The Game of Kings (39 page)

Cornered, she snapped. “I might have done, if you hadn’t been missing three weeks out of four. I was miserable, and idle, and not very well, and it happened. I might have agreed to tell you earlier—but as it is, I’ve told you now. Does it matter? Is it so hard to believe?”

The slip escaped her notice, but not Richard’s. He said,
“Agreed
to tell me? Agreed with whom, for God’s sake! Lymond?”

“No! No.”

“Then who? One of the girls? Buccleuch? Tom Erskine? Rothesay
Herald? You didn’t manage to tell me, but I’m sure you made certain we should both be the clack of the shopkeepers. Who was it?”

Mariotta said furiously, “I needed advice, and he noticed.… Anyway, he’s been a good friend to me. To you as well. It was Dandy Hunter.”

“So he advised you how to conduct this very comic marriage of ours. How friendly. And was it only advice he gave you? Or has Dandy, like Lymond, been showering you with expensive and unsolicited gifts? It was your maxim, I remember: it’s often more expensive to accept favours than to buy them. What did Dandy exact for his services?”

“Nothing! Stop it, Richard!” said Mariotta. “I’m sorry. I was a fool not to tell you; I was mad to tell Dandy first; I shouldn’t have told you now in the way I did. But I
have
told you … I didn’t need to. You would never have found out.”

Richard said, staring at her, “No, I don’t suppose I should. I should have been one of those odd stock characters, the ludicrous deceived husband, which would have afforded Lymond endless innocent pleasure …”

“No!” She tried to catch hold of him, but he moved away, pacing the room.

“Lymond … Dandy … Who else? Who else, now?” He stopped dead, a square, monumental, derisive figure. “You must think. After all, we’ve got to give this damned child an identity.”

Mariotta sat down. “It isn’t true.”

“Can you prove it?”

This time, steel met steel. “No!” said Mariotta, and dropping her arms, she turned to her table. Watched by this venomous new foe she lifted her jewellery piece by piece and put it on: the emeralds around her pretty neck; the bracelets and rings, the long earrings and the combs, drifting sparkling in her dark hair. She turned to him covered in light, in a blaze of many-eyed, expensive vulgarity, with her voice doubly, diamond hard.

“No!” she repeated. “No, I can’t prove it. Why should I? What do I care for you or your brother? You’re both Crawfords and you’re both Scots, the one alien to me as the other, except that one of you has a way with women and the other has not. Believe what you like.”

She saw him, with a belated fragment of clear vision, standing against the door, his clothes engrailed with the flash of her jewels; and his eyes were not blank. He spoke slowly.

“I will bring him to you,” said Richard. “I will bring him to you on his knees, and weeping, and begging aloud to be killed.” And he went.

It was over.

Mariotta waited until the Dowager, with Christian beside her, had left for Dumbarton, and until Tom Erskine, joining arms with her husband, had ridden out of the gateway and turned south. Then she locked the door and began to pack all she owned.

*  *  *

The Queen was feverish, the fat wrists pounding and the red, sore limbs thrashing restlessly; the tangled red hair gummed to the pillow, to her brow and eyes.

The doctors had chosen a high, deep-walled room in Dumbarton Castle for her sickroom, with its roots in the rock and the stormy grey tides of the Clyde Estuary slapping at its base. There the child lay in a formidable four-poster nursed by her ladies, by Lady Culter and by Christian. The bedclothes were tumbled night and day, and the satin pillowcase patched and stained from the crusted lips and swollen, broken face.

On the invisible filament of this one life, the two English armies moved in to attack, one on the east coast of Scotland and one on the west. First, Lord Wharton and the Earl of Lennox left Carlisle on Sunday, the nineteenth of February, and in two days had reached Dumfries.

On that same Tuesday, Lord Grey of Wilton led an English army into Scotland from Berwick and camped for the night at Cockburnspath. By nightfall next day he had established himself and his army in the town of Haddington, less than twenty miles from Edinburgh, and was proceeding to dig himself in.

At the same time, Lord Culter’s Scottish force, driving south, discovered the route taken by Wharton and Lennox and veered to come at their flank, thus missing a spearhead of horse sent ahead by Lord Wharton under his son Harry.

Harry was tough and confident. His orders were to bypass the house of Drumlanrig, to destroy the town of Durisdeer, and to give fight only if the Douglases did.

He expected little trouble from the Douglases. Report said most of them had already fled from his way: their head, the Earl of Angus
himself, was at Drumlanrig and with him, whispering in his ear and stiffening his gouty resolution, was his daughter, Margaret Lennox.

The disaster exploded in Lord Wharton’s face: Wharton, the most experienced of them all, plodding north with his foot soldiers in his son’s wake.

He was eight miles north of Dumfries when one survivor brought the news. The Douglases had not fled. They had joined up with John Maxwell in orderly ambush, and falling on Harry’s advancing horse, had smashed them to pieces. In this they were helped by the Earl of Angus and Drumlanrig himself, whose house Wharton had spared and where Margaret, ignorant of her appalling failure, must be waiting.

And further aided by one half of young Wharton’s own force of Border English and forsworn Scots who, peeling off the red cross of England, had abandoned him with a ferocious joy at the first onslaught and had joined the Douglases.

There was no time for mourning: in an hour the Scottish army might be upon him. Wharton turned from the messenger and found Lennox beside him, the fair, unreliable face whiter than his own. “Margaret!”

He had his horse gathered to go when Wharton took rough hold of his bridle. “No! I’m sorry, sir, I can’t risk your being taken hostage. The whole Scottish army lies between here and Drumlanrig. Even if you got there, your wife’d be worse off in your company than she is now in Angus’s. For God’s sake—”

He waited only to see the resolution fade from the earl’s face, and began to issue orders. It was then that he heard, unbelieving, that fighting had already taken place on his right wing. Culter, always gifted with a special intelligence in the field, had found Wharton’s outposts and advanced to strike his flank.

Maxwell’s men, pouring over the hills half an hour later, found the English troops streaming south with Culter at their heels; in minutes they had closed the gap and themselves caught the skirts of Wharton’s army. It staggered in its tracks, turned uncertainly, and willy-nilly, came to grips with the combined Scottish troops, renegades and all.

This time they fought side by side, the Maxwells and Douglases, Buccleuch and Culter, and if they were irresistible, it was partly because they despised each other and partly because they dared not lose. Wharton, even in his despairing rage, could make nothing of
them. He recoiled, and recoiled again, leaving his dead and wounded where they lay, and within an hour it was nearly over, and a rider was off, wearing his exhausted horse to the hocks, to tell Carlisle of the annihilation of the whole of Lord Wharton’s army.

Tom Wharton, the Warden’s older son at Carlisle, sent the news to Lord Grey at Haddington. It told of the total overthrow of the entire company led by Lord Wharton and the Earl of Lennox, including the loss of his father and his brother Harry, and it was the death knell of the combined plan. Lord Grey dared not hesitate. Leaving a garrison to fortify the town of Haddington, he marched straight home to Berwick.

There he learned with a shrill and incredulous fury that Harry Wharton was alive; that escaping with some men from Durisdeer he had been able to rescue his father from his later sad straits and that, although much diminished both in numbers and in confidence, Lord Wharton, the Earl of Lennox, Harry and a large proportion of their troops were all happily safe at Carlisle.

What he did not learn, and what the Earl of Angus, much mystified, could have told him, was that when the Douglas returned to Drumlanrig after the fighting, his daughter Margaret Lennox had totally disappeared.

Sybilla took the news to the Queen, hesitating outside the sickroom where Mary of Guise had remained now all day. Then she gently opened the door.

The priests and the doctors had gone. Alone in the room, the Queen Mother knelt by the bedside, her cheek on the smooth coverlet. For a moment Sybilla paused; then she walked steadily to the bedside and looked.

The child had turned, and was sleeping quietly under the fresh sheets, one hand under her cheek, her breath stirring peacefully in a deep and feverless sleep.

Sybilla blew her nose with muffled energy, and touched the Queen Dowager on the shoulder.

By sheer chance, Lord Culter’s irreverent cadet was less than fifty yards away from him when he swept down the Durisdeer road in
murderous pursuit of Wharton. Lymond let him go. Except for an episode which he made memorable both for John Maxwell and Lord Wharton’s son, he took no part in the fighting, his concern at the time being solely to supervise an extramural activity on the part of Turkey Mat.

Will Scott, sitting under orders in his room, the Buke of the Howlat open on his knee, heard the party leave Crawfordmuir for Durisdeer. They came back much later, and Turkey’s voice was audible, first on the floor below him; then travelling up the stairs which passed Lymond’s room, off which his own opened. The jostling of several feet came next; they passed Lymond’s door and ascended to the third and top story, where they halted. The lock of a door clicked, and a woman’s voice said icily, “Assuming that you now feel safe, will you be good enough to unbind my eyes?” Then a door banged, the lock turned again, and the tramp of feet repassed the door and disappeared below.

In the racket from the first floor he nearly missed the soft opening and closing of the stairway door into Lymond’s room. Then the firelit walls in the adjoining room bloomed yellow in new-lit candlelight and his own door swung open. “Bored?” asked Lymond.

Scott dropped the book he had not been reading. “I heard Mat and a woman. Was that the Countess?”

“That was Margaret Douglas.” The mobile face was virginal. Lymond said, “The sweet woman doesn’t know yet who has her: I thought it would be nice to let her speculate for an hour or so. When she’s brought to me you will stay here and listen. In the dark with the door two-thirds shut. God knows why it should be left to me to educate you, but I feel in all fairness you ought to be equipped for life.” At the door he added mildly, “Enjoy yourself,” and went out.

Scott tried to read. Except for the muffled voices from the lower stair, the tower was silent; the hills and half-mined valleys outside lay quiet in the dripping darkness. Next door, there was no movement either, although he could hear the fire crack and see the resulting flare through his own near-shut door. He had no idea what Lymond was doing. He remembered suddenly a revealing expression used at Annan, and wondered if it had been reported to Lady Lennox; and what a well-born majestically reared young woman would make of this wildcat eccentric.

When he thought the time was nearly up, he snuffed his own candles and found a place from which he could comfortably see without
being seen. As an afterthought, he took off his boots. Then he settled to watch.

Matthew’s knock on the staircase door, when it came, was thunderous and his voice when it opened rolled like Pluto welcoming one of the damned. “The Countess of Lennox,” he said, and retreated, closing the door behind him.

Margaret Douglas, standing just inside the room, was cloaked to the chin and very frightened indeed. The quality of her startled Scott: the near-leonine vigour, the firm chin and big, shapely hands. Then the unexpected black eyes took on fire from the reflected light, her lips parted and she unclenched and dropped her hands. “Francis!” Few people, except perhaps those with Scott’s opportunities, could have told that the recognition had preceded the fright. “Francis!”

“Yes. Come in,” said Lymond pleasantly, coming into view. He was dressed, as Scott had hardly ever seen him, in white shirt and hose, sleek white and gold in the firelight: the effect was damascened and deliberate.

Momentarily bemused, the Countess of Lennox moved forward, her blue robe brushing the new wood of the floor, until she shared the firelight. Her hair was wet with rain; its fairness darkened. “Was I brought here by your orders? I wish you had told me. I was very frightened.”

Lymond drew out a chair for her, and waited while she sat. “You should perhaps allow yourself to be frightened now. It would be very suitable and maidenly.”

The intelligent black eyes were without guile. “It probably would. But I have a husband.”

“A rather indifferent one.” The silverpoint voice was equally bland.

“A very partial one.… At least I trust him to protect my good name,” said Margaret. So she was not ignorant of what happened at Annan. She added reflectively, “And he saved your life, once.”

“True,” said Lymond. “But then, I spared his at Annan. I’ve regretted it since. I think that, like the dolphin, he would be prettier dying.”

Margaret exclaimed gently. “Dear me: now, what have we here? Revenge or jealousy? You want me as a weapon against my husband?”

“What else should I want you for?”

Her eyes sparkled, but her voice was calm. “To insult me, perhaps?”

“No. What a low opinion of me you have,” said Lymond tenderly. “I haven’t captured you to exchange for Lennox. Not at all. I was proposing to offer you to your husband in return for your small son.”

At last, the Attic tableau exploded. “Harry!” She was on her feet. “Not my baby: no! Francis, please! That’s being vindictive beyond all sense and sanity. Even you can’t be callous enough to ask a small child to suffer for … Matthew won’t send him!”

“Of course he will. He can always have more.”