The Game of Kings (12 page)

“Alone and unattended,” said outraged motherhood grimly. “And then of course my daughter is accosted, attacked! One hears her screams, the girl returns, thrusts her back into the boat and attempts to return unobserved. Oh, I grant you the girl Elspet is innocent: by returning she doubtless foiled the attempt. But how could such a thing be? Is there not a bodyguard, here at Inchmahome … attendants … the good fathers? Are there not armed men surrounding the lake, blocking the roads? Dame Sybilla, but for my daughter’s screams, where would she be now?”

“Sitting in the Pleasure Gardens, I imagine,” said Lady Culter dryly,
“although I must admit that the attractions of Perkin seem to have played ducks and drakes with our safety precautions. Suppose we ask the Queen’s Grace?”

Mary of Guise, Queen Dowager, stretched an arm and called her daughter. “Marie! Come and tell Maman what the ill-doing man did?”

“What ill-doing man?” asked the red-haired child, trailing over the grass without lifting her dress, and proffering a sticky mouth. “Can I say my rhyme?”

Her Royal mother, ignoring this, wiped the mouth thoroughly with a clean handkerchief and said, “The man in the Pleasure Gardens, ma p’tite. What did he say?”

Her Most Noble Majesty Mary, crowned Queen of all Scotland, found her pomander and began to play with it, with unsavory results.

“He wasn’t a malfaisant. I liked him. Can I—”

“Mary, was he a monk?” said Sybilla gently, mindful of one of the unlikelier aspects of Elspet’s story (“But all the monks are at Sext”).

“He was a
nice
monk,” said the child, with a single inflection neatly robbing the statement of all value. She bit the pomander, spat, and relented. “He said the rhyme, and he knew my name.”

“But …” said the Dowager Queen.

“But …” said Mariotta.

“I wonder,” said Lady Culter, recognizing defeat, “if it could be Dean Adam back from Cambuskenneth? He went last Monday, and I suppose—Or a wandering Observant? Oh well, he did her no harm—I think her screams were annoyance when Elspet lost her head and tried to get her into the boat and back.”

“They found no one?”

“No one. Lady Christian herself had been walking there, and heard no one at all in the gardens.”

“Can I,” said the Queen’s Most Noble Majesty, with urgency, “say it now?”

“What … I suppose so,” said Maman, her brow still furrowed.

“Eh bien,” said Mary smoothly. She recited.

“What is it, what is it, what is it?” roared the Queen.

There was a shaken silence.

Then Lady Culter, in a voice preternaturally grave, said (rather unkindly), “I think—it’s a hawthornberry, is it not, chérie?”

Her Majesty’s face fell.

*  *  *

Christian laughed outright. “How absurd … ‘Comment le saluroye, quant point ne le congnois?’ Of course I recognized who it was. Credit me with ears, at least.”

There was a moment more of the kind of constraint she remembered from their last interview in the cave, then the man beside her gave a mock sigh. “Forgive my obtruseness. My voice again? Crying the coronoch on high. I’m sorry about the uproar. I didn’t expect company, but even so, all would have gone well if that blasted girl hadn’t snatched the child so suddenly. Magnificent lungs for her age.”

They sat in the short grass in the middle of the maze a previous Earl of Menteith had designed on the north shore of the lake. Dusty box hedges with an unused air shut off any view of the water: from the rear a folly in marble overhung them.

It was warm and still, as it had been at Boghall, where, as her prisoner and her patient, he had played the lute and sung to her of frogs. Christian hugged her knees. “But how did the child find you?”

He answered ruefully, “I fell asleep. Considerably more than doth the nightingale. And the next thing I knew she was sitting on my chest.”

“What did you say?” said Christian, fascinated.

“She
said, ‘M. l’abbé’ (you’ll have gathered I’m dressed like a magpie)—‘M. l’abbé, you ’ave greatly insufficient of tonsure.’ And I said, ‘Madame la reine d’Ecosse, you are greatly in excess of tonnage.’ After which exchange of pleasantries …”

“She got off?”

“Not at all. She bounced like a cannon ball and said that Dédé—”

“Her pony.”

“—That Dédé had long yellow teeth; and did I know—”

“That,” said Christian in chorus, “you can tell a person’s age from their teeth. That’s a favourite one.”

“Oh. Well, as you say. So she opened her mouth, and I pronounced her seven years of age, and she admitted to five. (What is she—four?) Then I opened my mouth—”

“What was it, a pebble?”

“—I opened my mouth and received inside it a small fish, still resisting delivery to its Maker. After that—”

“But what did you do? With the fish?”

“I pretended to eat it,” he said simply. “Then we played a game or two, and sang a bit, and discussed a number of subjects. Then the nursemaid, or whoever she was, arrived, and whipped off the child, crowing like the cocks of Cramond. And you know the echo, to boot.”

“I wish I’d been there,” said Christian. “Had you been waiting long? I’d walked to the far end of the garden.”

“Not very long. But I have been, and am, all a-quiver like goose grass. My dear lady, you mustn’t toss the secret of the Queen’s hiding place at the feet of a complete stranger. It’s not in the rules. Quite apart from perjuring yourself on my behalf just now.”

She said regretfully, “I make some terrible mistakes. But then I’m a very hasty person. You see, they wouldn’t let me bring Sym, and I’d no one to send, even if Tom Erskine had found out by Tuesday—which he hadn’t. Then old Adam Peebles had to go to Inchkenneth, and I asked him to give a message to Sym so that he could go to the cave and tell you to come today. I had to make the message so garbled … and it was a gamble whether Tom would even have reached us by now … but he has, so everything has turned out well. Did you have much trouble coming? And getting the robes?”

He brushed the questions aside. “It wasn’t difficult—it should have been more so: the guard is wretched. I came by the hill path, and I had your password. There again … I don’t mind being a lame duck, but the pond you’ve put me into has a kingdom in it, my dear. By all means let’s play guessing games. ‘Will you hide me, Yes, par foi! Shall I be found out? Not through me!’—and all the rest of it; but not with your life, or the child’s: and think what happened to Eve, at that …

“Good God,” he said, coming to a stop. “I appear to be giving you a miserable nagging for risking your life and reputation for me. Look to me as Wat did to the worm, and relieve my conscience.”

She made no attempt either to answer or to argue with him. “Is your head quite better?”

To her relief, he accepted the change of subject. “Quite healed, thanks to you. I fall asleep sometimes rather a lot—as demonstrated—that’s all.” He hesitated; then said, “How do you get back?”

She showed him a whistle at her girdle. “I blow from the shore, and a boat comes. Then Lady Culter or Mariotta will meet me.” She smiled. “We’re a crowded household.”

He said, “The Culters. Of course. Who else—Buccleuch?”

She shook her head. “In Stirling. Tom Erskine had to tell him that—” She stopped.

“What?”

She said, “Oh, well. It’s common gossip now. His oldest boy Will has joined forces with—”

“—The God of the Flies, the Lord of the Dunghill—I know,” he said. “How did he take it?”

“Buccleuch? Terribly shocked, and grieved, and remorseful, I think. He felt he’s driven him off in a fit of temper.”

“I expect he should have thought of that in the first place,” he said with unexpected asperity, and she heard him get to his feet. “My dear lady, they’ll wonder what’s become of you. Did Erskine really tell you about Crouch?”

She told him, rising with the help of his arm in its coarse monk’s robe. “Crouch is Sir George Douglas’s prisoner.”

“Douglas has him!” There was a thoughtful silence.

“Does that help?” she said tentatively.

“Yes, of course it helps. Very much.” He appeared to be in a difficulty. “Yes … I have been postponing … Lady Christian, when we last met you were unthinkably kind and generous—for no kind of thanks that I remember making. I swore to myself not to involve you further. Then when I got your message I was irresponsible enough to come here after all. But at least you shan’t be in the dark. You shall hear—now—who I am, and if you want to call the guard, I shan’t try to escape this time.”

“No!” she exclaimed.
“I don’t want to know!”

There was, for the first time, a weary distaste in his voice. “But you require to know—you must see that. This secret—the Queen’s hiding place—”

“Have you betrayed it? Will you betray it?”

“No.”

“Then leave me ignorant,” said Christian. “What would make matters easier for your conscience might make them insupportable for mine. I prefer to be selfish. God knows I’ve been wrong—politically, legally, conventionally and every other way—in judgments before. But these always seemed to me the more irrelevant
aspects of human decency.… You are at least Scottish, I think?”

“Yes.”

“—And in trouble. Well, I’m human,” said Christian. “I don’t want conscience money in the form of secrets: not just now, thank you. But the day you genuinely want help, I’ll be proud to have your confidence. Till then, show your thanks, if you wish to, by letting me have news of you sometimes.”

The man was silent. Then he said lightly, “I can say naught but Hoy gee ho!—words that belong to the cart and the plough. Your confidence is fully misplaced this time, but I imagine you suspected that all along.… Tell me: would you know again the other voice you heard in the cave?”

She nodded.

“Good,” he said. “Yes, I shall keep in touch. Not as often as I should like, but certainly more than I ought by all the tenets you quoted.” They were almost out of the shelter of the box hedges, and he stopped and took her hand, as if examining it. “What in God’s name are you going by?” he said. “Instinct? Intuition?”

“Common sense. Which describes your case as fortunae telum, non culpae.”

He answered, bleakly, in the same language. “Heu! The darts which make me suffer are my own. Common sense can be a poor guide and an uncertain surgeon. Better—much better—be foolish, like me. God clip you close,” he said, and was gone.

Christian walked to the shore and there blew a nerve-racking blast on the whistle.

O
N SUNDAY, the day after the affair at Lake of Menteith, Lord Culter was also taking aquatic exercise of a kind which all but turned his epithalamics into elegies.

Mariotta, it is certain, was not alone in finding her husband baffling. Whatever his thoughts about being separated from his wife after three weeks of marriage, Richard kept them to himself and applied his undeniable ability to work.

Under his remote, laconic leadership, the Culter men spent an enlivening week, racing through the night after Wharton, harrying his outposts and nibbling his tail as he recoiled on Carlisle. Then, changing with equal aplomb to the politician’s bonnet, Lord Culter
set about taping and testing the mood of the southwestern districts which had been the theatre of Wharton’s operations, and still lay open to foray and seduction from the south.

The English had left garrisons at Castlemilk and Langholm. These, with his small force, he could not touch; neither could he do a great deal at Dumfries or Lochmaben, or with those unlucky citizens—“assured Scots”—who lived nearest the shadow of Carlisle and had in sheer self-preservation to buy immunity with promises, and even carry them out sometimes.

But with those nineteen hundred who had promised help for England in August he had surprising success, and when he turned back north for Midculter on Friday, September 23rd, his train was slightly out of hand with high spirits and very little damaged; and he left behind him a number of impressed Johnstones, Armstrongs, Elliots and Carruthers.

Halfway home, he remembered a promise, and sending on most of his men to disperse to their homes, turned aside at Mollinburn with six horsemen to ride through the Lowthers to Morton.

On Sunday afternoon, the party he was expecting came in from Blairquhan, and he left Morton on the Sanquhar road to take the Mennock Pass north. With him rode the Baroness Herries, his six men and two women servants.

Agnes Herries was thirteen years old, inexpressibly rich, and not very pretty. In spite of two years in the Culter household acquiring, supposedly, polish and panache, she still had a loud and energetic voice, poor skin and a passion for
romans idylliques
. Even Sybilla, soul of charity and tolerance, had mentioned to the girl’s grandfather that the child had regrettable taste; adding inaccurately that it came no doubt from the late Lord Herries her father, and not from her mother who had thrown over the joys of widowhood for a well-endowed marriage.

Grandfather Kennedy of Blairquhan, who was waiting with ill-concealed impatience for Agnes’s two younger sisters to qualify also for Lady Culter’s hospitality, had said rapidly that nevertheless she was a dear child and a pleasure about the house. He had then, mindful of his responsibilities, suggested that Lady Culter should take the girl to Court for the autumn. It wasn’t to be hoped that she would ever look much better than she did then, and if the Governor expected his son to marry her (they had been affianced since infancy) the sooner they got on with it the better.…