The Game of Kings (37 page)

“Enough.”

“Enough to yap at your heels while you trample busily back and forth over the rest of us in this panic-stricken, muddleheaded harrying you’re launched on! The Queen wanted you at Stirling, and where are you? Riding down my son in the name of your mim-faced honour! And why? Sybilla doesn’t want it, and she’s twice the cause you have. You’ll achieve nothing, as we all know, unless it’s to make the fellow kill himself laughing. Why go on with it? No one cares. And there’s some saying freely that it’s not a matter of justice at that, but plain, green, roaring jealousy that’s got into you.”

Richard said violently, “Hold your tongue, Scott!” and then restrained himself, the plates of his jack flashing with his breathing. “I won’t debate it with you.”

Buccleuch muted his voice. “Oh, I’ve nearly done. I’ve just got to say this: as well as Lymond, you’ve got me against you now. I loathe the man as you do, but I’m going to get Will safely away from him. And until I do, there’s no plan you can make against Lymond that won’t find me there before you. I wish no ill to you, or to your wife,
or to your mother, but you can hinder me at the risk of death or maiming: I’ll have no care for you.” And turning, he galloped his borrowed horse out of Crumhaugh wood.

*  *  *

Johnnie Bullo got back to the Peel ahead of Scott.

When the boy arrived, he found most of the men gone, and all the animals except a few horses. The building, always derelict, had a sullen air, as if in the emptying the last, lingering kindness had been wrung from the stones.

Lymond sat in the broken hall, and by him stood Johnnie Bullo. From the brilliance of the gypsy’s smile it was palpable that the story of Crumhaugh had been told to the Master. Will Scott stalked forward prepared to get full value from the wrath boiling in his veins, and met the wall of Lymond at his worst.

“My dear! I hear the bosom of your father produced a clatter like the Archbishop’s conscience, and you have returned to cast yourself on mine.”

“I was a fool to expect anything else.” Scott glared at Johnnie Bullo and shifted his eyes back to the Master. “You were perfectly right. I’m damned if I trust anyone, from now on.”

“The encounter seems to have had its share of bathos,” rejoined Lymond blandly. “How were you able to warn him, Johnnie?”

“Oh, I picked up a hint in one of the houses I was playing at. It made me think there might be a trap afoot.”

“So you sprang it.” The Master, rising, strolled to the door. “On the whole, this business of manumission is a little trying. I doubt if I have the nervous stamina to sustain it much longer.” Johnnie, having withstood the blue eye for as long as self-respect demanded, shrugged, rose and sauntered outside. Lymond shut the door and came back.

“Johnnie—” began Scott furiously.

“Johnnie makes mischief as cows make milk. You know that as well as I do. But at least he does it with his brain, and not his stomach, or wherever you keep your unique emotions.” He had deployed himself against the mantelpiece, tapping the stone softly with one hand, and Scott realized suddenly he had better collect his wits.

“You kept your appointment secret,” said Lymond. “Why?”

“Because it was none of your business.” Scott was still angry.

Lymond said gently, “Let us bathe in moral philosophy, as in a living river. Double-dealing is my business.”

“I know. But it isn’t mine,” said Scott rudely; and Lymond smiled. “I don’t believe you.”

There was an unsettled silence. The boy, still aggressive, broke it. “I simply wanted to talk to my father. There’s nothing to get alarmed about in that.”

“Nothing. Except that you kept it secret.”

“You don’t catechize Cuckoo-spit every time he disappears with his women!”

“Cuckoo’s women don’t have a pack of bloodhounds and two thousand men-at-arms behind them—not the most willing of them. You are the only person here who might discover he has something to gain by selling out. You are the only person who, whatever he does, is sure of a warm, moneyed niche waiting for him on the right side of the law. You are the only person with a shaky interest in ethics and the emotional stability of a quince seed in a cup of lukewarm water. Either you keep the oath you so dashingly pronounced last year, or I deal with you accordingly. I don’t propose to sit here like a pelican in her piety, wondering what you’re doing next.”

Scott, shaking with temper, replied. “Oh, I’ll tell you, if you want to know. I’ll tell you if I sneeze. I’ll tell you if I part my hair. But I still don’t see that it was any of your damned—”

“Lord Culter was there,” said Lymond softly. “Wasn’t he? And I might have relished meeting Buccleuch.”

“I daresay. But I didn’t know Culter would be there. And oath or no oath, you can hardly expect me to sell my father quite yet.”

“A nicety he hardly seems to appreciate.”

“I’ve already said I made a mistake.”

“So, obviously, have we.”

“Why? I’m here, am I not?” blared Scott. “I didn’t break my word. It was Buccleuch who—”

“After he allowed you to knock him down. I heard about it.”

“Allowed!”

“Buccleuch doesn’t think with his stomach either. Didn’t it occur to you that I could damage your precious family rather more thoroughly than Lord Grey?”

“And if you leave us, I certainly shall.”

“But—”

“So that, Marigold, if you are going to be forsworn, you must be thoroughly forsworn. You must give us all up as well. That’s what your father was counting on.”

Silence.

“Well?” asked Lymond.

“You needn’t be afraid,” said Scott frigidly. “It won’t happen again.”

The Master stared at him. “There are times when your utterances are refreshing, and times when they are flowerlike beyond belief. I am not afraid. I can tell you now that it will not happen again. I am waiting for an apology.”

Scott’s reply was inaudible, and Lymond walked straight up to the boy. His riding clothes, swiftly tended since he had come from Tantallon, were sartorial perfection, his hair shone like glass and his voice glittered to match. He was impeccably, unpleasantly sober.

“You have my warmest good wishes for any urgent need you may discover to injure me, personally. Just try it. But I will not have you endanger sixty men through maudlin sentiment and a watery schoolboy defiance. Whatever you meant to do, you drew about yourself and nearly about us a major armed ambush—whether it was of your father’s devising or not is of no importance. Intentions, yours or anyone else’s, don’t matter; they never matter and never excuse: get that into your head. If I allowed any one of your dear old friends now on Crawfordmuir to hear this they would decorticate you like an onion, and you’d deserve it. Next time I shall inform them myself. Is that clear?”

It was damned unfair. Seizing the first weapon to hand, Scott said furiously, “It sounds well, coming from you. Why should I trouble about them? It wouldn’t hinder you from selling any one of us if it paid you. Unless you restrict yourself to wiping out women in holy orders.”

There was an appalling silence. Then Lymond said carefully, “Ill-advised, Scott. Don’t bluster. And particularly don’t bluster in that direction. You may now get out of my sight.”

There was nothing to add. Scott left the room, mounted and rode off to Crawfordmuir hardly realizing that of all the checkered exchanges between them this was the first in which he had, after a fashion, held his own.

As Scott rode west, his father travelled north.

It was some time before Buccleuch, jogging bitterly home from Crumhaugh, thought to wonder how Culter had heard of his appointment with Will. He had told Sybilla, but she was as anxious to keep Culter away from Will and Lymond as he was. Who else?

He thought. Only one person could have seen the note and was likely to act on it in just that way: Janet. Sir Wat’s hands cramped on the reins. Janet! By God, thought Buccleuch, I’ll teach that longnebbit braying bitch of a woman to keep her nose from now on out of my business.… And he put his horse into a canter for Branxholm and lifted his head to scan the night sky.

There was something wrong with the light in the southeast—an underglow of crimson flushing the low cloud. He stared at it for a long moment doubting his eyes; then wheeled and galloped toward the fire with curses fothering the cleft air at his back.

Lord Grey had been as good as his word. Setting out with foot and mounted hackbutters from Jedworth and Roxburgh, Sir Oswald Wylstropp and Sir Ralph Bullmer marched west with orderly authority, reducing everything in their way to ashes. They took thirty prisoners, all the sheep and goats they could manage, and reduced Hawick to a series of ovens in which the resisters were cooked in their skins like new lobsters.

Buccleuch, flying to the scene through paths choked with women and children and the pitiful domestic debris of flight, found his Branxholm men ahead of him under his own captain, and deploying them, took what vengeance he could, since it was too late to save. In the exploding, light-torn darkness, with all the power still left in the district they snapped and tore at Wylstropp’s heels as he left, and killed some of his men and saved some of the animals. It was a poor enough salvage, and a poor enough revenge. After it, turning back with the west wind sick in their lungs, they scattered through the stricken, smoking district, and gave what help they could.

At dawn, Buccleuch rode back to Branxholm with an ache in his back and red eyes and a great fury inside him. In the hall, he remembered something else and strode to his wife’s room with a streaming candle. “Janet Beaton!”

The woman in the bed stirred and opened her eyes; and the big-nosed, generous face split into a sleepy grin. “Well, stick me if it isn’t Wat,” remarked Lady Buccleuch. “Late as usual.”

“I want to have words with you, my lady.”

“Oh, you do? What about?”

“About the heir to this castle, madam. My oldest son Will.”

“Oldest legitimate son,” corrected Janet. “Did ye miss him?”

“I missed him all right,” said her husband grimly.

Janet appeared remarkably spry with it. “Och well, never mind,” said she. “You know what they say. Ye havena lost a son but ye get a daughter.”

Buccleuch stared from under the eagle-owl eyebrows and Janet stared back. From beyond the bed a wavering and disenchanted wail rose, intensified and died. Janet’s beam developed overtones of beatitude. “The newest Buccleuch,” said his wife. “Unpick that damned basilisk stare and go and glower at your new lassie for a change.”

Sir Wat slowly went red in the face. A raffish smile struggled up from the depths of his beard and he covered it with one hand, but the eyes bent on his wife were as soft as a spaniel’s.

“Oh, well enough,” he said. “Well enough. We’ll say no more. It’s over and done with. But—ye needna expect to put me off this way every time, woman!”

“Och, Dod! Don’t worry!” said Janet, from the muddy embrace. “I’d sooner the scolding!”

*  *  *

In such a way ended Sunday, the fifth of February.

Shortly afterward, Sir George Douglas wrote Lord Grey that he hoped before long to appear before the Lord Protector in London, the accredited Ambassador of Her Majesty of Scotland, to arrange the royal marriage.

The Lord Protector wrote to Grey. “You have spent,” he pointed out, “sixteen thousand pounds in nine months, and have only the Buccleuch raid to show for it.…”

Lord Grey sent a laconic message to Lord Wharton. “I set out on Monday week to invade Scotland almost to Edinburgh’s gates. I expect you and the Earl of Lennox to time your entry with mine.”

And then, above the complicated board, freezing the pieces in their busy tracks, hovered a speculative finger which no one could outplay.

The child Queen Mary, the very knot and core of all their plans, fell mortally ill.

T
HEY
feared the English more than her disease. The sick baby Queen was taken to Dumbarton, rocky fortress on the Clyde, and Lady Culter and Christian Stewart were among those summoned to care for her.

The message was brought to Boghall by Tom Erskine. He found the girl standing at the window of Jamie’s empty room, her hands laid loosely on the sill. Simon announced her visitor, allowed Erskine in, and banged the door as adequate comment as she turned.

Left alone with his destiny, Tom Erskine embarked headlong on his message: he had come to take her as far as Midculter before going off himself to the fighting. The conclusion of the gabble may have sounded more petulant than heroic, but Christian didn’t notice. She said sharply, “What fighting?”

“There’s another armed push on the way. From Berwick on the east and Carlisle on the west. The Carlisle inroad is my affair.”

“Who else is going? Lord Culter? John Maxwell?”

“Culter’s going, yes. What Maxwell will do is anybody’s guess.”

It was their chief anxiety. Rowelled by French heels, Governor Arran had at last been brought to an ultimatum. Agnes Herries was destined for his son. But the Master of Maxwell had made it delicately clear that the Herries bride and the Herries estates were the price of his continuing interest in things Scottish; and Maxwell’s interest in the coming invasion was likely to be vital. So with affronted howls on one side from Lord John, and mute reproof from his treasury on the other, Arran let it be known at Threave that appropriate help would receive appropriate reward, and hardly knew what to wish as a result.

Christian was not impressed by these half measures. “Good God: Maxwell either for us or against us will be the turning point of the whole thing. Fortunately she likes him, poor lassie; but whether she did or not I should take her to Threave by the scruff of her neck and beg John Maxwell on my knees, if I were Arran, to come to our side.”

Tom said philosophically, “Well, if you don’t know what he’ll do, then neither does Wharton.…” Memory of his real errand had come to him. He coughed disastrously.