause, during which the Prince of Barrow had time to think that the tiles below him would begin to drum under the lashing of his heart. Then Stewart said, with uneasy brusqueness, ‘I said something once, as I remember. But I don’t have a kindness for the family, and that’s the truth.’
‘Oh, I agree.’ And, his voice amiable and unchanged, Brice Harisson used an expression about the Lennoxes which O’LiamRoe had heard in the gutters of Dublin. Then without pausing he said, ‘Then we shall write to Warwick; that I agree, too. Give him time to consider, and a place to meet. A bookseller’s is always useful. There are too many ears at an inn.… Would you think of letting me go? I have, to my cost, a long experience of this Court, and I think they would give me a good hearing. No one would question your standing, but your name, naturally, is not so readily known.’
‘I was going to say the same,’ said Robin Stewart; and in his capitulation O’LiamRoe read relief disguised as intelligent realism. Then they fell to discussing time and place for the suggested meeting and, this done, began the preliminaries of parting.
It was then, when O’LiamRoe was preparing to leave, that his own name was spoken. Harisson was answering a question. ‘They went off—I told you. And he won’t be in it again. I made sure of that too. He couldn’t be knowing you were here. It was purest chance; my fool of a brother had sent him.’
Stewart’s voice, thin with worry, said, ‘I can’t understand it. I left him in Ireland.’
‘My dear Robin,’ said Harisson dryly, ‘he wouldn’t be the first man to wish to change masters. If the man you called Thady Boy Ballagh were alive and in London, you would have had reason to worry.’
‘Well, he isn’t,’ said Stewart quickly in English; and his roughened voice, like succeeding strokes of a bell feared and half-heard on the wind, beat its intimation into O’LiamRoe’s senses. ‘How often do I have to say it? I put enough nightshade into him the evening I left to kill him outright. Folk like that, I hate them.… They go through life sure of everything, meddling with people. Why don’t they leave them alone? No one asked him to interfere. He had land, and plenty of money—everything easy from the day he was born into a dry silk towel by the fire. Why did he want to come meddling with me?’
‘So you said. You would t
The interview was ending. O’LiamRoe slid off his roof and escaped to where Dooly awaited him in the street, his body chilled, his stomach tight with the recollection of a sick man hurled to the ground under bucket after thrown bucket of water, of his dilated eyes and the free sound of his laughter.
It was a long ride back to Hackney, and The O’LiamRoe did not make it at once. He chose to go to an inn, a good long way from the Strand; and in the solitude of its common room in midmorning, with the rain beating on the oiled linen, did some elliptical thinking which came closer and closer, as the consoling tankards went down, to the vulnerable point he knew in his heart he would reach.
There, at last, he found his inexorable decision staring him in the face. His blue eyes vacant with solitary communion and drink, The O’LiamRoe mutinously recalled why he had gone back to Harisson’s house in the first place. ‘By Bridget, and the Dagda, and Cliona of the Wave, and by Finvaragh whose home is under Cruachma, and Aoibheal and Red Aodh and Dana the Moth—Cormac O’Connor, you have a power to answer for!’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe. And getting up, he found Piedar Dooly and in two hours’ hard work made all the necessary arrangements for his Firbolg follower to take ship to France, there to inform the Scottish Queen Dowager that Robin Stewart, the Archer, the likely author of all the attempts on her daughter and the murderer of Francis Crawford as well, was now in London seeking English help for a further attempt.
He sold Piedar Dooly’s horse and his own to raise ready money for the trip and saw him off by post-horse on his way to Portsmouth before setting off himself on the long, wet walk back to Hackney. Lady Lennox met him as he came in and commented, with her double-edged humour, on his state. He made some excuse. He had money enough in his room to buy a new horse; and he was not conspirator enough to be sure of smoothing his face at the moment before either of the Lennoxes, so disparagingly discussed by Robin Stewart and his friend.
Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, tall, splendid and tawny niece of King Henry, who had been a conspirator all her life, looked after the muddy, horseless figure, unattended by lackey, and changing her direction, moved into her boudoir. There, she summoned Graham Douglas, who had been with her from birth, who would spy for her and had killed for her, and told him pleasantly to follow every movement of O’LiamRoe’s.
Three weeks later, the Prince of Barrow, leaving a tedious Court function at Whitehall, rode through the red brick gate, past the tilting yard, round by the Cross at Charing and into the noble precincts of Durham House, the official residence of Raoul de Chémault, French Ambassador to the Court of King Edward, where he had himself announced.
Considering that he had been nearly flung out of France in the first place, and that he had since exchanged French hospitality for English with quite unseemly speed, it required a good deal of moral courage to accomplish this.
At the back of his mind was the plain hope that the Ambassador would refuse to see him. In this he was cheated. M. de Chémault, a thick, olive-skinned Latin from southern France with black hair and short legs, was nervously incapable of selection and saw everybody, even at night. O’LiamRoe was shown into a stolid English room entirely furnished from France, like a leather trunk full of butterflies. And like a harassed caterpillar who could not achieve his metamorphosis, the Ambassador held out a short, inelegant arm, and seated him. Then he talked about the weather.
It was O’LiamRoe, who could tell more stories about the weather than anyone south of Antrim, who cut him short in the end. ‘The business I have is a queer one for an Irishman,’ said he. ‘But live comfortably with myself I could not, until I had told one of you. There is a man I met in France, a Scottish Archer called Stewart, who is now in England offering to do away with the young Scottish Queen when he gets back—and it would not be his first effort at that. And the Earl of Warwick himself, the clever fellow, is near accepting it.’
The Prince of Barrow, who had a low opinion of any kind of officialdom, had been ready for disbelief, or a cursory politeness which would have shown him the door. But Raoul de Chémault owed his finicky alertness to a lifetime of commissions, agencies and embassies over Europe, and knew better than to discount information from however unexpected a source. The doors were closed on himself, O’LiamRoe and the Ambassador’s secretary, and O’LiamRoe described, with wonderful brevity, the meeting he had overheard between Stewart and Brice Harisson, the letter Harisson had proposed writing to Warwick, and the meeting which had come of it. At that meeting, held at the Red Lion in St. Paul’s Churchyard the previous day, Warwick’s appointed agent had met Harisson, who had put the Archer’s proposal. And Warwick’s agent, so far from being indifferent, had brought Warwick’s command that both Stewart and Brice Harisson should come before him to discuss the plan further.
To overhear that had taxed all O’LiamRoe’s inventiveness. The wry pleasure he took from his success was mixed still with a fearful irritation: from time to time his clean, pink fingers wandered to his face. The fine baby skin of chin and upper lip was naked. Had Brice Harisson, idling in a book-filled corner of the Red Lion, met O’LiamRoe face to face, he would hardly have recognized him; for all the waving golden whiskers had gone. To that, and his long robes and the black, ear-covering hat of the professor, borrowed blithely from the physician at Hackney, O’LiamRoe owed his triumph.
He had heard Brice Harisson meet Warwick’s man, and had heard all that mattered of what they said. He had then watched them severally leave, and had left himself, only to be retrieved by a breathless shopkeeper laying claim to the new book absently tucked under his arm.
All this the French Ambassador heard. At the end, in his good English with an unexpected aptness of thought, he thanked O’LiamRoe, and complimented him. ‘All this will be made known to the King my lord, who will express his thanks better than I.’ He hesitated. A flicker of a glance passed between de Chémault and his secretary; then the Ambassador said, ‘You may guess our interest, monseigneur, when I tell you that M. Brice Harisson has already honoured us with a visit.’
The sandy brows floated. ‘Brice Harisson’s been here?’
‘Yes. Seeking my aid, and my interest with the Queen Dowager of Scotland to enable him to escape from his English employment and return to some well-pensioned office in Scotland or France. I assumed from what he did not say that he guessed Somerset’s day was reaching an end. In return,’ said de Chémault, watching his secretary marshal the stack of papers on which O’LiamRoe’s words had been taken down, ‘he has offered to sell me an unspecified political secret of some value.’
‘In other words,’ said O’LiamRoe, a rare disgust in his voice, ‘Harisson is planning to betray Robin Stewart to the French?’
‘From what you say, it seems likely. I have told him to give me time to make enquiries, and return. Now that I know what is behind his offer, I shall make it as simple for him as I can; thus the affair will solve itself. As soon as Harisson gives us positive proof of what this man Stewart has done, the Archer can be arrested.’ He rose. ‘You are to be in England, monseigneur, for some little time?’
He was due the courtesy of a fair answer, at least. O’LiamRoe mentioned that he was the guest of the Earl and Countess of Lennox, and would remain there at least until the affair was cleared up. If his evidence was required, M. de Chémault had only to call.
M. de Chémault made no comment. At the door he took a serious farewell, and laying one broad, brown hand on the Irishman’s sleeve said, ‘You know your own business best. But should you wish to go back to France, there would be many who would welcome you for your own sake only. And whatever your conclusions or your policies, the friendship of the French Court can be assured.’
‘Ah, no,’ said Phelim O’LiamRoe, smiling. ‘I was never easy with ghosts; and France there is bursting full of them. I shall never go back—God save us, no.… I might meet the shade of Phelim O’Li
That afternoon, Piedar Dooly came back. He had delivered his master’s message with some trouble to the Scottish Queen Dowager, and had been provided with more than enough money to cover the double journey, and an obscurely worded message of thanks.
He also had news. Stewart’s attempt on Thady Boy Ballagh’s life had not been successful … but a later accident had. From Piedar Dooly, in Gaelic with spectrum-like detail, The O’LiamRoe heard the story of the Tour des Minimes at Amboise, of Lord Culter’s investigation and of the burning of the Hôtel Moûtier with Ballagh inside.
That night the Lennoxes, chaffing lightly through the supper courses from their heavy, crested gold plate, found him erratic and even unresponsive to their quips. Margaret, her dark eyebrows raised, more than once caught her husband’s eye over the sensationally cropped silky head, and afterwards redoubled her solicitous concern for her guest, expressed in the cool voice with which Margaret Douglas’s sentiments were most often presented, ice-fresh and bloody, like newly caught fish. She made little headway. O’LiamRoe, clearly, had other things on his mind.
Robin Stewart, who dared not be seen by any man, Scot, Frenchman or Londoner, was hiding in the brickfields at Islington, and making the rarest visits to the Strand. He did not know that on the morning before the momentous interview with Lord Warwick, his faithful friend Brice rode round the corner to Durham House and, passing through courtyards hazy with young green, was closeted ten minutes later with the French Ambassador and addressing him in fluent French. ‘M. de Chémault, I hope you have news for me. I come to tell you that tomorrow I shall be able to give you information of some considerable value.’
This time there were three of them in the room: de Chémault himself, seated at his fine desk, an undersecretary, and someone’s herald, deep in conversation with them both. They were all speaking French. Harisson meticulously did the same.