Free Queens' Play by Dorothy Dunnett

window.
    The mild, Irish voice had at last ceased, but they were still laughing, in small helpless sobs, when the man in white, flinging down hisracquet, seized his partner by the arm and strode over. The laughter stopped. O’LiamRoe, his fair brows raised, looked up at the sieur de Genstan, who from red had gone suddenly white. ‘And now,’ he said comfortably, ‘supposing after all that you get the fellow here, and we talk.’
    That they obeyed was the result of sheer self-protection. They had aligned themselves by their laughter on the wrong side of the fence. The players were clearly furious, and from a distance, M. de Genstan could be seen inventing explanations and excuses far more plausible than O’LiamRoe could have produced, if excuses had been anywhere in his remotest thoughts. He waited, rising, grinning as the black-bearded one, still flushed, left the crowd of men and approached him at last.
    ‘I’ll take that wine now, if it’s offered me,’ said O’LiamRoe cheerfully, ‘and give a word in your ear to go with it. For, God save us, you’re an insular lot, you Frenchmen; and it’s time you learned a thing or two about your more cultured neighbours such as the Irish. And translate it all, de Genstan me boy, this time; none of your three words to every three hundred,
divina proportio
and a wink and a shrug for the rest of it.’
    Crested cups were being filled. ‘His Majesty says,’ said the harassed interpreter from behind the bearded man’s chair: ‘He says that he would wish the differences between Ireland and France to be less.’
    ‘Ah, never mind the English in it,’ said O’LiamRoe. ‘We’ve had them lording it over us these three hundred years and swallowed them whole, same as you did, though the ones that came from Normandy were devils for taxes the same as yourself.’
    ‘His Majesty asks,’ said de Genstan, ‘if you are comparing his rule by any chance to that of England?’
    ‘Faith, would I do the like of that?’ said O’LiamRoe with his freckled smile. ‘And it so superior. There’s the Concordat, now. Why destroy yourself making out you’re the world’s head of the church when your Concordat lets you whistle up the abbeys and the bishops and the archbishops to your liking; all found money and a pet of a way to make friends?’
    There was a pause. ‘The King says,’ said M. de Genstan, ‘that these subjects are not a matter for discussion at this meeting, which is only meant—’
    O’LiamRoe’s smile had malice in it. ‘Not a matter for discussion! My dear boy, in Ireland the midwife uses one hand to hold the baby’s best fighting arm from the font water, and grips its jaws with the other lest the child goes to litigation about it.’ He put down the cup and rising, laid a commiserating hand on de Genstan’s shoulder. ‘Scrub off the civet and spit out the sugar plums and the next time choose an arguing, manly violent sort of king for yourselves. Sure, ifthat one’s hair were shaved off, like Bandinello’s Hercules, there’s not enough skull in it for his brains, so.’
    There was a deathly silence. The bearded man, rising also, glanced in turn at The O’LiamRoe and at the interpreter, who had gone even paler. De Genstan, appealing helplessly to the blank faces of his fellows, muttered something.
    The man in white drew a deep breath, curled his fist, and brought it down on the table with a thud that brought the cups cracking on their sides. A stream of red leaped on the velvet.
‘Traduisez!’
he exclaimed. And the young man, stumbling, began to translate.
    Listening, Blackbeard snapped his fingers. Pages ran. A surcoat was slipped on his shoulders, and fastened with gold knots. A chain was brought, and laid over his head. A pair of embroidered slippers was put on his feet in place of the plain shoes for tennis; and white leather gloves and a plumed hat were put in his hand.
    With the entwined crescents of his monogram leaping with his ill-compressed, angry