The Game of Kings (21 page)

The Dowager was enchanted. “So good of them. Have you any money, Tom dear? I seem to have spent all I had with me.”

It took their concerted efforts, hindered considerably by the leaking ox feet, to get at Tom’s pouch and extract from it the necessary number of angels. “Now,
straight
home,” said the Dowager, a suspicion of tiredness making itself heard in her voice at last; and they made for the end of the Square, arm in arm, and started down Bow Street.

Dandy Hunter met them at the bottom. They saw him from some
distance away, boring weevil-like through the thickening crowd, and waving.

“Just as well he’s as flat as a turbot,” said Tom Erskine judicially, watching him. “That’s twice he’s breenged through his betters today.”

But by that time they were close enough to see his face.

“Something’s happened,” said the Dowager in a voice notable for its unsurprised grimness, and led the way quickly toward him, clutching all her parcels as if these, at all costs, she would preserve.

*  *  *

Owing simply to Lord Culter’s presence, the October Papingo Shoot moved through its stately preliminaries to the beating of a fierce expectancy. Mortal challenge was not only piquant but eerie when the challenger was also wanted for treason.

Tension brought the automatic reaction. Ten thousand heads, capped, hooded, bonneted and bare, bobbed and jerked as the betting surged from point to point, fed by rumour: he isn’t among the competitors; they’ve got guards all around the field; Culter’s shooting twentieth.

The odds rose.

“The brother’s game-shy, man: a shirker. Never finished a contest in his life.” The odds rose higher.

Andrew Hunter, standing between Richard’s wife and Lady Herries, cursed Tom Erskine continuously under his breath. Mariotta would not go home. Staring in a hypnotized way at the side view which was all she could see of her husband, she seemed unaware, he was thankful to note, of what else was going on around her.

Agnes Herries, however, was both aware and equipped with opinions on the subject, which palled only as the drawing of lots came to an end. Listening with half an ear, Hunter noticed she was now complaining of the viewpoint she had been given. This, since he could do nothing to improve it, he ignored.

“It strikes me,” said Lady Herries, reminded suddenly of a sore subject, “that a Ward of the Crown might as well be a by-blow for all the difference it makes. A
girl
Ward, that is. Who wants to marry John Hamilton? Not me. I’ve never
seen
the man, even.”

A more unsuitable place in which to air her opinions about her
contracted fiancé could hardly be found. With the speed of a watchful mother, Sir Andrew said, “Look: there’s Buccleuch.”

He failed, as better men had done before him. “Yes. But if I’d been a boy,” pursued Lady Herries, intent on her theme, “I’d never have been contracted to John Hamilton.”

This penetrated even Mariotta’s preoccupation. She turned, diverted against her will. “Well,
that’s
true enough.”

“What I mean is,” said the Ward of the Crown, frowning, “that people have no business to settle other people’s future for them when they’re five years old. It’s a typical man’s scheme,” said Agnes ruthlessly. “It’s not for our own good; it’s no use saying it is. It’s to add to their rotten lands, or because they need to carry on the family name, or because it’ll bring them enough money or tenants or rights of lineage to stop a war, or start a war, or carry out their own uninteresting masculine affairs.”

There was a short, respectful silence. “Well,” said Mariotta soothingly, “I wasn’t contracted when I was five.”

“Yes,” said Lady Herries with devastating frankness. “That’s just what I mean. Trust a man to take advantage. Brood mares and—”

Whether her own undeniably single-track brain or Sir Andrew called a halt first, it would be hard to say; but in the net result the Baroness shut her mouth rather suddenly and Hunter said, “Look: the shooting has started.”

On the field, an orderly pattern, pleasing in itself to the eye, had fallen into place. Far out to one side stood the Master and officials of the games, dressed in Arran’s red and white livery; and beside them a group of arrow boys, minute fungi under cartwheel rush hats. Beside that again, in a long line against the painted barriers, the competitors waited; a trifle uneasy; a trifle tense now the moment had come.

The first bowman, flexing his shoulders, took his place in the centre of the field below the high, painted pole, and footed the mark. The parrot, brilliant in the eye of the sun, struggled and screamed against the backdrop of the castle rock, scarlet with bracken and the autumn glory of beech and sycamore; above the rock, the Palace windows gave back the sun in stabs of flame behind their cage grilles. A voice shouted “Fast!;” the archer raised his longbow smoothly to the sky, nocked his arrow, drew, held and released; replaced his second shaft, aimed, held and released again.

The papingo squawked bad-temperedly and swore with an Aberdeen
accent; the arrows arched and fell harmlessly, six yards to the left. To a roar of sardonic cheering the tension broke, and Sir Andrew suddenly moved.

“There’s only one place Lymond can shoot from,” he said, almost to himself. “And that’s from the shelter of the rock.”

Mariotta heard him. She raised her eyes as he had done and studied the broken face of the crag. “Shooting against both the sun and the wind?”

“That’s the difficulty, of course,” he acknowledged. “But look. The rest of the field is hedged in by the crowd: a man couldn’t raise his arms in it, never mind aim six feet of a longbow.” He hesitated, and then said, “Lady Culter, if you’d give me leave, I’ll climb up and look through some of that scrub there.”

But Mariotta, unimpressed by the suggestion that he should safeguard Richard’s life at the risk of his own, refused and would not be persuaded. He argued uneasily, found her adamant, and dropped the proposal. In silence they watched.

The wind, violent and skittish, was making better sport of it than the competitors were. Buccleuch, shooting third, nicked the post with his first shaft and overshot with his second, retiring bellowing amid a chorus of witticisms. The next two were wide; the fifth caused a mild sensation by breaking his bow and nearly amputating himself with the shards; the sixth lost his thread and bungled both draws; and the seventh squirted off like a firecracker.

The eighth nearly got it.

“Oh!” said Agnes, sparkling. “It’s very exciting, isn’t it?” And she added, a little wistfully, “A woman would enjoy being married to a wonderful archer.”

In the midst of their anxiety, the eyes of the other two met, and laughter sprang into Hunter’s. “My dear girl,” he said, “your mind’s running a great deal on marriage today, surely?”

Lady Herries looked surprised. “Not specially. But I’ll have to get married this year, I expect; and if I’ve
got
to be sold like a packet of wool—”

“Agnes!”

“Well. I mean, having children and doing embroidery may not be fun, but it’d be more so if at least they fought battles for you and pretended they liked it. Courts of Love, and sonnets, and scarves in their helmets. That’s what I think. Otherwise,” pursued Agnes, “there’s not much point in it all, is there?”

“Well, I’m afraid Johnnie Hamilton won’t write any odes to your eyelashes,” said Sir Andrew cheerfully. “Besides, that’s a limiting form of courtship, isn’t it? You’d be much more comfortable with a husband who worked up a connection at Court, or developed his lands, or exercised his money in trade so that you had diamond bracelets by the gross and a house in each county.”

“But I’ve got all the diamonds I want,” said Agnes succinctly. “Like Mariotta. And the little Queen. So I don’t see there’s any point in marrying, unless it’s to get something you haven’t got already. And nine times out of ten, you needn’t marry for that, either,” she added as an afterthought.

Watching the twelfth bowman loose off, Sir Andrew said unhappily, “How much land have you got, Lady Herries? And how many able-bodied tenants?”

She looked at him with vague distaste. “You sound like Grandfather Blairquhan.”

“Never mind. How many, and where are they all?”

She said rather sulkily, “You
know
. I share them with Cathie and Jean. Terregles, Kirkgunzeon, Moffatdale, Lockerbie, Ecclefechan … next to the Maxwell lands on the Border.”

“H’m,” said Hunter. “On the Border. You don’t say how many tenants, but I imagine it’ll run to a few thousand. And who do you imagine is going to look after all that for you and protect it from the English? And, if you’ll forgive me for being practical, who’s going to lead them into the field in wartime? You can’t dodge your national obligations, even if you think you can dodge your moral ones.”

“I
knew
you were going to sound like Grandfather Blairquhan,” said Agnes pettishly. “Anyway, we’ve all got men kinsfolk who’d do that for us, surely, without having to marry them first. The point is, whether it’s kinsfolk or husbands, they’d do it just because it suits them, no matter whether we were fifty and fat and had bowlegs, and that,” she ended with dignity, “simply isn’t romance as I see it.”

Mariotta suddenly intervened. “Don’t be silly: what do you want? An altruistic uncle for security and a boudoir full of lovers for pleasure?”

“I should like,” pronounced Lady Herries with a stately air, “a husband who put me before business or politics.”

“They don’t exist.”

“Oh, yes, they do,” said Hunter unexpectedly. (Fifteen.) He glanced down, his lips twitching. “You’re being a bit hard, you know;
both of you. It’s pretty well a full-time job, these days, keeping a family housed and clothed and warm and protected. Doesn’t leave much time for poetry under the apple trees. But chivalry hasn’t gone: don’t think it. You’ll even find it paramount still with some people, but a trifle the worse for wear, because it’s not the best protection against an aggressive and materialistic world.…” He smiled again, rather ruefully. “And don’t forget: a man has other claims and duties too—to relatives; and old folk; and his friends. He’s not always free, as you seem to think, to slap down the money and carry off the bride of his choice.”

Mariotta said, instantly repentant, “We know that, of course. Agnes only means, I think, that often in arranged marriages there’s a good deal of unhappiness on both sides.”

“—And it’s a pity to go through with it for the sake of posterity if posterity is simply going to repeat the process. Yes. I see that,” said Sir Andrew. “But look around you. I think you’ll find that marital bliss sometimes fights its way to the surface in the end. And then, you see, there are so many other things involved as well—the continuance of a great house, for example—family loyalty’s a powerful thing, and that’s as it should be. Even sometimes the continued existence of a nation—that’s the price royalty pays. And that’s got a romance of its own, of course; not quite the kind you mean, but one that lies perhaps a little deeper.”

“As far as I’m concerned,” retorted her ladyship, “it can bury itself. They won’t get me to marry anyone I don’t want to, contract or no contract. Oh, look: there’s Menteith shooting.”

They were already looking, for young Menteith, Mariotta’s host from Inchmahome, was the nineteenth archer, and the crowd was now perfectly quiet.

He took position, aimed and loosed. His first arrow struck the crossbar on which the parrot was bound. The bar jerked, and held; the arrow twisted and plummeted as the second flew, ruffling the bird’s plumage. Two good shots. A subdued shout went up, followed by a crawling hum of anticipation. The arrow boys, one of them with a goose feather waving in his hatbrim, ran forward briefly into the field; the perch, chipped and scratched, threw a thin wavering shadow toward the castle rock; the autumn leaves, lit by the dipping sun, turned from tawny to crimson.

Richard Crawford, holding himself uncommonly straight, walked steadily across the field and paused at the foot of the perch, looking
down momentarily at the big yew in his tabbed hand, then up at the crossbar. He took his stand, and Mariotta, reaching out panic-stricken, found Sir Andrew had gone.

The silence was absolute; the stillness profound. But for the ruffling of the trees and the gentle singing of the perch stays, a man might have thought himself deaf. He nocked, raising his arm with the poetic, compact motion of the master bowman; the thin, echoing official voice called “Fast!;” he drew, held lovingly, and loosed.

His arrow leapt; but another was already airborne. Slender, deadly, red as hot steel in the sun, a shaft came hissing from the farthest suburbs of the crowd. There was never an instant’s doubt of its destination. It drove into the crossbar, slicing off the crude ties with a razor barb, freeing the papingo in the instant that Culter’s arrow flew toward it.

From the audience, a sea of upturned faces, rose a breathy gasp. Weak and stiff from its bonds, the bird jerked grotesquely, fell, wavered, flapped; and with a sudden strong upbeat, recovered itself.

As if over its corporate soul the crowd, mesmerized, yearned over the bright wings. At its back Andrew Hunter, his face set in anger, had already reached the higher ground, racing; thrusting; running free like a madman.

They hardly noticed him. For as the parrot, gaining height, swooped wildly away from the field, a second arrow breathed by and feathered into its mark. The papingo, transfixed in its blundering flight, stopped, tilted, and dropped like a stricken star to the ground. A yellow feather, wanton and unseemly, danced its way after.

Then, on the wave of a roaring uprush, the crowd was moved to action: too late, for the third arrow was already launched.

It arched in the air, a gleaming parabola, the feathers susurrant with curses, and found this time its designed, human mark.

Culter, standing white, taut and watchful at the base of the perch, flung out an arm blindly, held himself a moment upright against the pole, then slowly folded against it and thence to the ground.

That evening, bright in the dusk, a great fire glowed in the parlour at Bogle House, bestowing light, warmth and comfort on its occupants. It flickered on the faces about it: the Dowager, Mariotta, Buccleuch,
Hunter, Agnes Herries, Christian and Tom Erskine. It glittered on the table beside it, on which lay three arrows, two of them dark with blood, a longbow and a leather embroidered shooting glove. It flared, lastly, on the calm face of Lord Culter, lying stiffly bandaged on a long settle before it.