The Game of Kings (9 page)

He reached the postern with his burden, dispensing pulses of excitement and bog smells as his mistress opened it from the inside; and as he explained, Christian Stewart knelt beside their captive in her garden, her dark red hair fallen forward, her blind eyes resigned.

What to Sym was an English magnifico, ripe for ransom, took, bearlike, a different shape under the hypertactile fingers—the shape of an unconscious boy, with a dirty wound, raised and sticky, in the short hair over the nape. She drew together the shirt cords thoughtfully and rose.

“Um. Well, you’ve hooked a twenty-pounder this time, my lad, by the feel of his clothes.… If I were married or promised to that young gentleman I’d sell the lead off the roof to ransom him back. Unless he’s a Spaniard, do you think?”

“Not with that hair, m’lady. Maybe,” said Sym with a sort of agonized calm, “maybe it’s the Protector Somerset? Or Lord Grey?”

“Och, Sym, he’s too young,” said Christian. “Although in a way it’s a pity he’s not, because, Sym my lad: what are you going to do about Hugh?”

“Oh, cock!” said Sym, his excitement checked. “Right enough. Hugh’s in an awful bad temper about the English.”

“Hugh’s bad temper takes practical forms,” said Christian thoughtfully. “Ransom or no ransom, your gentleman will find himself in multiple array on the wall spikes if Hugh sets eyes on him.”

Sym devoted some thought to this. “Of course, we can’t write for ransom anyway until he wakes up and says who he is.”

“No.”

“And by that time, Hugh might be feeling more like himself.”

“I find the resemblance to himself at the present moment quite startling,” said Christian. “But never mind. Go on.”

“So,” said Sym hurriedly, “if we got him up the privy stairs and put him into Jamie’s room, no one need know. All that wing’s empty except for me, and I could look after him. Until he says who he is … and the window’s too high to let him escape and the door could be lockit.”

Christian said slowly, “We could, I suppose, certainly …”

“And if he’s nobody,” said Sym fairly, “we can just hand him over to Hugh.”

“In which event,” said Christian, “he will certainly become nobody in record time. All right. I agree.”

*  *  *

To carry the prisoner within, to strip, wash and bed him, to surround him with hot bricks in socks and light a fire to heat cock-a-leeky and milk and honey sneaked from the buttery took Sym, borne on the wings of simple cupidity, less time than bedding a child.

Christian, pulled by outside necessity, set aside ten minutes to examine his handiwork and used the time to relax, hands clasped, on a chair by the bedside while Sym, a cudgel beside him, bestowed himself hopefully on the window seat.

Blessed silence, and the slow dissolving of the nagging images of the day into something near dreams. Flurried movements of the big fire, to her left. Silk, pricking her right hand as the bed curtains stirred in an eddy. A rustle from Sym’s feet in the rushes. A voice far below in the courtyard, crying something she could not quite catch. A creak from the bed.

Another.

A languid stir of the bedclothes.

It was, thought Christian, fully awake and gripped with laughter, like attending a birth. Were they wrong and he was Scottish, a purebred orthodox achievement with full honours: all well?

There was a thin crackle of pillow-feather; a stifled expletive; then a voice said resignedly, “God: my skull’s split.”

It was a cultured voice, with no inflection which would have seemed out of place at any point north of the Tyne. Like the jewelled aiglettes it announced consequence, character and money. Considering it, she spoke reassuringly. “Better not move. There’s a bump on your head like the Old Man of Storr.” And to save him time and breath she added, “I’m Christian Stewart of Boghall. My lad over there picked you up off the moor.”

There was a long pause; then he spoke, clearly with his head turned toward her. “Bog—Bog … ?”

“Boghall. Yes. You were thoroughly cold and damp, and here’s Sym with some broth for you.”

Unexpectedly, underneath shock and weakness there was the accent of laughter. “Think of the Cauldron of Hell,” remarked their prisoner, “and you have my inside arrangements. But I’ll try. Like the spider, I’ll try. That lightlie comes will lightlie ga … steady … That’s it. I can feed myself—or can I? I’m so sorry. The counterpane is not improved by spilt broth.”

He ate, and much intrigued, Christian waited. At the end, he spoke again. “I was not, I hope, wearing a nightshirt when discovered?”

An artless gentleman. Christian followed the lead. “Your clothes are drying, sir. Your weapons were impounded when we found you were English.”

“English! Lucifer, Lord of Hell!” (Here was passion.) “Do I look like an Englishman?”

“I,” said Christian with wicked simplicity, “am blind. How should I know?”

Used rarely and with reluctance this was, she had found, the infallible test. Braced, she waited: for remorse, embarrassment, dismay, pity, forced sympathy, naked fear.

“Oh, are you? I’m sorry. You hide it extremely well. Then what,” he asked anxiously, “made your friends think I was English?”

Exquisitely done, my young man, thought Christian. She said aloud, “Well, to begin with, you were wearing an English cloak. We’ve disposed of that for your own sake. Feeling in Boghall about the English
has been running gallows high since Lord Fleming was killed. You’re safe in this room with Sym and myself, but I shouldn’t advise you to attract the attention of anyone else in the castle.”

“I see. Or I shall meet my fate. Without pitie, hanged to be, and waver with the wind. My beard, if I had one—Lord, I nearly have—is full young yet to make a purfle of it, even to replace the one I’ve stained. And why, Mistress Stewart, should you and your henchman trouble to defend me from death and horrible maims?”

“What a suspicious mind you have.” Blandly, Christian matched metre with metre. “Why do you think? For gold, for gude; for wage or yet for wed?”

“I think no such thing: you malign me, I assure you. Every coherent sentiment escaped from the louvre at the back of my head long ago, and I am swimming in a sea of foolishness. I’ve already forgotten what we’re discussing.”

Simon Bogle, a single-minded person, had not. “Lady Christian and I,” he said dourly, “were wondering what your name and style might be?”

In a feverish silence, the young man stirred restlessly. “Lady Christian. Damnation. She has a title and I don’t know it. She lives in a bog; and of this also I am ignorant. Q.E.D. I cannot be Scots. Therefore why your excessive kindness … Oh God! Of course. Ransom.”

“And natural virtue. For gold and for gude, in fact.” Christian, visited by an unworthy satisfaction, was magnanimous. “But as part owner of the property, I think we should defer speech until you’re more rested. You’ve had a sore knock there.”

“Several sore knocks,” he said, and fell silent, rousing himself only as she felt for and took away pillows. “Don’t you want my name?” And dreamily, “This officer, but doubt, is callit Deid.…”

“No.” Aware of Sym’s silent resistance, she spoke firmly. “No, never mind. Not just now,” feeling exhaustion and faintness overwhelm him. Even so, he managed a gruesome chuckle.

“O lady: nor later. Deceit deceiveth and shall be deceived. It’s no good and I can’t prove it’s no good: I shall be as much use to you as the Nibelunglied. For I can recall nothing … nothing … not the remotest damned shred of my identity.”

*  *  *

Christian left the situation in Sym’s hands that night. Next morning, however, she woke thinking of her prisoner, and obtaining food and wine by a shameless lie in the kitchen, made her way with it up the private stair.

Inside the sickroom, she was aware of a strange step even before she shut the door; and indeed as she turned to do so, a voice said readily, “You may want to come back later, Lady Christian. Sym is out, and I’m up and standing by the window.”

She shut the door. “Ah, you’re feeling better. My dear man, not even an attack on my virtue would drive me downstairs till I’ve done. I’ve already climbed more steps this morning than a bell ringer.”

He laughed, but did not come to help her, she noticed; and, respecting his tact, she took the tray herself to the window seat and laid it on a kist. Then, sitting by the bed, she ascertained that the fever was gone, the headache was less; that he was profoundly grateful, and remarkably well up in current events.

“So Simon has been talking to you.”

“He has seldom stopped. He tells me Lord Fleming’s widow and family are all at Stirling, and thinks it uncommonly rash of you to stay behind. With which, as a special hazard myself, I must agree.”

She shrugged. “I can do more good here at the moment than in Stirling.” And felt impelled to add, “Naturally, I can’t risk being an encumbrance, or a hostage either. If things get much worse—or much better for that matter—a friend of the family will take me to Stirling.”

“And I shall stay with captors somewhat less benign. Ah me,” he said rather ruefully. “It may sound selfish but, as the poet said, words is but wind, but dunts is the devil.”

“Doesn’t that depend who you are?” she remarked. “If you bear a Scots name, you’ve nothing to fear. Or is this officer, but doubt, still callit Deid?”

There was a pause. Then he said, “Are you quoting from me?”

“Your very words last night.”

“Oh. I must have been in dire spirits. Have you ever lost your memory? I suppose not. It’s an experience. Pleasant but precarious, like the gentleman who sat under palm trees feeding fruit to a lion …” Pausing for breath, he added, “I rely on you to put down any lacunae to the effects of a blow on the head. I am but ane mad man that thou hast here met—”

“—I do you pray,” she said gravely, “cast that name from you away.”

Delighted, he took her up at once. “Yes, of course. Call you Hector, or Oliver … What else? Sir Porteous—Amadas—Perdiccas—Florent … How common the predicament seems to be. Most of the heroes and all the poets appear to have been there before me. I am as I am, and so will I be; but how that I am, none knoweth truly … Disdain me not without desert! Forsake me not till I deserve, nor hate me not till I offend.” And he abandoned English plaintively.

“Your French is excellent, of course,” said Christian. “And you disliked being called English.”

“Thank you.”

“Implying Scottish rather than English affinities—”

“I hoped you’d notice that.”

“—In which case,” said Christian reasonably, “do you not owe it to yourself to appear in public? Someone here might even recognize you.”

“A shrewd move, decidedly,” said the prisoner with interest. “If I disagree, I am undoubtedly lying about my loss of memory. On the other hand, it might be genuine, and my belief that I am Scots might be unfounded; in which case your friend Hugh, according to Sym, will be apt to give free play to his prejudices, and your hopes of a ransom will vanish.”

“You must think us very mistrustful,” said Christian equably. “Why should you be lying? If you are English, you would have no motive for hiding your name. The sooner we know, the sooner we should arrange your freedom.”

“I find the Socratean method even more uncomfortable than plain sarcasm. I propose to say what you wish me to say, viz.: there are two exceptions in your category. If I were English but destitute, and if I were English and politically important, I should avoid identification like the plague.”

“—Therefore?”

“Therefore when I say, as I do, that I have no wish to appear to your friends before my memory comes back, you have no means whatever of proving the honesty of my reasons—”

“Which in fact are … ?”

“Funk,” he said promptly. “Sheer terror of the dark. I don’t like standing outside the door of a crowded room any more than you do, waiting to be pounced on from inside.”

Christian said, “A priest would tell you this was pride and self-conceit.”

“If anyone so described it to you, I hope you impeached him for a pompous liar.”

“My dear man, would you have me excommunicate? It’s a process of hardening one goes through. You would find me hard to shock.”

“And to deceive?”

She smiled, and threw his own quotation back at him. “Deceit deceiveth and shall be deceived. You have an incorruptible voice and a lawyer’s tongue. One thing I commend in you: you refused to add to the sins of the poets. A false pedigree is always worse than none at all.”

“Avoiding your traps, O virtuous lady, O mixt and subtle Christian. But, as you see, I am honest and good, and not ane word could lie.”

She laughed. “I deduce that you’ve lived on Hymettus on honey and larks’ tongues.”

“And can, I suppose, die in a bog as well as anywhere,” he said dryly.

No one likes to appear cheap. Betrayed into archness, Christian caught her temper and said evenly, “I can’t, of course, answer for what will happen to you if I leave before your memory comes back. But meanwhile, until it does, you may have grace to stay anonymous, if you wish.”

She rose, adding briskly, “And meantime, there are many would envy you. Make the most of your freedom, my friend—you’ve more of it than any of us.”

“True. Only lunatics have more. I’m ungrateful to find it intolerable; and more than intolerable, of course, not to know the extent of the burden I’m putting on you.”

Christian had reached the door. She turned, and said ironically, “No burden at all. You haven’t forgotten?

She shut the door, smiling, and left him to think it over.

This was Thursday, the 15th of September. Tom Erskine had gone south on Monday: he might very well be back for her any day now.

In the meantime, the demands on her time and her resources were continuous. All the lands of Biggar and Kilbucho, Hartree and Thankerton were in the care of the castle. In the absence of all the able men who had followed Lord Fleming to Pinkie and who had not yet returned—who might never return—the families on these lands must be succoured: given advice, news and medical help as they needed it; and plans made for their reception if the invaders broke through.