The Game of Kings (50 page)

Nothing.

The captain raised his voice. Scott could see he was a popular man. “Oh, fine then. We know how to sort this kind. There’s a legal punishment for refusing to plead. Alec: have we got any weights? Well, chains, then. Plenty of chains. Davie: there’s two high rings. Cut him off and stick his hands on these. Now. That’s a fine bit of chain, man. A shade rusty but no harm to it: we wouldna want to dirty a nice clean one. We’ll put the first one around his neck.”

The Peine Forte et Dure was a perfectly valid punishment for silence: it used weights to achieve a gradual pressing to death. Scott said, “Wait a moment. We’re supposed to deliver the man alive. The courts won’t exactly thank you for doing their job for them.”

The captain was engineering the laying of the first chain like a Roman with his first viaduct; he didn’t even bother to look around. “Never heed. We’ll have him talking that fast he’ll wear his tongue thin.”

And they would, of course. Lymond might be capriciously vain, but he wasn’t foolish. Like some mountainous and ironic chain of office the cable bedecked him; he had braced himself against its weight so that there was no needless drag on his arms, spread-eagled above. His face was set like iron. Never before had Scott seen so clearly the force of his will.

The captain was bringing forward another chain, ostentatiously, to cheers. Lymond took the strain in silence, with an odd mixture of impatience and resignation, and Scott, bemused by the sickly luxury of the event, almost missed the flickering lashes as Lymond looked fleetingly up and beyond the crowd. Scott turned unobtrusively.

At an open window on the first floor of the castle stood Christian Stewart. He saw her, saw the blowing red hair and listening face and then no more, for with an uproar greater than all Threave could offer, his father and his father’s train appeared. The sharp Buccleuch eyes swept over the throng; over the grotesque, taut figure by the tower over the captain, whom he jerked to his side, and over his son’s red face.

“Chains. That’s a new idea. Thank God ye didna have them at Crumhaugh.… Are you the captain? Just so. The Master of Culter may be anathema to you, as he is to the rest of us, but that doesna alter the fact that …”

The window was empty. Christian had gone, thought Scott, mercifully missing the name. Then he saw a billow in the crowd: a red
head and two stout elbows made remorseless passage and Christian Stewart, agonized and dishevelled, arrived among them like an arrow, Sym flying at her side.

“Buccleuch? They’re killing a man here. Your snivelling whelp and that ape—”

“Hey!” said the captain resentfully.

Buccleuch, with plenty on his mind, looked both annoyed and alarmed. “Are you staying here? Well away back in: Hunter’s there; I’ve seen him. Nobody’s being killed, and this is no place for lassies.” But she was off, Sym pulling her, and paid not the slightest attention.

Cleated with iron, his wrist tendons stark and his yellow head poised like a tassel, Lymond watched her like a cat, chilling even Sym’s red-faced grin into blankness. Within a yard of him, the blind girl said, “Mr. Crawford?”

The way it was said caught Scott by the throat. His father’s breath hissed through his teeth; there was a surge of intrigued whispering and Lymond turned his full regard for the first time, wide-eyed, on Scott. The boy jumped forward, and put a hand on her arm.

He raised his voice. “It’s Lymond, Culter’s young brother, they’ve got,” he said. “Let me take you indoors. Well look after him: don’t worry.”

“I know who it is, you fool: I heard your father,” said Christian. “Are those improbable, schoolboy chains still on him? Sym, take them off. Francis Crawford: you’re another fool, playing Macarius with the lockjaw. I told you sound was my stock-in-trade. I’ve known your voice since I was twelve. You intended, I suppose, to sink like a pressed duck into a vertical grave.” There were tears of fright in her eyes.

Sym’s sturdy arms raised the last garland of cable, its manifold prints embedded below in pulped cloth. Lymond, obsessed and unheeding, opened tight lips at last and hurled words at her. “There are two hundred people listening to you. Buccleuch, damn you: get her out of here.”

“I don’t care,” snapped Christian, “if there are two thousand. I’m not accustomed to denying my friends in public.”

“Lady Christian knows the prisoner?” The captain, no less than his audience, was fascinated by this glimpse of frailty in high places. Scott rushed to her aid. “The Master imposed on the lady’s kindness without telling her who he was.”

That touched off the explosion. Ignoring Buccleuch’s hand on her
elbow, Christian rounded on his son. “I knew who he was. To know isn’t necessarily to inform, as with some people.”

“But he believed you didn’t know, didn’t he? Hence the pantomime.”

The captain was impressed. “Jesus, that’s crafty. He wouldna pipe up in case the lassie linked his name with his voice, and let on that the two of them …”

“I told you!” said Scott angrily. “He got her to shield him. You’ve no right to assume …” But his voice was lost in the deluge of ribald laughter and comment.

The row lessened as Buccleuch let out a roar, but it didn’t stop. He gripped Christian’s arm afresh and she shook him off. “I don’t move until he’s safely out of this yard.” Her face creamy white within the masking red hair, she was quite unflinching. “It’s more than time some things were said and done in the open, instead of underground like a nation of moles. This time, I’m going to stop a man from knitting his own noose. Mr. Crawford—”

Lymond’s voice, carrying its full power, cut across her words. For his own sake, clearly he must silence her. He did it in his own way, raising his voice in a mockery which insolently denied pain, or strain, or any experience of ignominy.

“There goes my epic moment again!” he said. “Pantomime! I’d have held the Rose of Hamborough in twenty fathoms on a gravel bottom in a southeast gale, and all for nothing and less than nothing: my illusions destroyed, my deceptions dragged into the light of day and my speech miscarried and scattered to the hyenas. I do not complain. You may have your frolic. But on one thing I insist. I will not have my name coupled with a redheaded woman. Red-ribboned mares kick. Red-horned cattle gore. Rowans poison, and so do redheads, given the chance.… Is that clear?”

Sym had drawn back. The blue eyes pursued him coldly. “Well? What more? You heard her. She won’t move until I’m freed.”

He had lost any good will left to him. Sym, at a nod from the captain, moved forward doubtfully to unlock Lymond’s wrists. The captain cleared his throat uneasily. Inside the castle his temporary prison was ready, and there was an escort of soldiers waiting; the sooner the fellow was locked up now the better.

He glanced sideways. In spite of what they’d just heard the girl showed no signs of anger with the jackanapes. And she had high-up friends, he knew. As the shackles were unfastened, he addressed her.
“It’s a fine, dry cellar, my lady, and he’ll come to no harm. Forbye, we hardly laid a finger on him.”

“Ye leid, ye leid, ye filthy nurse,” said the prisoner pleasantly. “One hand free. God. Manus loquacissimae—it’s pantomime all right. And the second free. Competently done. Restored without loss to the parent trunk: ulna, radius, humerus …”

There was a long pause. “Not very,” said Lymond rapidly. “Not at all, in fact.”

He had lowered his arms very slowly. Ceasing to speak, he cupped his face momentarily, grimacing; then with a gesture of half-comic resignation slid like a trout through Sym’s grasp to the ground.

And the odd thing was, as Scott bending sardonically over him discovered, that he really had fainted.

*  *  *

They had Maxwell’s permission to use the castle for one night, leaving for the capital next morning.

In the privacy of Threave, once the prisoner had been battened down under triple guard, the chief actors expended their nervous excitement on each other. Christian, frustrated in her efforts to visit Lymond and irritated by Buccleuch’s wholesale damning of that gentleman’s anonymous ways, finally lost her temper completely and went off to bed. Scott fared little better.

The question was one of naming his former colleagues. Accused of standing with one foot in each camp; of leaving the countryside at the mercy of leaderless cutthroats, of lack of responsibility and of owning a head full of pulp and pips like a Spanish orange, Scott replied in kind without a trace of exhaustion, and he and his father were still going at the subject hammer and tongs long after Hunter had collected his men and departed. Finally Buccleuch roared. “It’s a pity, since you’re so keen on them, ye didn’t stay with your precious friends!”

Will, already on his feet, snatched up his cloak. “All right; I will!”

“Ye kale-heided coddroch! They’ll cut ye in triangles if ye show your neb there after what you’ve done!”

“Then I’ll go somewhere else!”

“You’ll go somewhere else all right,” snarled Buccleuch, and rang the handbell as though he were twisting a cockerel’s neck. “You’ll spend the night where you can’t do any harm and where you’ll have
every chance of comparing your dear old friends with your new ones—Fetch the captain.”

Scott jumped to his feet, but Buccleuch’s heavy hand was on his sword arm. When the captain came, Wat alarmed him by continuing to shout. “Here’s another prisoner for you. I want him under lock and key for a night to clear the mud off his brain.”

The captain was anxious to please, but unprepared. “I havena a fast room, Sir Wat. The dungeon’s blocked, and there’s only the cellar …”

“That’s what I mean,” said Buccleuch vindictively. “Put him in the cellar.”

The captain hesitated. “But the Master of Culter’s in the cellar.”

“I know that, you fool!” said Buccleuch. “Put him with Lymond for a night, and let’s see if he’s hare, hound or rabbit, the fool.”

Will Scott fought every plank of the way to the kitchen; he fought while they unbolted the heavy trap door in the floor, and he bit and kicked while they shoved him through it and halfway down the wooden steps which led to the cellar. Then the trap thudded shut above his head, the bolts clattered, and he was left alone with initium sapientiae and the Master of Culter.

*  *  *

There is nothing very jolly about being locked in a cellar with a man whom, in every possible sense, you have just stabbed in the back. As Will Scott crashed into the stair rail and heard the trap thud above him, his very thews melted with apprehension.

The cellar had been used as a storeroom. Opposite, two barred windows near the ceiling imprisoned the night sky. There was a well in the shadows on his right, and a quantity of sacks, barrels and boxes. On two of these Lymond lay stretched at ease, a solitary candle at his side.

Within the light, shapes and colours were sudden and strong: the butter-yellow head, impeccably neat, with a bag of meal under it; the fresh Hessian bandaging; the silver spark of burst points and the blue of the light cloth at shoulder and raised knee; at neck and cuff, the half inch of cambric glinting white. All that was unsightly had been removed from Lymond’s appearance.

Looking for traces of the day’s humiliations or the languor of bodily weakness, Scott found neither. With the face of a Delia Robbia
angel, Lymond spoke. “In a day of gimcrack cannibalism and snivelling atrocities, we have now touched rock bottom. God send,” pursued the voice as Scott, descending, made his way to a trestle by the well, “God send that somebody else is about to flay the gristle from your inestimable backbone.”

Scott sat down. He had already had enough of physical violence. The other kind hung in the air, a raw miasma, sapping his robust and righteous anger. He said curtly, “You challenged me yourself.”

“To attack me. Not to engineer a cheap death for Turkey Mat.”

“It was his own fault. Father would have looked after him.”

“Father would have had his work cut out, after your Jove-like pyrotechnics at the convent. Don’t fancy yourself the neo-Christ of Branxholm, by the way. You weren’t saving anybody. I’m used to being taken for a cross between Gilles de Rais and a sort of international exchange in young mammals, but I draw the line somewhere.”

All the tormented emotion, the anger and fear and vexed and mauled spirit of the unfortunate Scott sprang affronted from his lips.

“I can guess the kind of names you’d like to call me,” he said with cold fury. “I betrayed you to Andrew Hunter; I tricked you into hiding in the convent; I used a knife on you—badly; my God, how ineptly—but at least I made you wince in some sort, once, however briefly. When my father delivers you to the law, I’ll have paid the debts of the cheated dead and the warped living and the wrecked lives of four women.… Can you deny it? Am I not right?”

“Right?” said Lymond. “You pathetic, maladroit nincompoop, you’re never right; but this time you can squat in your misconceptions like duck’s meat in a ditch, and let them choke you.”

Scott, viciously, was on his feet. “Go on. Explain my own motives to me. Or if you won’t explain yourself, shall I try? Someone once said you hated women, and you do, don’t you? You despise everyone—even yourself—but above all you hold women cheap …”

He got no further. “You bloody, insalubrious little fool,” said Lymond, and uncoiled like a whip, forcing Scott to retreat. “I’m not calling you names, my dear: I’m telling you facts. Today you murdered a friend of mine. You treat that very lightly. I hope his tolerance and his honesty and his infirmities break their way into your imagination and sphacelate in your insufferable vanity. That and another thing. To hell with your piddling vendetta: the bits you were bragging about never mattered, and the things that do matter you know nothing about. But what the
hell,”
said Lymond with fury,
“what the
hell
do you mean by subjecting that girl to a public ordeal?”

Scott was stunned. “It was you who—” but Lymond swept on. “If I could keep my mouth shut, surely you could take the trifling trouble to keep her out of the courtyard? You don’t care whom you sacrifice, do you, as long as you imagine it will damage me?”

“I didn’t deceive her!”