Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett Read Free Book Online

with a connoisseur’s eye. Thady Boy, liverish and morose, stared, unloosing his dark, stubbled jaw. Nor did O’LiamRoe acquire any pretensions to grace, but he rose, and his long-lashed blue eyes were wider and steadier than before.
    ‘Ah, the devil, bad end to the girl!’ screeched Mistress Boyle, spinning round, and ropes swinging, skirts swaying, she pounced on the newcomer, her face hot with delight. ‘Pay no heed to them, Oonagh. It’s a party of Irish come to Court; the very same kind of silly fowl you left in Donegal. You’re not to look twice at them. Gentlemen, my niece Oonagh O’Dwyer, over from Ireland to stay with her old aunt awhile and pick the flower of the French Court for a husband if I have my way. Oonagh, my child, The O’LiamRoe, Chief of the Name—ah, don’t curtsey too close, you’ll step on his whiskers … and Mr. Ballagh, his secretary. You should hear him. He can rhyme rats to death like Senchan Torpest himself.’
    With a soft flush of blue wool, the girl sat, her calm gaze on the Irishmen, and said in Gaelic, speaking impartially between them: ‘They have been sparse in the woods, the ollaves, for this time past. Is the season on us again?’
    With the change of language, the warmer impulses of chatter were halted. In a little silence, Master Ballagh coughed, and as O’LiamRoe glanced at him he plumped down, settling his shiny trunk hose in his chair, and said politely in English, ‘The ratio, now I think of it, is one ollave per inhabited and manured quarter of ground. Do you miss them, it may be that the other conditions are lacking.’
    The young woman’s light eyes turned to O’LiamRoe. ‘The Prince of Barrow, as I heard it, had a bard called Patrick O’Hooley.’
    ‘You heard right,’ said O’LiamRoe composedly. ‘ ’Tis like the
Birach-derc
, now. Put Patrick O’Hooley on a boat and show him the blessed Saint Peter himself, and it would stretch four stout men with hooks to lift the lid of his eye.’
    She was contemptuous. ‘He gets seasick.’
    ‘He does, too, and him a bard only, without lawful learning but his own intellect; whereas Master Ballagh here is a comely professor of the canon, a stream of pleasing praise issuing from him, and a stream of wealth to him. But would you grudge it, and the epigrams pouring off him like a man straight from the Inishmurray sweating-house?’
    The talk was straying in these dangerous shoals when Robin Stewart came to the door, seeking permission to borrow or buy replacements for O’LiamRoe’s saddlery. On top of sheer old age and neglect, the salt air of the journey had completed its ruin; and in its present state no one at all could travel to Rouen.
    Thankfully, Lord d’Aubigny left, taking O’LiamRoe with him, and the Irish accents rolled back along the passage, giving an untrammeled account of some fantasy-life of his horse harness. Mistress Boyle pulled in Robin Stewart and shut the door. ‘Come in, for the sake of God, and the two of you tell me something of that champion of the Slieve Bloom, that would fetch his price cut into two hairy hearthrugs and cured. I heard tell he was queer, but not as terrible queer as all that.’
    She had poured them wine, and Thady Boy, working diligently, was almost restored to his normal condition. He relaxed. ‘You’ve seen him. What else is there? It was O’LiamRoe’s misfortune to be born a prince with a smart lot of followers instead of a little, mad-like professor with a wife and a pension and a shining day-long circle of pupil-philosophers; not a one over twelve. I met him at his castle, a great slab of wet rock with rats in it. He will talk you dry on any subject you wish; it’s all in his head. And, of course, he is the unhandiest thing in life. Not one finger of him is on speaking terms with the next.’
    Stewart grinned. Thady Boy raised his wine in faltering salute to the girl, whose gaze had not moved from his face, and slammed it back on the chair arm as Mistress