The Game of Kings (77 page)

Argyll, surprisingly, said, “I can see the point of some of it. His Majesty learned just after our prisoners reached London that our King had died and Scotland was accordingly under a regency, and he was immediately bent on winning over as many leading Scots families as possible to his interests. Hence all the prisoners being taken from the Tower to better lodgings, and the offer to let the most important go free if they signed an oath of allegiance to England. It wasn’t the time for the sudden murder of a prisoner of war in his hands—even a less important one.”

“Also,” said Lymond, continuing the argument with an unbounded scholarly detachment, “he probably wanted to protect the
real purveyor of secrets. If Edinburgh was becoming suspicious, he was calling off the hunt by making me scapegoat. Then, having discredited me at home and with the prisoners still remaining in London, he could dispose of me in safety.”

“And yet you survived?”

“I was taken to Calais and allowed to fall into the hands of the French. Perfectly simple.”

“And after that, the galleys?”

“Yes,” said Lymond with no trace of expression in his voice.

“Now we’re coming to it,” said Buccleuch, and shifted his bulk in his seat. “Lawyers! Dod, look at him: his een glinting like a coo with the yellows.”

The Lord Advocate’s tone was mild and of a grave delicacy.

“How can we stay indifferent to such misfortune? We have before us a man unhappy and deceived; duped by the best brains of the kingdom; enticed by an immoral woman of royal birth; kidnapped; maltreated; shackled to the starving heathen at the galley oar and beaten through the seas for two undeserving summers.

“Look at him! Weak—from the knife of his own underling; but that has no bearing. Innocent—his admitted betrayal and corruption of this young, blind woman has clearly left no stain. Dismiss from your minds the robbing and thieving and murdering of those whom until recently he led—he is virtuous. Dismiss the ruthless plotting, the devious schemes for battle and gain which we have heard about this afternoon—he is simple and vulnerable. Think, last of all, of how he has conducted himself today; of the fluent and malicious tongue from which you, as lords of the highest court in the land, have not been exempt. Does it seem to you that this drunkard, this outlaw, this wastrel son of an ill-starred family, is the man of this pitiful history? Or do you think, as I do, that it is all a pack of lies?”

The echoes died. The Lord Advocate removed his spectacles, and spoke gently. “But we are asked for proof. What proof have we? Nearly all the people concerned are dead. It is not the sort of transaction likely to leave a record; and those persons who still remember the event are in enemy country.

“But—we have one piece of evidence in writing. The notes which were picked up in Scotland and attributed to Mr. Crawford; the document he says was the work of an unknown English spy; and which was attributed to him, he says, to ensure his disgrace with us. If that is a forgery; if Mr. Crawford can prove that this paper is none of his;
that it was compiled without his knowledge; then the case against him immediately loses its mainstay. Mr. Crawford!”

Like the face of many-eyed Indra, the corporate head of the Committee turned on the exposed chair. Douglas’s lips were tight, his stare thoughtful; Herries wore a look of fastidious concern; Buccleuch was craning forward. Among the benches Lord Culter had made a tent of his hands, and his face was invisible.

The strain on the Master was sufficiently clear now. He sat still, a thin, deep line between his eyes, watching and anticipating Lauder as light might thrust and linger on a falling blade. Their eyes locked. “Mr. Crawford,” said the advocate softly. “This document before me was taken from the pocket of an English soldier after the raid which destroyed the convent of Lymond. It includes these words:

“‘The convent is on my land six miles east of that, and we hid the gunpowder there just before being taken at Solway. If you go immediately, you should be able to reach it before it is discovered: no one else knows of its presence. There is an underground passage to the cellar where the powder is stored, reached in the following way. If it is difficult to move, I suggest you blow up the convent.’”

There was a long silence. Culter did not look up and Erskine, beside him, folded his arms suddenly and gazed at the floor. The Lord Advocate said flatly, “Mr. Crawford. Do you admit that these words are in your handwriting, and were written by you?”

The tyranny of pride and the tyranny of intelligence, however pitilessly forced, could not protect Lymond from this. His eyes, terribly, answered before his voice. “Yes. They were.”

“Do you admit,” asked the lawyer, “that the signature on the last page of this document is yours?”

“It is mine.”

A contraction passed over the Lord Advocate’s face and was gone.

“I see. And,” said Henry Lauder with no levity at all in his voice, “since the English did follow these directions, did find the passage and, when attacked, exploded the convent as you suggested—since these things happened, the deaths of four nuns and ten girls within the convent, including the death of Eloise Crawford, your sister, are your responsibility?”

Flagging and infinite silence.

“Yes. I am responsible,” said Lymond, ashen to the roots of his sun-bleached hair.

*  *  *

The room in David’s Tower was suffocatingly crowded; chiefly because not only prisoners but all the guards off duty had managed to squeeze in as well. The hottest man there was Frank, sitting by the fire with Samuel Harvey’s statement hovering near the blaze.

If he had expired in a paste of perspiration, nobody would have noticed. The colletic stare of guards and Englishmen alike was on the sweating, subsaltive hands and on the grinning tarots: the impious Papess, the lascivious Lover, the jeering Fool. The two baggage rolls still lay on the floor, but their contents had changed: beside Palmer’s chair lay some of Scott’s money, and some of Palmer’s minor possessions lay at Scott’s hand. Both men were in shirt sleeves.

In the evening light, Will’s face was the paler of the two. The older man was playing with a careless, sure hand: leading, luring, discarding with persistent ingenuity, and had caught Scott out badly several times. None the less Scott won, not once but reasonably often; and when he lost, it was not by an irretrievable margin.

He had a healthy respect by that time for Palmer’s card playing. Watching him seated opposite, massive and smooth as a tree, Scott recognized also his toughness, and grew more and more afraid that through sheer fatigue he himself would stop thinking clearly. As if to drive home the point, Palmer tapped an elemental finger on the table between them.
“And
the Fool, Mr. Scott. Fool and three Kings: fifteen points—that right? Yes. And my game, I think.”

He was right, and the grin he exchanged with his audience did nothing to help. “Mine, boys! Any more beer, while I choose me prize? That’s a good belt, Mr. Scott?”

Scott’s chest tightened. Until one or other of them had nothing more to barter … that was the length of the game; and they were so evenly matched that their damned belongings might be passing to and fro for weeks—unless he succumbed and lost all. And the stipulation was that Samuel Harvey’s papers were to be Palmer’s final stake.

The thought of it sickened him with wrath and frustration. After all they’d gone through—after what the Dowager had suffered—after Christian’s death—after the fool he had made of himself twenty times over—no one should present this prize under his nose and snatch it back like a toy from a kitten. He stopped shuffling and flung down the cards with a crack. “My deal.”

Palmer winked. “He thinks he’s going to win this one.”

“I’m going to win them all,” said Will Scott. “I’m going to have the
nails out of your boots before I’ve done with you, and if you’ve any pins holding up your breeks you’d best watch them, because I’ll have them skint off the superior Sassenach dowp o’ ye before another day dawns.”

And he began to deal.

*  *  *

“So here,” said the Lord Advocate, “is the truth at last. I cannot say I expected it. Your confession does you credit, Mr. Crawford. Quum infirmi sumus, optimi sumus, I see.” Lauder was aware, blissfully, beyond doubt, of the success of his onslaught. He was within Lymond’s guard, and the passport was the name of Lymond’s sister.

So he quoted Latin and Lymond, breaking painfully from his numb cataphract, retaliated. “The credit is entirely yours. Quod purpura non potest, saccus potest, Mr. Lauder. But I prefer my truth flat and not concamerate, even with the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric in spate beneath. The notes were mine. But they were written for Scots, not Englishmen to read. Not for a manor or a woman or the combined keys of Tucker and Schertz’s treasure houses, in spite of your character reading, would I—”

“Harm a woman?” suggested the lawyer gently.

Buccleuch’s grunt reached them all. “You can be a damned fool over women without wanting to blow up fourteen lassies.”

Lauder said, “Mr. Crawford’s tamperings with Christian Stewart were more than those of a damned fool, I should have thought. She also died, remember.”

Argyll contributed. “In any case, Sir Walter, the information about the convent in this document was prefaced by three pages of detailed news about Scottish plans and some explicit references to previous reports to the English Privy Council. It is clearly absurd to imply that any of this was intended for Scotland and not for England.”

“I have been trying,” said Lymond with a deep breath, “to explain. The first three pages of that letter are a forgery, based no doubt on the genuine spy’s report sent to Henry. The letter about the gunpowder is real enough. I hid the powder in my sister’s convent when it was partly wrecked and abandoned after an earlier raid. The man who helped me was killed at Solway: no one else knew of it, and it looked as if I might be kept in London for some time.

“I knew the Government needed the powder, and I was nervous in case the nuns might come to harm if they returned. So I wrote a letter in London and had it taken to the Master of Erskine who was being released to go back to Scotland. I was allowed no personal contact with other prisoners.”

At the high table, Buccleuch’s eyes met those of Tom Erskine. He said, “Robert died at Pinkie.”

“In any case, he never received it,” said Lymond quietly. “I discovered that later. It was intercepted, the superscription cut off and the whole made a tailpiece of the other report, which was rewritten in my kind of hand. The next raiding party to cross the Border located the convent, was surprised into igniting the powder, and took care to leave behind the paper incriminating me.”

Sir Wat said, “Ye gomerel: if that’s right, why the devil didn’t you watch that first letter? You could guess what’d happen to it in the wrong hands, even if you didn’t know the lassies had gone back?”

“The thought isn’t new to me,” said Lymond, his voice empty of expression. “I took all the precautions I could at the time.”

“But not enough.”

“Obviously. If you’re anxious to analyse my feelings on that occasion,” said Lymond with sudden savagery, “you can measure them against my lapses from temperance according to the gospel of Mr. Lauder.”

“Bloody fool,” said Buccleuch briefly. “Wait a bit, Henry. If the report was in two hands there should be some difference in the writing, eh?”

But the advocate shook his head and, getting up, stretched across to the Committee’s table. “Look for yourselves.”

The paper crackled as it passed from hand to hand: the sun, much lower, was climbing up one wall, forcing Erskine to shield his eyes against the heraldic dazzle of it. Culter sat without moving, his eyes on his hands.

From the benches opposite, Mylne suddenly got up, and crossing to the prisoner’s side, bent and spoke. The Master shook his head just as Lauder sat down, the restored paper in his hands, and observed them. “Well, doctor?”

The elderly figure straightened. “If ye want to hang him, ye’d best watch your step.”

“Would you like a rest, Mr. Crawford? You mustn’t swoon.”

Buccleuch growled. “I wouldna say yes to a drink of water on the lip of Gehenna, put like that. Lauder’s on top and he knows it. Look at him! He’s a mouth like the smirk on a pig.”

The smile was certainly there, widening at Lymond’s sardonic reply. “So near the climax? I can surely hold together for the peroration, Mr. Lauder.” And the surgeon, shrugged away, disappeared.

The Lord Advocate waited for the rustle of adjustment to die down, and then stood up.

“There is no need, I think, to prolong this inquiry much further. We have heard Mr. Crawford’s explanation of what happened in London, and in Lymond, in 1542: we have seen that there is no obvious difference in the handwriting in any part of the document which he claims is only partly his: we have heard him acknowledge responsibility for the appalling and cold-blooded crime whose results we know.

“On the one side, we have an explanation of these events which, if dreadful in its violence and its story of degeneration, is both straightforward and likely, and is supported both by documentary evidence and by part of the proofs supplied by Mr. Crawford himself. On the other, there is the history of what must appear an incredible twist of fate, which placed the defendant helpless at the mercy of powerful forces in London.

“We are asked to believe that he incurred the sympathetic interest of one of the highest ladies of the land, but that she could do nothing to help him: that while fervently supporting the Scottish cause he was feckless enough to allow a dangerous secret to fall into enemy hands: that there existed, as there exists in romances, some terrible English plot of which he happened to gain knowledge. Do all these things seem likely?”

The pause was for effect, but Gledstanes, meticulous and canny, broke in. “It doesn’t seem to me to be incontrovertible that the two halves of this letter are in the same hand. Also the suggestion about blowing up the convent seems gratuitous, if intended for English readers. Seems unnecessary and argues a callousness I find hard to believe. Particularly since—assuming he was a spy—the man surely expected when he wrote it to be sent back to Scotland in due course.”