The Game of Kings (35 page)

“Some might feel one hen of a sort was worth twenty horses,” said Maxwell.

“And yet you won’t get far without horses, be your poultry never so prolific.”

Lymond was clearly mocking, and the other switched subjects curtly. “Do you wish to continue the letters to Agnes Herries? We agreed that you should have this channel for messages.”

Lymond said, “Let it lapse. I can find other means now, if need be.” He rose. “I am grateful for your co-operation. We may still meet, of course. Next month, for example. In spite of your fondness for the chicken run.”

Maxwell also got up. He hesitated, stooping a little under the low roof, his half-armour fogged with condensation. “There is one piece of news you might find of interest,” he said. “It’s not the kind I should pass on to Edinburgh, as the woman is, I suppose, a niece by marriage.…”

Lymond’s face and voice were his first weapons, and he used them consciously with the same control that in his brother kept expression away.

But this time, something new filled the blue eyes; and Scott, sitting forgotten, saw it, and his breathing stopped. Then it was over, and Maxwell, unobserving, was still talking.

“Lennox and Wharton are trying a new gambit this time. The Countess of Lennox is being sent north to Drumlanrig to try and splint together all these burst Douglas loyalties before the army invades.”

Lymond said in his accustomed voice, “The Lady Margaret Douglas? Angus’s daughter? When is she coming?”

Maxwell shook his head and took up his hat. “I have no other details. But I expect she’ll arrive shortly before they march, and wait for her husband. I thought you might be interested.”

He turned in the doorway, one hand on the lintel. “Good day to you both. I fancy these meetings will not be to our loss.”

“I fancy not,” said Lymond dryly; and Maxwell, mounted, leaned down. “You have a nice touch with the Latin tag, but I found the
French a little indelicate, here and there.” And, one of his infrequent smiles lighting the solemn face, the Master of Maxwell rode off.

Scott, straightening from dousing the fire, found Lymond waiting with both horses at the door, his expression angelical. “O rubicund blossom and star of humility! O famous bud, full of benignity! O beautiful Master of Maxwell!”

Scott came out and took his horse. “What’s happened, sir?”

“Ce n’est rien: c’est une femme qui se noie,” said Lymond, and laughed. “Love Mr. Maxwell, my cherub: he has brought your old age with him today. We require a hostage to exchange for Samuel Harvey. And behold, we have a hostage. My brilliant devil, my imitation queen; my past, my future, my hope of heaven and my knowledge of hell … Margaret, Countess of Lennox.”

C
HAPTER
   I:   
Bitter Exchange

II:
  
The Queen’s Progress Becomes Critical

III:
  
Mate for the Master

IV:
  
Concerted Attack

M
EG DOUGLAS, the boy Scott was thinking, his hands slack on the reins. Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. What could have forged a link between the refulgent, self-contained Lymond and this woman?

The meeting with Maxwell lay behind them. Riding north with the Master, Scott had time to dwell on these and other matters, other women. He remembered the cold dawn camp after the cattle raid. Lymond was unique: perhaps he was entitled to a unique relationship with the Stewart girl. Perhaps. It was none of his business.

But because of it—every man has his private affairs—he had said nothing to the Master of his promise to meet Buccleuch.

His motives were wholly chaste: he meant to toy a little with the old man, giving his father the chance of a good look at him. He wanted to inspect the banners of the angels so near to the merry ranks of Mahoun, and make self-satisfied comparisons.

But he said nothing of that to Lymond. The devyll, they say, is dede; the devyll is dede. But Kincurd, renegade, would revive him
fast enough, thought Will Scott, and kept quiet as they moved toward their new winter quarters.

Affairs around the Peel Tower were becoming a little too busy; and Lymond had decided to move. Tomorrow, Scott was to leave for the old Tower to supervise its final dismantling. Tonight he would spend at the new Tower, at Crawfordmuir.

The gold mines at Crawfordmuir were not very old. For thirty years, Dutch and Germans and Scots had been mining there, and the Queen Dowager Mary of Guise had also brought French miners from Lorraine. Since James V died, the Dowager Queen had not renewed the contract.

So the mines lay derelict, the ruins of workmen’s huts and storehouses littering the broken moorland, with rotting spades and wheelbarrows and crumbling dams and shallow, timbered pits.

The rock yielded no fabulous artery of yellow ore, but pebbles and scourings grained and gritted with gold dust and, rarely, an attenuated nugget. Mining was furtive and unlicensed. Week in, week out, the earth brought down by the spring rains was cherished and riddled, and the sparkling fragments folded in twists and rags and taken to a friendly goldsmith who might choose to forget that a tenth of all lawful takings on Crawfordmuir belonged to the Crown.

This was the land to which the Master brought Scott: up through bog and heather and packed moss and harsh root to two thousand feet above sea level where they stopped, and the boy looked about him. Here were four rivers, Lymond had told him, and Eldorado between them as the ancients thought it lay between the four rivers of Paradise. There were other graces. In this harness of high, safe hills they were surrounded by escape routes.

Lymond pointed. Below and to the left, a burn wandered into the hills with heaps like molehills about it and the figures of men moving. “—Your colleagues looking diligently for alluvial gold. It amuses them and helps fill the treasury. It also explains our presence and gives us warning of anyone using the valley …” And led the way to their destination, an excellent stone tower, thick-walled and small-windowed, built in a grassy socket of the hill.

There, in Lymond’s new winter quarters, Scott passed the night and next morning, pleased at the prospect of a little autonomy, left for the Peel Tower. A little later the Master also rode out and, turning sharp east, began the journey to Tantallon Castle.

*  *  *

“It grieves me deeply to break up your manège,” said Sir George, “but I can’t accept the alternative. If you want me to trace Harvey for you, you must sell me Will Scott.”

Lymond spoke idly. “It sounds as if you
have
been endearing yourself to the opposition. Can’t you repair your relations in some other way? I have several keen bargains in political information: or is Grey no longer interested in our life, our lust, our Governor, our Queen?” His face expressed only mild inquiry.

Both men were in a stoutly furnished room in the East Tower of Tantallon. Beyond the window the North Sea crawled and roared at the bottom of hundred-foot cliffs; far out, the Bass Rock stood in a nest of white floss, with gannets plummetting like so many celestial lead lines into the jumping sea. Douglas turned impatiently from the sight.

“If I could conduct this transaction simply by buying information from you, I would. As it is, I am ready to take on my own account anything you may have to sell. For that reason, as you probably noticed, I avoided addressing my letter to you by name. Nor have I given your name to Lord Grey although—let us be as open as we can, Mr. Crawford—I had very little trouble guessing your identity.… I hope you were less severe on Mr. Somerville than you were with Sir Andrew.” He paused. “You’re swimming in very deep waters, aren’t you, Crawford?”

“But life in an aquatic kettle can be quite entertaining,” suggested Lymond. “And what keeps out water will also keep out steel between the shoulder blades. Gideon Somerville, if you are interested, is in pristine health, and Jonathan Crouch is at home. That leaves Samuel Harvey and his purchase.”

Sir George was broadly reasonable. “Why hesitate? Get yourself another disciple, man, and be done with it.” Sir George badly needed Scott to bolster his tattered prestige with Lord Grey.

“But Scott is extremely useful to me,” said Lymond. “Besides, he gives me excellent cover from Buccleuch.”

“Once we have him, Buccleuch won’t trouble anyone any more.”

“He won’t trouble you: he’ll use up all his surplus energy looking for me. And another thing. If I gave you Scott I should want absolute possession of the man Harvey. Would Grey agree to that? I imagine Harvey, for one thing, would object quite violently.”

“There’s no reason why Harvey should know,” said Douglas after a moment’s quick thought. “I tell you, Grey wants Scott badly enough
for anything. If this unfortunate man is your price, I think I can promise he will pay it.”

“In the siècles de foi you would be irresistible,” said Lymond generously. “But I have arrived in the age of reason. You’ll need to provide some pretty imaginative security before I believe that.”

“And if I do so?”

Lymond smiled again, and Douglas’s hands, in spite of himself, opened and closed. “If you do so,” said the Master, “of course I shall give you the person of Will Scott.”

Before Lymond left, Sir George repeated his own private bid for his services. It met with bland refusal. “My offer was to exchange information for Harvey; not to plunge into general commerce.”

“If you can afford to say that, you’re a fortunate man. I wish I knew your source of revenue. I notice incidentally,” said Sir George, understandably irritated, “that in your somewhat frenzied quest for Mr. Harvey your other project has fallen from sight.”

“Everyone credits me with projects. I sometimes feel like a latter-day Hercules. Which one?”

“The one concerned with preserving your brother from the ills of old age. I imagine Lady Culter’s pregnancy has complicated your problem?”

It was news to Lymond. The fractional pause told Sir George that, and he was irritably thankful, in passing, that he could still read a man to some degree at least. Then the Master said with amusement, “Are you suggesting that I should add to my tally?”

Sir George’s answer was ready. “If Lord Grey and I are happily reconciled, and if his lordship’s plans for this country are successful, we shall remember our friends. As to the granting—or reinstating—of baronies, for example.”

There was a respectful pause, broken mildly by Lymond. “Setting aside anarchy and murder and returning to simple conveyancing—how soon could Samuel Harvey be brought north?”

The essential bargain, after all, had been made; so Douglas’s exasperation was well-hidden. A common posting station, a hovel they both knew, was agreed as a means of communication, and the pact was sealed. At the door, Sir George turned and smiled. “I can’t imagine a Scott resigned to authority and bars. What will your callow colt make of the snare?”

“Scott is trained to authority already,” said Lymond. “The bars are a trite enough sequel.”

He reached the Peel Tower on Sunday the fifth of February, finding it already unrecognizable in the torments of chaotic removal. He walked from room to room, dispensing criticism and looking for Will Scott.

In this he was unsuccessful. Will had left the Peel early that afternoon for an unknown destination, and had not come back.

The meeting between Will Scott and his father was due to take place at dusk. After banging violently about the castle all day Buccleuch left, rather too early, for his supposedly secret encounter, and his family was overjoyed to see the last of him.

Wat Scott of Buccleuch was a man crammed with sentiment, which accounted for the peculiar harmlessness of half his explosions. The sight of his heir at the cattle raid had produced an unwonted tremor among his principles, and he was shy of repeating the experience.

Of all his brood, Will was least like himself. His oldest and illegitimate son, Walter, was a stuffy and powerful lad, and he was setting him up as befitted his first-born; but Will had a head on his shoulders, if a fat one, and Buccleuch was not the man to underrate that. The boy’s scruples he put down, with some justice, to the company of flute-mouths and dishwashing writers in books; and he rode out therefore alone to meet him at Crumhaugh with a fine determination this time to stand for no stupidity.

It was still light when he reached the hill and pressed into the copse on its side. At first, peering through the trees, he thought the little clearing was empty. It was a place in the wood, known to Will and himself, where larch and oak and juniper gave way to a quincunx of soaring beeches so old that the aisles between were cushioned with a permanent autumn of red leaves. Then he heard a hoof strike, and the clunk of bit on teeth, and the next moment saw his son’s horse with its reins loosely tied to a bush, and Will himself standing just beyond.

The boy was quite different. His thick neck was strapped with
muscle; he had eyes like sea pebbles, and his red hair roared like a lion. Buccleuch got rid of his surprise and dismounted. “So you came!”

His son regarded him austerely. “I said I would.”

There was a slight pause, a bellow as Buccleuch cleared his throat, then Sir Wat waded in. “Ye might like to know that your Englishy friends have burned me out of Newark. Missed Janet and myself and the weans by half a day, just.”

Will was distressingly calm. “Well, you seem to have survived.”

“No thanks to you!”

“Why blame me? If you chose to move all the cannon to Branxholm, it was no fault of mine.”

This error of judgment was no sweeter for being Buccleuch’s own. He remembered just in time what he was supposed to be doing, and wiped his mouth with a large hand.