The Game of Kings (80 page)

“Your young catachumen played tarocco all night with Palmer to get possession of it,” said the Lord Advocate’s most sumptuous voice. He had found a chair and was lying back in it, grinning benevolently at the ceiling. “By God, I wish you’d take me in hand for six months in that troop of yours. Anyone who can beat Buskin’s brother—”

“Not my doing: we imported a trainer for that,” said Lymond gravely, his skin faltering between red and white, his eyes brilliant. “I don’t think we could teach you much, Mr. Lauder.”

The legal gaze, leaving the rafters, swooped down to the pillows. “Who stole your letter, Mr. Crawford? That damned Douglas woman, I take it.” He paused. “You were very gentle with our friends today.”

Lymond’s thoughts were clearly a thousand—a hundred—miles away. “Our friends … ?”

Wiser than Scott, Henry Lauder ignored the boy’s scowl and talked on. “The Douglases. The Earl of Angus undertook, I believe, to set the crown of Scotland on Henry VIII’s head by midsummer of that year. There was also talk of a secret bond signed by both Sir George and his brother in London, promising all their help to make Scotland Henry’s. The King wouldn’t want that noised abroad at the time.”

“No.” Lymond’s hands still lay on the folded pages of the confession. He lifted the packet, a speculative, balancing finger at each end, and said, “Nothing about the Douglases is news any more. The unpleasant truth is that, being a long-sighted family, they will attach themselves to the winning side, and not necessarily to the side that pays them most.

“When Douglas goes to Berwick as spokesman for the Scottish court, when he comes to Edinburgh sworn to promote the English marriage, both the Protector and Arran know very well he is putting his own words to the song he was taught. Perhaps even words which appear to be his own are sometimes not. These are stormy petrels: they show where the heavy seas are coming from and are to that
extent useful. Their transactions shelter under sham diplomacy and they can truly be influenced in one way only, by personal shame. The side which succumbs to the temptation to strip the Douglases naked will lose them, and the considerable power of their men with them. Grey knew that: that is why he handled Sir George so tenderly in spite of the Protector and Wharton.”

Scott said defensively, “My father also got permission to negotiate with the English. To protect his own interests.”

The Lord Advocate smiled involuntarily. “Buccleuch has been driven to doing a lot of queer things to protect his own interests, but no one would ever confuse him with the Douglases. Mr. Crawford is right. The undiscriminating vulture is not our real danger: open scandal would simply drive him into profitless exile again, and would be of no possible advantage to us. Neither should we fear our sturdy patriots who, like your father, are busy with their loyalties in queer and crooked ways. Our danger lies with the men who want to take this country by trunk and limb and wreak it into such a shape that it will fit them and their children for hose and jerkin in their old age.”

“Some of them are sincere,” said Lymond.

“I know: and such men will wreck us yet. Preserve us above all from the honest clod and the ambitious fanatic.”

“There doesn’t seem to be a bewilderment of types left to choose from.”

“The Culters, for example?”

Scott caught up Lauder with angry eyes. “This ill-starred family with a wastrel son?”

The lawyer smiled. “My business is with words, my boy; and the best ones grow like mushrooms on a good bedding-down of law. Your friend used some fairly choice expressions himself.… I admire your gift for commanding loyalty in spite of your tongue, Mr. Crawford. What will you do now?”

“I was going to ask you the same thing,” said Lymond; and it was clear that he had used the breathing space Lauder had given him to good effect.

The Lord Advocate rose. “I think there are some people who should be shown this statement, and without much more delay,” he said. “If you’ll trust me with it.”

Lymond’s voice saying “Of course” clashed with Scott’s “No!” His hands lingered a moment longer on the papers, then he ran finger and thumb along the fold and held the document out. Lauder took it.

“I should advise you to dress, if you can. Mr. Scott will help, perhaps. It may be necessary to send for you.”

The door shut behind him. Lymond said, his long mouth twitching at the sight of Scott’s face, “You must trust
somebody
, Will … in spite of any repeated advice to the contrary you may hear.”

Scott muttered, avoiding his eyes, “You must have thought me the qualified king of the simple-minded.”

“If I did, I should never have allowed you to join me. Your father said as much to the Tribunal today—God, yesterday; and I can endorse it.”

“In spite of my hellish mistakes?”

“I was thinking of tonight. You made no mistake with that.”

With an enslaved eagerness, Scott asked the question Lauder had put in vain. “What will you do now?” But Lymond, stretching, caught him by the arm and forced him into a chair beside him.

“Wait a moment. It is gradually forcing itself on my consciousness that I am not to be divided into four pieces tomorrow. No appointment with Apollyon. You appear to have made a decision about my life far more arbitrary than any I made about yours.”

Scott’s voice was uncertain. “I owed you that much, at least.”

“You didn’t owe me anything,” said the Master. “There’s an unnatural conspiracy to keep me alive, that’s all. I hope to God you don’t regret it. I hope to God I don’t regret it. How the hell did you manage to thrash Palmer at cards?”

Delight rose within Scott’s soul. Not expecting Lymond to say more, and not knowing that he dared not say more, the young Buccleuch explained, while the Master dressed.

*  *  *

The Culters’ house in Bruce’s Close had a red roof and a motto over every window; but inside it was comfortable and convenient, with two separate bedrooms and a parlour with a wide, light window above the garden for Sybilla’s sewing.

At midnight the Dowager ordered her son and daughter-in-law to bed, promising firmly to retire. But she sat on at her window, a still shadow on the bright square of rosebushes outside, and every separate nerve in her body trembled and ached.

For five days Sybilla had launched herself and all her bountiful possessions—her brains, her charm and her money—in a single-minded
bombardment of authority. Her friends and contemporaries of church and nobility, the suitors of the Court of Session, the powerful of both sexes at Court, had all felt the impact of the Dowager’s fear, and many of them tried to help because she was Sybilla, and people would lend her a needle to cobble the moon to her gates if she asked for it.

To no avail. From the start she had known that nothing could save this son’s life for her: the law recognized proof, and there was no proof. On his return from the Committee Richard had been made to repeat again and again the pattern of question and answer. They had thrashed the case out, the three of them, until they were exhausted; and she had sent her son and Mariotta to bed.

She moved, and the dark roses shivered. There was an Ewe had three lambs, and one of them was black. What of it? Sheep are commonly white: does that make white unassailable, any more than the pure light of the sun before the prism? How may a breed freshen except under mutation? How improve its whiteness except by admitting a rogue cobalt to its candid meadows? … Not that the misery had been lived through quite in vain. In all her life she had never heard Richard speak as, distressed and vehement, he had spoken to them that evening.

Sybilla looked out of the dark window. To the east, Moultrie’s Hill and the Dow Craig, with Greenside on its farther slopes; where for nine hours she had once sat and watched Davie Lindsay mock the Three Estates before the Three Estates, and the Crown before the Crown. That was a tolerance fast slipping from them.

The Lang Gait and Gabriel’s road, unlit; and few and distant lights from Broughton and Silver Mills and Kirkbraehead and Canon Mills. Below, her garden plunged and rolled to the turgid waters of the loch, and the tall lands on either side shifted their shadows with the shifting moon.

There was an Ewe had three lambs; and one of them was black. The one was hanged, the other drowned; the third was lost, and never found.… Sybilla’s hands closed hard on each other.

It was then that Tom Erskine, riding lightly and alone, came sweeping to the door.

Half an hour went by. In Mary de Guise’s palace the tapers took fire from room to room, as the Queen Dowager moved with her
maids to the audience chamber, turning her head as she walked to speak to Richard, on her right, and Henry Lauder, behind her.

They stood beside her as she settled on the dais. The Lord Chancellor was already there, his clothes wrinkled and dusty as the Queen’s; and Argyll came in quickly, bowed, and sat with Huntly and Erskine and the secretaries along the wall of the short, elaborate room.

It was very hot, and the lights rebuffed their tired eyes. Because of the hour and the perpetual, malignant circumstance of crisis, the Queen demanded no ceremony. She spoke a little longer to the Lord Advocate, and next to Argyll; and then one of the secretaries answered her nod by opening the door. The Queen Dowager sat and watched Lord Culter, and Henry Lauder watched the Queen.

Richard smiled. Crawford of Lymond, standing just inside the doorway, smiled back, bowed, and remained where he was, in himself a novelty and a force to the considering gaze lifted to him. Chin sunk on her chains, starched gauze thinly shadowing the bridge of her nose, the Queen moved a hand and watched the man advance to her chair. She said, in her heavily accented English, “I was curious.”

The Master replied in his own rapid French. “It is I, Madame, who am curious, or I should not have manufactured myself a silly predicament.”

“The Justiciar cannot follow you,” observed Mary de Guise. “We shall speak in English, in which he cannot follow me. There is no precedent, Mr. Crawford, for addressing a man who has been done an injustice by the State. We had, I thought, reached the safe haven of corruption where we need never fear to misjudge anybody. I am astounded to find myself wrong.”

A nasty one. Too shrewd by far to answer, Lymond only inclined his fair head: he had the knack of seeming to have been delivered in his garments, observed Lauder, irritably aware of sitting on rucked linen and surrounded by half-awake and unvaleted statesmen.

The matronly, autocratic voice continued. “Through Will Scott of Kincurd, we have had constant information of your providing about enemy movements and enemy affairs. We know now that we owe to you other gifts of money and of secrets over the years, and that we have had ignorantly the use of your talents and your abilities at Hume and at Heriot, at Carlisle and Dumbarton. All these services performed beneath the edge of our sword and below the heel of our boot: performed with vigour and wit and independence.

“You have amazed me, Mr. Crawford. You see in me a misery of rage which should compensate you a little for your suffering. Bequeathed a shabby and ransacked armoury, I have thrown away tempered steel. My God, M. le maître, you have done us an injury: you should have held us by the neck and shouted your wrongs into our lungs. What redress can language give you? A polite apology, and Mr. Lauder’s regrets?”

“Modified regrets,” said the Lord Advocate. “I love Mr. Crawford like a son, but I wouldn’t have missed that examination.”

“If you mislay your notes,” said Lymond, “you will find them engraved on my liver. La reine douairière is generous. My impression is that I made several mistakes for every one of the State’s. The thing is best forgotten.”

“My dear Mr. Crawford,” said the Queen Dowager. “How can I forget, when my daughter recites scurrilous poetry, and holds you still dear to her heart … ?”

Huntly moved. Mary of Guise folded her hands without looking at him, but a fibre entered her voice which was not there before, and her gaze hardened over them all.

“I am aware,” she said, “that to most of you—to most of the people who fight for me and against me, and for and against the Protector—the royal line is a certificate of birth, and a circlet of metal; a pawn astray on her own board and more used to domination and a ruthless handling than the weakest of her subjects.

“To me, it is a little girl, fresh and warm, holding surprises and knowledge and happy years in her palms. When armed invaders come and men die and are captured and plot and betray, she is still a small girl, crying because she has wakened in the night.” Her eyes dropped for a moment to her hands and her lip trembled for a moment, and then became firm.

“By all your efforts this year you have kept the Scottish crown safe from capture—yes, of course. What I remember, I, is that you have won me a year of my daughter’s company.

“The last year, perhaps. She is safe. You, sir, with courage, kept the secret that allowed her ships to sail. Yesterday the wind moved from the south: autumn is coming, and a colder season perhaps than we have known yet. Yesterday my daughter set sail from Dumbarton: with Lord Livingstone and Lord Erskine, with her brother, with Fleming, Beaton, Seaton and Livingstone and Lady Fleming, she set sail for France, to live there and, in time, to marry the Dauphin.

“… Some will say, we should have admitted England, this importunate bridegroom; and kept unspilled blood and whole hearths for our dowry. I think not. I hope that we are choosing wisdom as well as pride, and a long peace as well as a quick harbour.”

“And England?” It was Lord Culter’s voice.

“The King of France has taken this kingdom in perpetual shelter. He will demand of England peace between our three nations; and that all enmity between England and Scotland should cease.”

Outside, dawn had come, pale and wind-torn, with stars set tardily in its brightness. In the yellow glare of the lights, Lymond’s gaze had turned to his brother. “So they lose, after all,” he said. “All the King’s knights. Lord Grey and Lord Wharton, Lennox and Somerset, Wilford and Dudley, Sir George Douglas, Angus and Drumlanrig. Such plotting and striving and discomfort and distress; so much gold spent; so many peoples moved across the face of Europe to confront us. It’s a sad thing to woo with cannon and to lose.”