The Game of Kings (25 page)

For a moment the Englishman’s heart failed him. Then he said stoutly, “I demand some satisfaction from you, sir. Four weeks have passed since I left Ballaggan in your company, and no effort has been made to restore me to my home. Had I stayed with Sir Andrew I
could expect to be ransomed and back with my Ellen a month before this.”

“I doubt it,” said the Master. He threw the gloves on a chair and took an alepot from a tray hurriedly brought him. “I am disappointed in you, Mr. Crouch. Here you are in our Paestum, warm, fed and rent free, and with a face like cheese rennet. Are your companions dull? Surely you can educate them? Are they poor conversationalists? Then edify them: they should make princely listeners. Do they have little skill at cards? Then ruin them: you have my permission. It is really time,” said Lymond, “that you were developing some sense of social responsibility.” And he walked to the fire and seated himself, his eyes sliding over Matthew and Johnnie and the scattered cards. Will Scott sat down near him. Mr. Crouch, affronted and unhappy, stood stiff-legged before the fire. He began: “If I had stayed at Ballaggan—”

The Master, stretching in a leisurely way, looked up at his prisoner. “The ass with the voice of Stentor,” he remarked. “That was all you were to Sir Andrew, I regret to tell you. The cheese in the mousetrap, Mr. Crouch.”

Will Scott suddenly found his tongue. “A trap to catch you, sir?”

Lymond clicked down his tankard on the table beside him as a fresh one approached. “Who at Annan knew we were asking about our friend here?”

“The captain at the gate, I suppose, who let us in?” said Scott, remembering.

“Who let us in and suffered accordingly. When the English got out of Annan and my dear brother got in, the captain was left to breathe his last. He did so, I fancy, into Sir Andrew Hunter’s ear.”

“—And guessing you had an interest in Crouch, Sir Andrew set about getting hold of him in order to take you … but,” said Scott, working out the problem with some care, “why keep it to himself in that case?”

“It’s not difficult to imagine,” said Lymond dryly. “First, Sir Andrew is a young man living considerably above his means; second, I have a price of a thousand crowns on my head; and third—” He paused, and Scott saw his eyes were cold. “The third reason,” said Lymond slowly, “is still open to conjecture. In any case: the ensuing flight of fancy has cost friend Hunter a broken head and Mr. Crouch—I see—a cold in the head and an unhappy lapse in good manners.”

“Now look here,” said Mr. Crouch, too riled to be afraid. “I’ve had about enough of this. I was taken a prisoner of war, all right and proper, and I’ve got the right to be exchanged or ransomed back, as soon as may be, according to the law on both sides. You talk,” said Jonathan heatedly, “as if it was a privilege to be shut in a damned, filthy—”

“But it is.” Lymond uncurled and rose; with a long index finger he pressed the titmouse into his own seat and closed his protesting fingers around the second mug of beer. “But it is. Such a study you will never meet again. Here we are, our beards smugly shaven, prolixt, corrupt and perpetuall. You have come until the grisly land of mirknes, and with reasonable luck you may leave it yet. And that, Mr. Crouch, is the greatest privilege of all.”

Mr. Crouch, pot in hand, made to speak. Lymond forestalled him. “No. You spend your speech and waste your brain. Accept our gifts and be grateful. Either Gideon Somerville or Samuel Harvey is a douce and God-fearing man and has nothing but legitimate shock to expect from me. Whatever happens to the other he will probably deserve and would have happened most likely whether you helped or not. But I don’t want my birds flushed, Mr. Crouch. When I’ve spoken to both, you can go home.”

The prisoner was not reassured. “I want to go now,” he said starkly.

“You can,” said Lymond gently. “Oh, you can. Whenever you wish. Fragment by fragment. Drink your wine and learn gratitude. Quoi! Ce n’est pas encore beaucoup d’avoir de mon gosier retiré votre cou?”

Mr. Crouch, succumbing to force majeure, drank his wine: the Master, turning his back on him, rambled to the card table and idly fingered the scattered suits. “Blind Fortune, stumbling chance, spittle luck, false dealing—take to cards if you will, Marigold, but must you stare at me like a kitten with its dam? … Johnnie, are your gypsies all here?”

“A mile away. I smell wind later on.”

“Good. Away thou dully night. Scott, into what impurities has Turkey led you, other than the giddy vaults of gambling?”

“Impurities!” exclaimed Mat, indignant on principle.

“Moral irregularities,” said Lymond. “Diversions.”

“Oh, diversions,” said Mat, with the air of a man who understood
all. “God: we’ve been that damned hard at it, we havena had a diversion since the last night at the Ostrich.”

Scott, his face still crimson, said belligerently, “I’ve never been to the Ostrich.”

The familiar, chatoyant glint was in Lymond’s eyes. “The Ostrich is in the hands of a common woman, that dwells there to receive men to folly. The question is, do we seek such madness? The answer is, we do.”

He looked from one to other of the three men, his eyes flickering. “Let us go to Paradise, where every man shall have fourscore wives, all maidens. Let us go tonight, and speir at the Monks of Bamirrinoch gif lecherie be sin.… Scott?”

Will’s eyes were bright. He nodded.

“Matthew? Yes, I’m sure. And Johnnie, who is going in any case.”

Johnnie Bullo smiled, and hissed between his teeth. “Just so.”

Scott, caught watching Lymond again, blushed scarlet. The Master addressed him thoughtfully. “Are you anxious to go? These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping.”

Sophisticated at all costs, Scott quoted Rabelais. “But the ravens, the popinjays, the starlings, they make into poets.”

“No,” said Lymond. “The popinjays they kill.”

*  *  *

The four men and the gypsies reached the Ostrich Inn at nightfall in thick fog.

During the long ride, Will Scott stayed with Bullo. In the first moments, the Master’s sorrel disappeared among the hoary beasts of the gypsy troop and stayed there: bursts of muffled laughter and occasional snatches of song excoriated the ears of the other three. Turkey Mat, flesh with the flesh of his horse, rode solitary: long tail, fluid back and supine, sentient wrist. Bullo, at Scott’s side, sat as an owl might sit, listening for the folding of long grasses. Once, with the uncanny thought-sense Scott had noticed before, he said, “He’s wild tonight,” and the boy hardly realized another had spoken.

To the new Scott, the core and engrossment of his days was their central figure. Nothing of the warm vulgarities of Branxholm or the artifice of the Louvre or the ambitious, emotional expediencies of Holyrood had prepared him for the inhumanities of Lymond. To the
men exposed to his rule Lymond never appeared ill: he was never tired; he was never worried, or pained, or disappointed, or passionately angry. If he rested, he did so alone; if he slept, he took good care to sleep apart. “—I sometimes doubt if he’s human,” said Will, speaking his thought aloud. “It’s probably all done with wheels.”

A scintilla in the fog was the gypsy’s smile. “He proved very human in September. I seem to recall you had a sore head as well, after the skirmish with Culter and Erskine?”

Scott’s horse halted. He swore, kicked it on again, and said, “I was on my back for four days: d’you mean Lymond was hit?”

“Very humanly. By a stone. And led us the devil’s own dance bringing him back, Mat and I. We had to leave him under cover—Culter and the rest came about us like bedbugs in an almshouse dorter—and when it was safe to go back, the infallible Lymond had found himself a horse and vanished. We found him, of course.”

“Where?”

“It would be a shade indiscreet to say. Particularly with the two most interested parties at our elbow. You perhaps noticed that when we came back there was no mention of our passing faiblesse. Lymond, you see, is omnipotent, as you were saying.”

The white teeth flashed again. “Ask me again. I’m going to Edinburgh this Saturday, but when I come back, we might meet over it. The story’ll charm you. You’ll maybe want to write a poem about it, if you’re that way inclined: how Lymond passed the days after Annan. It’s a bonny tale.”

Scott listened, and hearing in Bullo’s voice an acid counterpoint to the high, sudden cackle of gypsy laughter behind, grinned sedately to himself and rode on.

They had kept to the high ground, where the fog was thinner and the ground less rotten. At some point the heather roots and tarnished bracken of Scotland became the heather roots and bracken of England. They crossed the Border like a fixed and hidden constellation and passed silently over lost grass behind the dim, leading form of Johnnie. The whiteness turned to black; the day withdrew, and they breasted the last incline.

Before them, vast golden parhelions blistered the fog. They approached. The colour changed and sharpened, became windows lit by lanterns and candles; and an open door, and faint music and voices, and a warm, stinging fragrance of roast meat curiously laced with musk. Became a courtyard with running ostler-wraiths, appearing and
evaporating with the horses and, finally, an enormous shadow in the wide doorway: a monstrous, eighteen-stone shadow of a woman with a fresh, childlike face, who stretched powdered arms, calling, to Lymond. “It’s yourself … and Johnnie! Back at last … Lord! We thought we were abandoned.”

“Why else,” said Lymond, “are we here?” The eyes were sea-blue and the expression one of celestial affability. “This, Marigold, is the Ostrich Inn. So hop Willieken, hop Willieken: England is thine and mine …” and moving swiftly to the threshhold, he scooped up the tremendous form of his hostess, accepted a hearty kiss and a dimpled arm along his shoulders, and disappeared indoors.

Scott found Johnnie Bullo looking at him with an ironic glint in the brown eyes. “Come along,” said Johnnie. “We’re allowed in as well.”

*  *  *

Men keeping vigil at the dawn of battle spoke of the square common room of the Ostrich. It rose two silken stories high, and whole oxen confessed to the fires at each end and reached sizzling Judgment on the crowded tables, alongside pies and puddings and heaped fragrant trenchers and jars of bland, too-warm wines.

All the pleasures of unfilled time belonged to the Ostrich. For those who were shy about sleeping in public, a wooden arcade around three sides of the room supported a gallery at first-story level, off which opened the private rooms. Wax lights blazed. The gypsies, flooding the centre floor with music and violent colour, danced in the footsteps of tumblers and harpists and magicians and monkeys; of bears and minstrels and dogs and play actors and mimics; and the painted walls and brilliant hangings kept a sense of them. Combers of talk and laughter rolled aggrandizing from pillar to pillar with the beat of drum and guitar; the air bounced with fat enjoyment and gourmandise, and bright ministering women like chaffinches flew and darted between the dark arcades.

Will Scott, at one of the fires, found his fogged eyes swimming with the blaze of marching lights and his senses drugged with fleshly smells and mulled wine and the heat of the fat-spitting fire. Lymond had vanished; Johnnie Bullo was plying his trade with his gypsies, and Mat, after an encounter half glimpsed in the pillars, had disappeared too. A gigantic and violent nostalgia for venison seized Scott: in its very midst he saw on the table before him a perfumed and
steaming haunch, laid by the white, ringed hands of the she-monster.

She smiled at him. She was beautiful. The round, rose-petal face was clear and young and yet maternal in its look; her hair was shining and clean, her great bulging torso massy with velvets and ermines cut to show the great snowy shelf of her breast, on which rubies lay, calm, beaming testimony to her serenity.

He rose uncertainly. She put down wine and two tankards, bread, sweetmeats, cheese and knives and salt; then swung off her tray with one hand and pressed him back into his seat with the other. “You don’t get Molly serving you every day … but then, you travel in very special company.” Her fine eyes with their dyed lashes appraised him. “Nice manners! You’re strong, but you’re kind: that means gentle birth and a pitying heart … What’s your name, my dear?”

Her sweetness was irresistible, and her bulk meant nothing. He smiled back. “I’m called Will.”

“Will! That’s better!” The lovely eyes and mouth melted; she ruffled his hair gently, as his mother might have done. “Make a good meal, my dear, and your golden-haired friend will be with you shortly. Oh, God!” said Molly, and raised heavenly blue eyes to the rafters. “That hair! He was born to wreck us, body and soul, that one. Look at this!”

She lifted a white arm and fished below the rubies. A thin chain came into view, and at its end a ring with a single, magnificent square diamond. “I suppose I’ve had more jewels in my life than most, but this is the one I wear; the one I got from him.” She laughed, and let it slip back. “Don’t look scared! Diamond rings are proper currency for such as him, but you won’t need to pay for your dinner at the silversmiths. Never mind my babbling. Go on, eat up, and drink, and forget your troubles, whatever they are. That’s what the Ostrich is for.”

She went quickly, gentle-footed, and he saw her go with a pang, and with a sudden, pleased resolve to do with diamonds. Then he turned to the table and forgot her. The venison was rich and savoury and cooked to tender perfection. The wine was warmly fumed and superb. The candies were strange and sweet; the cheeses firm and flavoured.

Life was glorious.

With a soft elegance Lymond slid into the seat opposite, and drew wine and plate toward him. He had changed into fine, fresh clothes: studying him, Scott was made conscious of his own splashed jacket
and breeches. Slicing the venison, the Master remarked, apropos, “Molly doesn’t clothe giants, unhappily, my Pyrrha. You’ve met her?” Will nodded.

“Molly married an innkeeper,” said Lymond. He poured wine and drank it, his eyes studying the other tables. “And the innkeeper was never seen again. He married Molly, and brought her to the Ostrich—and next month, there was just Molly. Molly and her girls.”