The Game of Kings (19 page)

For a moment, the two men breathed the same sweating air. Hunter saw a pitiless mouth, two intent eyes behind a black mask, and a head covered with some sort of woollen cap. The mouth twisted; so did the deadly trained body, and pain leapt from a lock on his knee. Black-mask gave a sudden, triumphant laugh. “The Common Thick-knee,” he said breathlessly, “is a bird … capable of running at great speed.” He increased his leverage, grinning. “Now here, Dandy mine, we have a specimen of the Uncommon—”

How he broke the lock, Hunter never knew, but he afterward wondered if the strength which surged up in him would have done so
but for anger at the stupid jibe. He jerked, broke the hold on his legs and threw the other man half on his side, driving off at the same time the predatory fingers feeling for his throat. Then he flung himself on his opponent. The clenched figures rolled over completely, then again; a fine stool splintered, its prowling leopards bifurcated, and a row of medicine bottles fell from the bedside table with a tympanitic crash. Catherine Hunter, her eyes like charcoal above her bound mouth, stared without expression at her son. Crouch, pink with emotion, watched, squirming in his bonds.

Hunter was on top. He wanted to shout, but all the power of his lungs was occupied in driving his body: the sound of both men’s breathing was like tearing cloth. Feeling the black eyes on him, Hunter set his teeth and grinned; then, listening to his muscles speaking, exerted all his force to flatten the other’s body and approach the twisting throat with his thumbs. The masked figure writhed desperately; its arms threshed; it began to go limp. Sir Andrew, his fingers finding and burying themselves at last in the flesh over the great vessels, threw caution to the winds and, raising himself, exerted all his power in pressing on the neck below him. He had an instant’s vision of eyes screwed, not in pain, but a kind of barbarous hilarity, and then booted feet curled themselves neatly and smashed into his unguarded and exposed groin; one of the searching hands, now armed with iron from the hearth, cracked open his face and beat him back as he knelt, retching; then Black-mask, rising, threw away his andiron and bent over him.

Hunter, racked with the torments of the damned, heard him say through the throbbing in his brain, “Come along, Dandy … observe the modus operandi … How can thou float … without feather or fin.” He was gripped by wanton arms, balanced a moment, helplessly convulsed, and then with a sickening wrench sent hurtling across the room. Chairs, candlesticks, books, fell. The world vanished in a bloody mist, reappeared inspissate with pain, disappeared. Playful, inhuman fingers rested on his collar, hooked below it, and methodically began to flay his head against the high gloss of the tiles.

The voice said, erratically, “Who … falls upon rushes, falls soft; beware of … vain pride in terrestrial treasure, Sir Andrew. And … doused lights … and fireirons … and wrestling in slippers.” He was released, and lay, three parts unconscious, looking up at his tormentor.

“And of tempting me further,” said Black-mask, smiling. “I have come to see your little English friend, Sir Andrew; but I’ll break you a limb in the Turkish style as often as you like.…”

Hunter, drowning in tides of nausea, closed his eyes, and shut out the mask, and the black, unwinking eyes in the bed.

T
HE shop of Patey Liddell, goldsmith, was on the south side of the Middle Raw in Stirling, handy for the Burgh Yett, and only a short walk from St. John Street. It was a tall thin building, with a coloured timber arcade, and outside steps to the first floor where Patey stored his stock, and Lady Culter was sitting having her miniature painted.

From time to time Patey peered down, Cyclops-fashion, to the shop proper through a neat hole in the floor boards, partly to watch for customers, and partly to howl threats at his apprentices, known caustically as the Seven Little Masters, who dwelt among mystic coloured fires at the back of the shop.

Mr. Liddell was lively as a frog, his small face niellated with gold dust, and his white hair trained over his ears, which were missing. Patey readily explained how this happened, and the numerous versions, in toto, lent substance to Sybilla’s private belief that the man
was a rogue. He was also a brilliant goldsmith; and the source to Lady Culter of much simple entertainment.

Why she had made this appointment for today, the morning of the Wapenshaw, was beyond her to recall. Why indeed the plans for the Wapenshaw had been allowed to stand so soon after Pinkie was another matter, but the Dowager could guess. She thought, with unusual depression, that it was probably just as well, under the circumstances, to have a count of arms: that had begun in the morning and would be over by now. And if the Queen thought that outdoor exercise would keep the lieges from one another’s throats until the meeting was safely convened, she was probably, in a French way, right. This brought her mind on to her son.

“Patey!” said the Dowager at the top of her voice. “It isn’t a tapestry! Haven’t you done yet?”

Patey Liddell raised a denunciatory finger. “You moved!”

“I can’t help moving,” said Sybilla, in a nicely controlled shriek. “Your wretched cushion’s come adrift from the stool: it’s like trying to steer hurley-hackit. Are you going to be long?”

The old man beamed, nodding vaguely. “A wee thing to the right.”

Lady Culter turned obediently. “Are-you-going-to-be-much-longer?”

Patey worked away, his tongue silently tracking the strokes of his brush. “As to that,” he said piously, “the gude Lord alone kens. You’ve changed your hair, tae.”

“I’ve washed it,” said Lady Culter tartly. “If you think I’m going to remain unchanged and unwashed for sixteen months while you immortalize me, you’re wrong. If you could pin up the sun permanently in the top left corner of your ceiling, you would.”

“Ah, the bonny lad,” said Patey, working phonetically through the last sentence. “Only the other day I said to him, says I: wi’ the separations o’ war, says I, whitna better than a bonny picter o’ the wee lassie tae carry neist the heart.”

“What did he say?” shouted Sybilla with interest.

“He said,” said Patey, a shade reluctantly, “that he’d think about it when he kent whit I was charging for this yin. Acourse, I told him, it’s all in the frame. Says I, gin ye choose gold now, that’d be a wee thing costlier than your dear mother’s: on the other hand, tin’s dirt cheap, and if the lassie puts up wi’ the insult, who’m I tae—” He raised an astonished eye from the floor. “’S breid! There’s a customer!”
And before Sybilla could murmur, he skipped to the stairs and vanished.

The Dowager instantly got off her seat and picked up the miniature. The likeness was, she thought, fairly good. Appraising her face at one remove, she was glad to find that sixty harassing years had left it, on the whole, quite presentable. The eyes and bones, of course, had always been good.

“But I must have it today!” A familiar voice, laboriously distinct, rose through the peephole, and the Dowager, entranced, prepared to listen.

Patey’s voice said, “Well, it’s no done yet, Sir Andra.”

“Then when will it be ready?” Hunter sounded impatient, and Sybilla sympathized. There was another exchange, then silence as Patey disappeared to the back of the shop. Then a new voice:

“Hullo, Sir Andrew! Man, what’s happened to your face?”

The Dowager had no special interest in Sir George Douglas, but her wandering attention was jerked by Sir Andrew’s reply.

“My face?” said Sir Andrew, and laughed ruefully. “God; like the beggar, I’m all face. It was that damned Crouch man, the prisoner of war.”

“Good Lord!” Sir George sounded startled. “I must say, he’d none of the air of a man-eater.”

“Dammit, it wasn’t Crouch that did the damage,” said Hunter. “It was some murderous brute with a black mask who smashed the house open, tied up Mother like a boiling fowl and thumped me—I must confess—to a pulp. It wasn’t too funny at the time.”

“No, of course not.… What about Crouch?”

“Departed, protesting, with the rescuer. God knows what the man wanted; my impression is he hardly knew himself. All I got out of it were a couple of English names they bandied about; if I had any contacts over the Border I’d follow them up for the devil of it, to see if I couldn’t track down my agile friend. I don’t suppose they mean anything at all to you? Gideon Somerville and Samuel Harvey?”

Sir George admitted they didn’t, and his commiserations were halted by the arrival of Patey, grousing, with Sir Andrew’s finished brooch. Sybilla had seen it being altered. She admired it again, listening still; but the conversation had drifted to less interesting channels.

“… And what duplicity!” said the Dowager much later, describing all this over pheasant at Bogle House to Christian Stewart and her
son Richard. “After telling the rest of us the bruises came from a fall from his horse. But of course Dandy is shrinkingly sensitive about money; heaven knows how he manages to shower his mother with diamonds. It must have been someone he was hoping to ransom, poor man.”

“No,” said Richard. “He was going to exchange him for a cousin of his own held prisoner in England.”

The Dowager eyed her son with such gentle surprise that he explained. “Overheard him discuss it at Drumlanrig. He bought the fellow from George Douglas there.”

“Well, I never heard that he had a cousin in England,” said Sybilla; “and even if he has, I don’t see why poor Dandy should have to redeem him. What that man wants is to marry an heiress, although heaven knows I shouldn’t ask Medusa to share her castle with Catherine.”

Richard, she thought, was looking tired. The weeks she and Mariotta had passed at Menteith had been spent by him in harassing activity. He had visited them once at Inchtalla: that apart, it occurred to the Dowager, he had hardly spent a complete day in his wife’s company since the battle.

She had been extremely cross to find him at Bogle House when she arrived there, late, from Patey’s; to learn that he had been released from those activities she had circuitously arranged for him at the castle, and that Tom Erskine, arriving in his absence, had taken Mariotta and Agnes to the games, leaving (perforce) Christian, who insisted on waiting for herself.

She was considering the next move when fate forestalled her: a roaring separated itself from the excitements of the street, wound up the stairs in increasing volume, and debouched into the room at the tail of a disorganized servant.

“Hey!” said Buccleuch, hauling off his hat and nodding perfunctorily at the ladies. “I’ve been looking everywhere for you! You’ve missed the best of the wrestling!”

“Sir Wat!” said Lady Culter.

“And the jumping’s over!” said Buccleuch, unheeding. “And the running! Where’ve you been? There’s only tilting at the glove, and the ring, and then the Papingo. The butt shooting’s nearly finished, too, and these damned Kerrs are having it too much their own way.” He made for the door. “Come on. Where’s your bonnet?”

“In his room,” said Sybilla, outstaring her son’s sharp glance. “And there it stays. Wat Scott, I knew you had no manners out of your first two wives, but I thought Janet Beaton had taught you how to address a lady.”

“But I’m not here to address a lady,” Buccleuch pointed out unwisely. “I want Richard to—”

“But since you’ve called, and I’m hostess, I’m afraid you can’t avoid it,” explained Sybilla. She agitated her hand bell. “Malmsey or Canary?”

Buccleuch cast an agonized glance at Richard, got no help and tried Sybilla again. “We’re going to miss the Popinjay,” he pleaded.

“I’m not!” remarked the Dowager. “I never liked birds, and still less when they talk—Canary, please, John.”

It all but succeeded; by the third cup Sir Wat was well launched on a detailed theory about hard snaffles and would have been there yet had not Hunter’s face appeared around the door, anxiously addressing Buccleuch and Lord Culter, after a quick bow to the ladies.

“I’ve to bring you both quickly. They’re getting to the Popinjay.”

The look which passed between Sir Andrew and Buccleuch was the briefest possible, but Sir Wat jumped guiltily to his feet, his eye wandering agitatedly toward Lady Culter.

Sybilla sighed. “Don’t say a word. I can guess. The news of Lymond’s challenge is being shrieked from the chimney tops.”

Sir Andrew had the grace to look uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Lady Culter. But the crowd have got to know that your sons are to compete—”

“Stuff and nonsense,” said the Dowager irritably. “How can they, with one of them at the horn?”

“They know that,” said Christian from the fireplace. “It’s not a shooting match they’re expecting. It’s an assassination.”

“It’s no use, my dear,” said Sybilla. “We are face to face, like poor Janet Beaton, with a severe case of Moral Philosophy, and there is nothing we can do about it.”

Lord Culter crossed to the settle and bending down, kissed his mother on the hand and on the cheek. “It’ll be over in an hour,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll come back, if only to teach you the proper meaning of Moral Philosophy.”

The door closed behind them all.

*  *  *

“Well, I must say,” said Lady Herries definitely, and loudly enough to turn several interested heads, “if I were married to Lady Culter, I shouldn’t let her spend the whole afternoon at the games alone.”

“Thank you very much,” said Tom Erskine, grinning at Mariotta, who sat on his other side.

She smiled politely back, and Mr. Erskine’s soul moaned within him. Reduced, singlehanded, to coping with so much potential gunpowder, he felt himself, like the bird which cleans crocodiles’ teeth, assailed by hideous doubts.

Privately, he agreed with the brat. He couldn’t blame the Dowager for taking her own measures to keep Richard away, but then, she didn’t know how public the thing had become. Neither did the two girls beside him; and the Herries child, ignorant of the challenge as well, insisted on fretting at the subject like a bitch at the spit. Exiled from his own group of friends by his female company and unwilling, in any case, to listen to his neighbours sharpening their wits at Richard’s expense, he wished heartily he were elsewhere. A Lindsay won the butt shooting and his annoyance increased.