The Game of Kings (68 page)

“Yours, by all accounts,” said Richard dryly. “Buccleuch got him accepted back at Court and Will has taken to advertising your peculiar talents from the four walls in a voice like a Gadwall duck.”

“Don’t be deceived,” said Lymond with equal dryness. “That’s only remorse because he bit me and I didn’t bite back. He’ll settle in time into a decent, douce Buccleuch.”

If Richard thought it unlikely, after a year of Lymond’s company, he said nothing; and was not to know that his brother was watching him. A moment later the Master said equably, “Nobody’s going to hold you to a promise that needs this amount of nursing, Richard. I don’t want my life at the price of anyone’s outraged instincts. It has a rudimentary value in that you were moved to preserve it, but don’t let’s labour the point.”

He was not, clearly, interested in a superficial reassurance; also, his reading was correct. If he produced facts a yard a day like a guinea-worm, Richard didn’t want them. He had promised to free Lymond, and he had no desire to regret it. He said at length, “My instincts are very accommodating.”

“All right, but remember, although you’ve bought the rights of fuel, feal and divot, I shan’t be lying here like an upset sheep forever.”

Richard said, “You think I’ll discard in the perpendicular what I favour in the prone?”

“Not if you talk like that: you’ll want an audience at any price.”

Culter laughed, and it was the end of that particular discussion.

But although Richard forgot it, Lymond apparently did not. Next day he put his theory to the test, dispassionately and with the kind of calculated resolution that still startled his brother. Richard knew nothing until he came back from his traps to find the clearing empty and his horse gone, and one of the saddlepacks with it.

One by one, his first conjectures were discarded. No one had captured Lymond: there was no trace of struggle, and only their own footprints and the tracks of one horse in the soft grass. Nor could it be some flamboyant gesture to relieve him of his decision: horseless, Richard had little chance of reaching Scotland alive.

He looked again at the tracks. They were very recent, and not hurried. Lymond was unable, of course, to ride fast. With sudden decision Culter stooped again, and snatching bow and quiver followed the mare’s hoofmarks out of the clearing. They led him along the banks of the stream, then up a shallow cliff to open grass. He picked them up, running lightly, as they swung out in a wide circle, and alternately studied the ground and the gentle, tree-scattered slopes in front of him. There was no trace of Bryony there. Driving back every apoplectic emotion which might distract him, he concentrated on the ground.

The hoofprints brought him, in a gentle arc, back to his own clearing. He stopped when he realized it, breathing tightly and fast,
and waited, resting, his free hand smoothing back his hair. When he had control both of his breathing and of the curious conflict within himself, he went on.

Lymond, lying face down beside the gently cropping Bryony, turned his head and produced a sick, placating grin. Richard exploded.

“This bloody mania for juggling with other people’s guts. You lunatic, if I’d overtaken you back there, I’d have killed you.”

“I thought,” said the Master pacifically, “that it was time to get used to the saddle again. We ought to start north.”

“Quite. And that was only part of what you thought,” said Lord Culter. He tied up the mare and stalked back again with a cup of water, which he dumped at his brother’s elbow. “You like to be sure of your relationships—who doesn’t? But no one else does it by making themselves into a clearing nut for other people’s emotions. If my sentiments are in a muddle,” said Richard angrily, “I damned well prefer them to stay in a muddle, without any interference from you.”

Propping himself on one elbow, Lymond lifted the cup, spilled it badly and set it down again without drinking. He said, “It seems I can now stick on a horse. Therefore we can get back north, beginning tonight if possible. And since, as soon as we move into Scotland, my company will compromise you, we ought to have some issues clear.”

He stopped. Richard said nothing; and his brother went on grimly. “You offered me a reprieve knowing only half the story. You mentioned Mariotta, and what I told you about her was true. You haven’t mentioned Eloise.”

Richard sat down, removed the fallen cup, and set it straight. Then he said, “Look. I don’t share your passion for self-immolation. I don’t want to hear about Eloise, and I don’t want issues made any clearer than they now are. Whatever your conscience has on it, I intend to take you back to Scotland and see you aboard ship. If you can ride, we leave tonight.”

“God,” said Francis with amiable rudeness, between his hands. “What price now the mighty Lar?”

A day later, with Lymond mounted and Richard walking at his side, the two men began the slow journey north.

*  *  *

Dinner in Lord Grey’s house was served at two o’clock, and he had invited company: Sir Thomas Palmer, his fortifications expert from London, and Gideon Somerville and his young wife Kate.

Katherine, neat as a peach and spruce in grey satin, was not impressed by Berwick, by the meal, or by Willie Grey. With a thoughtful brown eye she watched the salt cellar whisking past her nose—“There you are: Bowes, Brende and Palmer with the horse, leaving tonight and lying at Coldingham”—the ale jug: “Holcroft with the foot, leaving tomorrow and joining the two of you with the horse at Pease Burn”—and the salt cellar again: “Monday, early, Palmer makes contact with Haddington and they give cover while all of you put fresh men into the fort and come back.”

Some of the salt had spilt. Kate threw it over her left shoulder and remarked, “How simple it sounds in English! Just imagine Sir James drawing diagrams on the walls to convey his orders in Haddington. A quick course of Udall would work wonders with this army.”

Gold wire twinkled. “Why Udall?” asked Palmer.

“Or any other nimble Latinist you can think of. Don’t you think they need a lingua franca, poor things?” said Kate. “And if your two thousand Germans are coming by sea, and Lord Shrewsbury with eleven thousand Englishmen from all the shires are exchanging dialects at York, and the Swiss and the Spanish and the Germans want to communicate from Haddington, throwing in a few Italian engineers for luck, you’ll have a dear little Babel all of your own.”

Lord Grey’s face was gloomy. “So will the Scots,” he said. “By all accounts. If Henry sends forty thousand more Frenchmen and the King of Denmark throws in—”

“All the more reason for linguistic action. Buchanan against Eton. You’ve been to Haddington, Sir Thomas?” asked Kate.

Palmer grinned. “We all went the day they held Parliament, and popped a good few bags of powder in while they were busy. Bowes took young Wharton under his wing: he did rather well. Between Lord Grey here and his father he was a bit low to begin with.”

“Incompetent young fellow,” said Grey vaguely; and remembered something. “By the way, sincere apologies: Gideon having to bring you that girl who escaped. Nasty business, but unavoidable. Lady Lennox could do nothing with her, I believe.”

Katherine said, “You never caught up with the other, did you?

The man who killed the messenger at Hexham?” and Grey stared moodily at Palmer. “That damned fool Wharton. The father’s worse than the son. Five minutes after the shot he sends a man to collect the body—No body. The fellow had an accomplice. One? The kind of guard my Lord Wharton had on that church, he might have had ten.”

Palmer said cheerfully, “Enterprising fellow. Was that the one who tweaked Ned Dudley’s nose at Hume?” Warned by the silence that he had only half the story he added quickly, “Look out for him if you like, my lord. Never know what you’ll come across, jogging post back and forth through the country like this.”

“I should be obliged if you would,” said Lord Grey. “But the task on hand is to get all these men safely into the fort at Haddington tomorrow. Monday the what?—the sixteenth. That’s our job.”

The point was made. Sir Thomas, butter-tooth veiled, seized a pigeon and said no more until the end of the meal.

Afterward, Gideon took Kate up to the castle ramparts, and with the Tweed running tousled and low beneath them, they studied the green fields to the north, where Palmer’s men would travel that night.

Gideon said, “It’s a dangerous subject, Kate. Better forget it. Whatever happened, we’ll never know now.”

“It doesn’t matter what happened,” said Kate. She turned and looked across the river where the grass, identical, flower-ridden and boisterous, was English grass.

She said angrily, “I don’t like this war. I don’t like the cold-blooded scheming at the beginning and the carnage at the end and the grumbling and the jealousies and the pettishness in the middle. I hate the lack of gallantry and grace; the self-seeking; the destruction of valuable people and things. I believe in danger and endeavour as a form of tempering but I reject it if this is the only shape it can take.”

There was a brightness in the flat, clean plane between her short nose and the cornea and brown cheek. Gideon, who had hardly ever seen his wife in tears, was moved and disturbed, his intuitive mind groping for the reason and the right reply. He said, gripping her shoulders, “Philippa will be all right. She’ll learn. We can explain to her.”

Katherine turned instantly and impulsively and put her own warm hands on Gideon’s. “Don’t mind me. I want to put right the world’s sorrows in a night, and it might take a night and a day. But three stout people like us can afford to bide our time.”

“If need be,” said Gideon. He looked tired, she thought; but he smiled at her. “Trust me.”

*  *  *

That night, the fine mid-July weather broke at last; clouds piling spinel-red in the west surged over all the sky by morning and brought small showers, with a minor, tugging wind.

Palmer, cheerful red face under a perfectly polished helmet and enormous shoulders tucked into steel mesh, was not the man to bother if the skies spouted venom like Loki’s serpent. He and Bowes made their scheduled rendezvous with the foot soldiers on Monday morning and marched north to Haddington. At Linton Bridge, five miles away, he sent word to Sir James Wilford, captain of Haddington, that a fresh army was waiting to relieve the English garrison.

Forty Spanish horsemen from the fort came back with Wilford’s answer. It was too dangerous. Although he needed the men, he distrusted the present quiet, and advised Sir Thomas to postpone his plan.

Palmer read it, swore lightheartedly, and took the Spaniards with him to have a closer look at the French and Scottish camps. It continued to be quiet until they reached the slopes north of Haddington. Then, against the bald, uncompromising sky, Bowes spotted movement. The lilies of France, whipping in the wind, were pouring downhill toward them in the van of a hundred and fifty armed horsemen.

Peace and sylvan propriety exploded. Gamboa wheeled and shot off with the hackbutters to hold the French; Palmer and Bowes interweaving behind him got the horse and foot into position and stopped, halted by trumpets. Long-sighted, Palmer saw new colours flying toward him, this time from Haddington. His face crimsoned with delight.

“Ellerkar, by God! Ellerkar and damned nearly half a thousand light horse from the fort.…
Now
let’s pick off the smirks with your goose feathers, boys!”

Ellerkar was not called on to charge. The French had no wish to argue with four hundred fresh horsemen. Disentangling at speed, they shot up the hill and out of sight, leaving the English and Spanish to greet each other, reform, and set off in jubilation for Haddington, led by Palmer and Bowes.

None of them reached it. The French simply waited behind the nearest hill until the tail of the force was riding past them, and then slid down and cut them off. Then, having taken some smart bites at Ellerkar, they retreated hastily but in order around the hill, with the whole combined English force at their heels. Sir Thomas, furious at the destruction in his rear, had almost closed with them when the cutting edge of the little manoeuvre became horribly clear.

Round the shoulder of the hill on which the French were retreating was a solid quadrant of French foot soldiers and hackbutters, patiently waiting; patently armoured in a ready-made aura of rude success.

Driven headlong by their own impetus, Palmer and Bowes skidded and smashed into this impenetrable front. The Spanish leader Gamboa, coming up behind, was drowned in the recoil. Holcroft’s footmen, faced with nose-to-nose fighting against an opponent of the first quality, wavered, crumbled and fled. For half an hour the fighting continued, and then Palmer’s men broke too.

There was nothing to be done. Pursued by Gallic language and Gallic joy, English and Spanish streamed from the valley of the Tyne, and the French horsemen hunted them all afternoon like a coursing. Behind them, the Protector’s army left eight hundred English and Spanish dead or captured, the major part of their horse, and a Haddington not only lacking the new forces intended for it, but disastrously bled of Ellerkar, Gamboa and the horsemen who had issued to help.

Thus
, read the subsequent dispatch to the Protector:
Thus with victory in our hand, this mischance has altered things. Our principal horsemen and chief footmen are consumed; our powder wasted. Wherefore it is not good to venture anything by land, except by a royal force
.

Eventually, the royal force did come. Like Palmer’s, it was tough and enthusiastic. Unlike Palmer’s, although it made mistakes, it was not routed. But neither did it prevail.

*  *  *

Sir Thomas Palmer, riding hard, nearly reached the bridge at East Linton. With three of his own men and a Spaniard at his heels, he had broken loose from two skirmishes, and it was just beginning to seem possible that he had shaken off pursuit, when out of the ground before him rose a small, wicked, steel-bound phalanx of horsemen.

They were Scots. He didn’t know the emblem, but he could recognize defeat: he let them encircle the five of them and waited in silence as the leader trotted forward. Grey, healthy whiskers sprouted from a pugnacious, sweaty face. “Dod,” said the victor, peering at Sir Thomas. “Don’t tell me: it’s on the nether side of my back teeth. Palmer! Am I right?”