The Game of Kings (47 page)

“Inviting the evisceration party? That seems a bit odd,” said Gideon dryly.

“It nearly turned out to be very odd indeed. But then, I didn’t expect to be among the welcoming party—or if I had been, I expected to be enjoying the society of Mr. Harvey, which would have altered things a trifle. However, as it happened—”

“As it happened, it seems to me you were abnormally lucky to escape from your own cross fire.”

Lymond agreed dreamily. “Nemesis nodded. I know.”

“And now?”

“And now you shall come with me to my home for a change …

The horses Lymond had captured were tired, and the journey to Crawfordmuir took the two men rather longer than it need have done.

About halfway there, they came across the redheaded boy.

He was a formidable and well-grown young man, on a horse almost as weary as their own, and beside him a small swarthy gentleman on a long-faced brown pony. Lymond reined instantly before the boy’s drawn sword, and effervesced into gnatlike mockery.

“Will Scott! With chin driven into his chest as if he’s been thumped
on the head with a fact. Facts and Mr. Scott never meet: they collide. What’s wrong now?”

Scott! Gideon’s eyebrows shot up; the black-haired man grinned; and the young man exclaimed with an unhappy, controlled violence, “What have you done with my father?”

“Exercised him and sent him home. Johnnie, you shouldn’t frighten the child.”

The dark person smiled, showing beautiful, sharp teeth. “I didn’t. He got the story elsewhere and was wearing himself out trying to track you all down. I thought it would be handier to help him find you.”

Scott ignored it, his whole mind set on Lymond. “I thought I was the person wrapped ready for sale; but no. I was nothing—the grease around the candle, the keyhole for the key. You sold my father and your own brother to the English, but by God, you’ve still got a reckoning to face for it! Get down.”

“Make me?” invited Lymond, and unfurled himself with terrifying suddenness. There was an explosion of movement. Scott, swordless, was ripped from his horse and stood gaping, while Lymond addressed Gideon.

“We’re not always so uncouth. I’m sorry. You were at Heriot. Would you say that the Scots who surprised you were falling into a trap?”

Gideon, fascinated, spoke the truth. “Oh the contrary. Scott of Buccleuch and his friends had prepared a very efficient trap of their own.”

“I told him,” said Johnnie virtuously. “I gave all the help I could to Buccleuch.”

Scott’s hands were doubled. “But you completed the bargain somehow. You’ve got Harvey.”

Prompted by the eye of his impresario Gideon responded, amused, to the cue. “My name is Somerville,” he said quietly. “I’m afraid Lord Grey steered rather an erratic course as well. He didn’t keep his promise to bring Harvey north.” And out of charity, he added, “Your father took no harm in the fighting. They didn’t get any prisoners through a chance intervention of mine, but both Buccleuch and Lord Culter got away quite safely.”

Scott’s eyes never shifted from Lymond. “I seem to have made a fool of myself again?”

“You put yourself in a damned silly position to begin with. But you can put half the blame, if you like, on the universal habit of pattering off to Dandy Hunter with one’s troubles. Is that a fair comment?”

The red-haired boy flushed, and then went pale. “I suppose so, yes. All right. I suppose I should apologize again. Or would one omnibus grovel cover all past and future failings?”

“Anything,” said Lymond, “that will prevent you from leaping like a chamois to unutterable conclusions. Seen all you want to, Johnnie?”

The white teeth flashed. “I like watching acrobatics. If you want me again—”

“—I shall consult the viscera of a fish louse. Goodbye!”

Gideon found himself looking into a pair of snapping brown eyes. “He pays well,” murmured Johnnie; and nipping his pony between his knees, darted off. The Master’s gaze, unusually wide, followed him.

It had been folly to lose his temper, however briefly, and both he and Gideon knew it.

*  *  *

Unlike his predecessor Mr. Crouch, Gideon Somerville had within him considerable resources of scholarship and wit. Life at Shortcleugh he found full of a freakish interest; and after two days he had a thoroughgoing admiration for the assurance with which the dominus quod-libetarius did his job.

On the second day he was brought down from the top floor to Lymond’s room, and began himself, briskly, on entering. “Your plan now, I take it, is to exchange me for Samuel Harvey.”

Lymond considered this, tapping his teeth. “Do you think the Protector would give Harvey up?”

“I like to think he won’t,” said Gideon.

The Master threw the pen he was holding on the desk and got up. “I doubt if Lady Lennox can persuade him a second time. But in any case, you’re a friend of Lord Grey’s. He’ll bring Harvey north if the Protector doesn’t.”

“He may,” said Gideon. “But it won’t make any difference. I’ve no intention of buying my freedom at the price of someone else’s life. Money, yes: you have a right to ransom me if you wish. But you’ll neither find me nor make me a party to any other arrangements, alive or—or dead.”

Lymond moved restlessly. “Honest men are notoriously hard to do business with.… Harvey’s life will be quite safe with me.”

Gideon said, “I’m afraid I cannot take the risk.”

“Your wife wouldn’t see it as a risk.”

“My wife would agree with me,” said Gideon in a final tone, and waited again.

Lymond prowled across and reseated himself. “You can’t stop me, of course,” he said flatly. “I’ve only to send your signet ring and a message to Grey, and keep you stuffed full of drugs till the exchange is effected.”

“I recognize that, of course,” said Gideon. “But I’ll make it as diff-difficult as I can.”

“Then I’ll offer you another bargain,” said Lymond, and looked up suddenly. “Since honesty is your surest asset, let us gamble with that. There is your sword, your knife and the key of your room. There is a horse waiting for you downstairs. You are perfectly free to go home provided you will take it on your conscience to arrange for me to meet Harvey without any danger to my life, and with any measures you like to safeguard his.”

The word “free” startled Gideon into movement; then he put the tips of his clean fingers together and surveyed them calmly.

What was the flaw? Not a threat to his health: he had to be kept alive for the purpose of the exchange. But as soon as he left his prison, he was out of Lymond’s control. He could go home and do nothing further: this time he would set a guard, he promised himself grimly, that wouldn’t admit a one-legged mouse. Or he could go home and make the desired arrangements, and then capture Lymond in turn when he came. Either way, the Master was putting himself entirely at his, Gideon’s, mercy.

As if answering his thoughts, Lymond’s voice said, “There isn’t any trick, though you can take time to hunt for one if you like. Whatever you do, the power and the initiative are with you, and not with me.”

“Why?” asked Gideon bluntly.

“An Easter present.” And as Gideon continued to frown at him, Lymond said coolly, “I owe your family an act of sensibility. Remember?”

Somerville stirred. “If you don’t want Harvey’s life, what do you want him for?”

“For his ethological small talk,” said Lymond. “You must decide on the data you have.”

“I have decided,” said Gideon unexpectedly. “I’m not going to do what you want, I tell you frankly, for no better reason than that you want it.”

“I was afraid of that.” Lymond’s voice was surprisingly mild. “You may set fire to churches and cribble empires through your bloody fingers, but the one irretrievable mistake is to misjudge a fellow being.”

“Or force a child to judge its parents.”

“Oh, quite. Nemesis has wakened up again. My hoofs, it appears, weigh more than your halo. It’s a most damnably one-sided balance, but that’s not your fault. Put on your sword and go and get your gear; Matthew’ll put you on the Redesdale road.”

The sword drooped in Gideon’s amazed hand. “I haven’t given you any undertakings.”

“I know. You haven’t given me anything except rather incoherent arguments, and I already have a fruitful source of those under my roof.”

Gideon was still at a loss. “I warn you, Flaw Valleys will be totally impregnable from the time I get back.”

“You can have ten bowmen to a brick for all I care,” said Lymond with sudden exasperation. He strode to the door and shouted. “Matthew!”

Gideon moved as quickly. Standing at the other man’s shoulder, he said, “Why do you want Samuel Harvey? Is the reason so squalid?”

Matthew came. “The horse for Mr. Somerville,” Lymond said, and turned back into the room, leaving Gideon by the door. “Not squalid, my friend: ludicrous.”

“In my scale of values,” said Gideon, “a matter of dignity is always on the trivial side of the reckoning.”

“I can’t help that,” said Lymond. “Pride is a congenital disease in my family, and I’m damned if I’ll put five years’ hard labour into the trivial side of anything. This is on the other scale, along with the hoofs and the haloes.”

Madness took possession of Somerville. He said brusquely, “If I arrange a meeting, it will be in my own time, at a spot chosen by me and surrounded by my men. The interview will take place in my presence, and you will arrive unarmed. If you attempt to injure Mr. Harvey, or threaten him, or in any way molest him, I shall reserve the
right to hand you immediately to Lord Grey. Do you agree to these conditions?”

A trace of colour had risen under the thin skin. “Of course,” said Lymond evenly. “Without reserve. But there is one risk you ought to consider: that Lord Grey might discover I had visited you. I don’t think Harvey will want to tell him; but if need be you may hold me until you know that you can safely let me go. I’m going to disband my men first, in any case.”

Gideon said curiously, “You set great store by this meeting, surely, if you’re going to abandon your livelihood for it. I doubt if I could face the situation so calmly.”

“I pay my price,” said Lymond, and smiled suddenly. “But if I’m going to hear from you, I shall stay sober.”

In less than an hour, Gideon was on his way home, wondering if, like Evagrius, he would receive the receipt for these pious outgoings in his coffin.

*  *  *

It was a soft spring that year, with spotted eggs where the winter cattle walked, spindle-legged; with fawn in wood and cub in hole and white lambs under the whin. With the sun came green shoots and flat water and a fresh courage erumpent which depressed Lord Grey into a welter of gloom at Haddington.

He had marched there from Cockburnspath and found a wind egg which had to become a monolithic fortress. In the shallow bowl of the Tyne, overlooked on both sides, he was threatened hourly by the nearness of Edinburgh, of Arran’s three thousand five hundred, and by five thousand Frenchmen, delicately scenting the infested terrain.

On the other hand, once done, he had a classic tourniquet on the Lothians, on the routes north and south and on the crop-growing farmlands. He took all the rest of April and May to it, and had his men boring like gimlets and building like corals to render him his defensible fortress.

By the last week in May, Lord Grey had over five thousand horse and foot in and around Haddington, and stores for them all. By then also, Sir George Douglas’s honeymoon with England, already badly damaged by the muddle at Heriot, began to slither to an end.

“The captain of Haddington,” wrote the Protector, “is to train as many hackbutters as he can, to do all he can to get Sir George in
his hands, and having him, keep him. And notwithstanding any treaty, to destroy the country as he may.”

Lord Grey took the necessary steps. He did more. Without consulting Somerset or Palmer or his own staff, he sent for Samuel Harvey.

It was Sybilla who, mistrusting the apathetic security of the convent, installed her daughter-in-law, in Richard’s permanent absence, at Midculter.

There, she found herself in the embarrassing position of the social suicide who wakes up after the laudanum: the skies had fallen and had done nothing but add to the general obscurity. The Dowager, wishing strongly that Christian Stewart was with her instead of staying with the Maxwells, did her best to amuse; but all that could stir Mariotta to the mildest interest was the alchemy experiment.

In recent months, the laboratory which Sybilla had equipped for Johnnie Bullo had glowed with strange lights of an evening, and bad smells infiltrated lovingly into the fabric of the house. Johnnie explained, frequently, what he was doing, but so far little was visible save a sticky and unsavoury residue in blackened retorts.

On a mild, sunny afternoon at the end of May, however, encouraged perhaps by the presence of Janet Buccleuch as well as the two Lady Culters, he had gone further. Standing by the odorous furnace and tapping a dirty copper he intoned.

“Calcination, dissolution, separation, conjunction, putrefaction, congelation, cibation, sublimation, fermentation, exaltation, multiplication and projection,” chanted Johnnie, his dark face ferociously solemn. “These and none others are the twelve processes.”

There was a respectful silence. “Twelve processes of what?” demanded Janet, who liked to have things straight.

The bright, mystagogue’s eyes appealed for sympathy to the intellectual Culters. He explained. At the end—

“Yes. I see all that,” said Janet. “Go on to the bit about the Paradisiacal fruit.”

“Yes. Well,” said Johnnie, who was not overfond of being quoted. “The fruit has ripened. If it’s dry, you add mercury until silver Luna rises. In time, that yields to the Sun. Then the phial is sealed and put
in the furnace: mine went in a month ago as I showed you—white fumes with a black residue as I showed you also—perfect putrefaction of the seed.” His eyes shone.