The Game of Kings (3 page)

And, long since ashore with his men and his booty, Crawford of Lymond, man of wit and crooked felicities, bred to luxury and heir to a fortune, rode off serenely to Midculter to break into his new sister-in-law’s castle.

*  *  *

In the Castle of Midculter, close to the River Clyde in the southwest lowlands of Scotland, the Dowager Lady Culter had reared three children of whom the youngest, Eloise, died at school in her teens. The two boys remaining were brought up variously in France and in Scotland: she had them taught Latin, French, philosophy and rhetoric, hunting, hawking, riding and archery, and the art of killing neatly with the sword. When her husband died, violently, in the field the elder boy Richard became third Baron Culter, and Francis his
brother received the heir’s title of Master of Culter as well as taking name from his own lands of Lymond.

Until Richard’s marriage, Sybilla Lady Culter had lived alone at Midculter with her older son. What she thought of Lymond’s activities she did not say. She welcomed Mariotta, Richard’s new bride, with warm arms and dancing blue eyes, and today, in the late summer of 1547, had dismissed her son to his eternal local meetings and had invited the women of the neighbourhood to meet her daughter-in-law. And thus, in Richard’s absence, forty women clacked each to each on plush chairs encased by the barrel vaulting, the tapestries and the carving which made the Great Hall of Midculter famous.

Mariotta, black-haired and beautiful, walked on air decorated with compliment and envy. Richard’s mother Sybilla, small and splendid, with cornflower eyes and fair skin, effaced herself as well as she could, controlled the household machinery with half her mind and kept her own counsel about the other half.

“And how’s Will?” she said rashly to Janet, third and most formidable wife of Wat Scott of Buccleuch, and Janet, big-boned and handsome and heartily florid, thirty years younger than Buccleuch and the cleverest of a diabolically clever family, fixed an unwinking eye on the ceiling and groaned.

In Sybilla’s mind, Buccleuch’s heir by his first wife was a pleasing, red-haired child who, losing his mother at five, had been gently reared by Sir Wat’s then chaplain. Then Buccleuch had sent him to France, where he had attended Grand Collège until this year. Nevertheless, Sybilla was able to put her own accurate interpretation on Janet’s groan. “Religion or women?” asked Lady Culter expertly.

“Women!” It was a cry of despair. “Can you see Buccleuch turning a whisker about women! Not a bit of it. Moral Philosophy, that’s the trouble,” said Janet with gloomy relish. “They’ve taught poor Will moral philosophy and his father’s fit to boil.”

“It
is
theology then,” said Sybilla uneasily. “I suppose he might manage if he sticks like Lindsay to the vulgarities in iambics; but if he’s developing into a Calvinist or a Lutheran or an Erasmian or an Anabaptist it isn’t very healthy: look at George Wishart and the Castillians.”

“He isn’t quoting Luther. He’s quoting Aristotle and Boethius and the laws of chivalry and the dreicher speils of the Chevalier de Bayard on loyalty and the ethics of warfare. He’s so damned moral
that he ought to be standing rear up under a Bo Tree. And he won’t keep his mouth shut. I grant,” said Lady Buccleuch with a certain grim amusement, “that the pure springs of chivalry may be a little muddy in the Hawick area, but that’s no proper excuse for calling his father an unprincipled old rogue, and every other peer in Scotland a traitorous scoundrel.”

Sybilla pulled herself together. “Wat knows how to argue, heaven knows. Why not explain?”

“Because Buccleuch isn’t a plaster saint and Will would drive the Archangel Gabriel to lunacy and drink,” said Lady Buccleuch with candour. “Wait till you hear him on the subject of perjury, patriotism and divided loyalties. The last time he trailed his coat Wat and he were shrieking at one another in five minutes like the Ghibellines and the Guelphs. Damn them both,” she said thoughtfully, “for a couple of sumphs,” and paused, her gaze suddenly sharpening.

Sybilla, her smile unimpaired, caught her daughter-in-law’s eye smartly as Lady Buccleuch spoke again. “You’ve heard Lymond’s back.”

For an instant the clever blue eyes focused. Then Lymond’s mother, turning, said, “Oh, Mariotta, my dear. The gypsies. I expect they’ve finished supper below, and it might be safer to send them away before Richard and the horses come back. Although they looked very honest. Could you … ?”

Between Mariotta and the Dowager Lady Culter there was perfect rapport. Mariotta laughed and instantly took herself off to see the gypsies dismissed.

“So fortunate that they came,” said Sybilla, “—with the extra musicians being held up; although acrobatics are not my favourite entertainment. And what do you intend to do about Will?”

“We weren’t discussing Will,” said Lady Buccleuch with brief exactitude. “As you perfectly well know, I was talking about Lymond.”

“Yes,” said the Dowager. “Yes, I remember; and yes, I know he’s been seen about. So they say.”

With difficulty, Janet transfixed the wandering blue eye. “Sybilla. What about this marriage of Richard’s and Lymond?”

“It makes no difference. None at all. Lymond never could be Lord Culter as things are. Even his own estate of Lymond was forfeited when he was outlawed. There isn’t another heir. If Richard and Mariotta both died, the whole fortune would go to the Crown.”

“He couldn’t succeed Richard now, certainly,” said Janet. “But if the English took over? Criminals at the horn with the right kind of politics have died in silk sheets before now.”

“So they say. Perhaps it’s lucky then,” said Sybilla, “that this criminal has cheated his way out of favour with every party in Europe. Did you try some brazil on your curtains?”

And this time, Lady Buccleuch took the hint.

Mariotta was returning from her errand by the wheel stair when she heard the horses in the courtyard and guessed that Richard and his train were coming in. The requirements of dignity fought with a wifely desire to scamper below. She was hesitating still when footsteps turned the stair corner below and an alien and unknown yellow head rose from the serpentine depths, a nautilus from the shell.

Young and exhibitionist by temperament, Lady Culter gathered her skirts, darkly glowing, and just missed a simper. “Can I help you, sir?”

Norman fairness recognizing Celtic darkness howled like a cluricane. “I’ve got the servants’ stair again. This place was built by mouldiewarps for mouldiewarps, and to the devil with lords and gentlemen. Jennie, m’joy, where is thy master? The traces d’amour? The path to a Culter? Any Culter: old Lady Culter, young Lady Culter, or his middle-aged lordship … ?”

If she thought the mistake genuine, it was only for a moment. Then: “A rather primitive sense of humour, surely?” she said pleasantly. “My husband has not yet arrived, but his mother the Dowager is upstairs. I shall take you to her, if you like.”

A crow of delighted laughter answered her. “A Culter, and bad-tempered, and black. Come dance with me in Ireland.”

“I,” said Mariotta firmly, “am Lady Culter. I take you to be a friend of my husband’s.”

He came to rest two steps below her. “Take what you like. Yellow doesn’t suit you, and neither does angling for compliments.”

“I—really!” said Mariotta, roused. “There is no excuse for rank bad manners.”

“Richard doesn’t like me either,” said the fair one sorrowfully. “But that’s unmannerly rank for you. Do you like Richard?”

“I’m married to him!”

“That’s why I asked. You don’t believe in polyandry by any chance?” He rested a shoulder and elbow against the newel post,
staring at her cheerfully. “It’s difficult, isn’t it? I might be a distant cousin with a quaint sense of humour, in which case you’ll look silly if you scream. I might be a well-known cretin to be kept from your guests at all costs. Or I might be—oh no, my angel!”

Quick fingers, closing on her wrist, wrenched her up from a headlong plunge to the lower floor, to the servants and her husband.

“—Or I might be annoyed. Don’t be a fool, my dear,” he said. “These were my men you heard entering below. You are not being badgered; you are being invaded.”

Held close to him as she was, she found his eyes unavoidable. They were blue, of the deep and identical cornflower of the Dowager’s. And at that, the impact of knowledge stiffened her face and seized her pulses. “I know who you are! You are Lymond!”

Applauding, he released her. “I take back the more personal insults if you will take back your arm without putting it to impious uses. There. Now, sister-in-law mine, let us mount like Jacob to the matriarchal cherubim above. Personally,” he said critically, “I should dress you in red.”

So this was Richard’s brother. Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise, with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent. He returned the scrutiny without rancour.

“What had you expected? A viper, or a devil, or a ravening idiot; Milo with the ox on his shoulders, Angra-Mainyo prepared to do battle with Zoroaster, or the Golden Ass? Or didn’t you know the family colouring? Richard hasn’t got it. Poor Richard is merely Brown and fit to break bread with …”

“The poem I know at least,” exclaimed Mariotta, chafing her wrist. “Red wise; Brown trusty; Pale envious—”

“And Black lusty. What a quantity of traps you’ve dropped into today.… If you wish, you may run ahead screaming. It makes no difference now, although five minutes ago we were in something of a hurry … the servants to be tied up … the silver to collect … Richard’s personal hoard to recover from its usual cache. A man of iron habit, Richard.”

He had wandered absently past her and ahead up the stair when Mariotta, fully alert and aghast, started after him. “What do you want?”

He considered. “Amusement, principally. Don’t you think it’s time
my family shared in my misfortunes, as Christians should? Then, vice is so costly: May dew or none, my brown and tender diamonds don’t engender, they dissolve. Immoderation, Mariotta, is a thief of money and intestinal joy, but who’d check it? Not I. Here I am, weeping soft tears of myrrh, to prove it.”

They had reached the door to the Hall. One hand on the standpost, he turned, and the kitten’s eyes were bright blue. “Watch carefully. In forty formidable bosoms we are about to create a climacteric of emotion. In one short speech—or maybe two—I propose to steer your women through excitement, superiority, contempt and anger: we shall have a little drama; just, awful and poetic, spread with uncials and full, as the poet said, of fruit and seriosity. Will they thank me, I wonder?”

Mariotta, collecting her wits, produced the only deterrent she could think of. “Your mother is in there.”

He received this with tranquil pleasure. “Then one person at least should recognize me,” Crawford of Lymond said, and pushed the door gently open for her to walk through.

*  *  *

Meanwhile Sir Wat Scott of Buccleuch was riding westward from Edinburgh, free at last of the Governor’s councils, and leaving behind him his good friend Tom Erskine, a distraught smuggler, and a depressed pig.

Buccleuch was accustomed to war. Since the golden age before Flodden of a dynamic kingship and culture, it seemed that he had been governed by children, or by their elders and so-called protectors locked in civil struggle for power. And always the nobles who fell out of power were able to look for help to England’s Henry VIII, who as a matter of personal pride and pressing European politics meant to conquer Scotland for himself, and to take the child Queen Mary to England, there to rear her in English ways and marry her in due course to his son.

Henry had sent force after force over the Border into Scotland to harry them into submission. He had taken hostages; offered inducements; granted pensions; offered high positions to the discontented, impoverished great and, in the very month of Mary’s birth and her father King James’s death, had snatched as captives to London half the Lowland Scottish peerage at the disastrous battle of Solway Moss,
and had there extorted from them as the price of their freedom a written promise to help him achieve the marriage between his son Edward and Mary.

Now Henry was dead, and a child sat on the English throne too: Edward VI, for whom ruled his uncle, Edward Somerset, Protector of England and avid adherent to Henry’s policy for the marriage, who also burned and pillaged and put to the sword, and seduced the Scottish nobility with other weapons; for King Henry in marital and concupiscent frenzy had severed his country’s church from the Pope; and there were many in Scotland who looked away from the French Queen Mother and their old ally, Catholic France, and toward the Reformed Religion instead.

None of that, however, concerned Buccleuch who was little troubled, if ever, with matters of right and wrong. He thought occasionally about religion when it appeared to be taking too close a grip on politics and therefore on the future of the Scott family, but this latest upheaval was nothing to him. The Bishop of Rome was no paragon, but old Harry of England had damned nearly overrun Buccleuch’s home of Branxholm, and that put him anyway in the bottommost pit with the heretics. When your nation has no standing army, there is nothing for it but to defend it yourself, with your tenants at your back, and hired swords and foreign mercenaries to eke out, depending on what the privy purse can afford. Buccleuch liked fighting. Having received his orders, he turned westward ready to explode into militant activity, and digressed on his way home to call at Boghall, a castle placed on its malodorous peats in the centre of Scotland and owned by the Flemings, a family uniquely loyal to the Queen, whose head Lord Fleming had himself married a lively and illegitimate daughter of the royal house.

Lady Fleming, who was governess as well as aunt to the baby Queen, was away, but the honours of Boghall were done by her goddaughter Christian Stewart.

She was a favourite of Buccleuch’s. Comely and tall, with hair of fine dark red and a decisive air to her, she was pleasant and positive to talk to, and it was impossible to tell that she was blind from birth. Familiar with every inch of Boghall, she stood chatting to Sir Wat after his necessary talk with Fleming, and it was she who told him Lord Culter was upstairs.