The Game of Kings Read online

  ACCLAIM FOR

  Dorothy Dunnett’s

  LYMOND CHRONICLES

  “Dorothy Dunnett is one of the greatest talespinners since Dumas … breathlessly exciting.”

  —Cleveland Plain Dealer

  “Dorothy Dunnett is a storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about suspense, pace and invention.”

  —The New York Times

  “Dunnett evokes the sixteenth century with an amazing richness of allusion and scholarship, while keeping a firm control on an intricately twisting narrative. She has another more unusual quality … an ability to check her imagination with irony, to mix high romance with wit.”

  —Sunday Times (London)

  “A very stylish blend of high romance and high camp. Her hero, the enigmatic Lymond, [is] Byron crossed with Lawrence of Arabia.… He moves in an aura of intrigue, hidden menace and sheer physical daring.”

  —Times Literary Supplement (London)

  “First-rate … suspenseful.… Her hero, in his rococo fashion, is as polished and perceptive as Lord Peter Wimsey and as resourceful as James Bond.”

  —The New York Times Book Review

  “A masterpiece of historical fiction, a pyrotechnic blend of passionate scholarship and high-speed storytelling soaked with the scents and colors and sounds and combustible emotions of 16th-century feudal Scotland.”

  —Washington Post Book World

  “With shrewd psychological insight and a rare gift of narrative and descriptive power, Dorothy Dunnett reveals the color, wit, lushness … and turbulent intensity of one of Europe’s greatest eras.”

  —Raleigh News and Observer

  “Splendidly colored scenes … always exciting, dangerous, fascinating.”

  —Boston Globe

  “Detailed research, baroque imagination, staggering dramatic twists, multilingual literary allusion and scenes that can be very funny.”

  —The Times (London)

  “Ingenious and exceptional … its effect brilliant, its pace swift and colorful and its multi-linear plot spirited and absorbing.”

  —Boston Herald

  The Game of Kings is jointly dedicated as may

  seem fitting to an Englishwoman and a Scot

  FOR

  ALASTAIR MACTAVISH DUNNETT

  AND

  DOROTHY EVELINE MILLARD HALLIDAY

  THE LYMOND CHRONICLES

  FOREWORD BY Dorothy Dunnett

  When, a generation ago, I sat down before an old Olivetti typewriter, ran through a sheet of paper, and typed a title, The Game of Kings, I had no notion of changing the course of my life. I wished to explore, within several books, the nature and experiences of a classical hero: a gifted leader whose star-crossed career, disturbing, hilarious, dangerous, I could follow in finest detail for ten years. And I wished to set him in the age of the Renaissance.

  Francis Crawford of Lymond in reality did not exist, and his family, his enemies and his lovers are merely fictitious. The countries in which he practices his arts, and for whom he fights, are, however, real enough. In pursuit of a personal quest, he finds his way—or is driven—across the known world, from the palaces of the Tudor kings and queens of England to the brilliant court of Henry II and Catherine de Medici in France.

  His home, however, is Scotland, where Mary Queen of Scots is a vulnerable child in a country ruled by her mother. It becomes apparent in the course of the story that Lymond, the most articulate and charismatic of men, is vulnerable too, not least because of his feeling for Scotland, and for his estranged family.

  The Game of Kings was my first novel. As Lymond developed in wisdom, so did I. We introduced one another to the world of sixteenth-century Europe, and while he cannot change history, the wars and events which embroil him are real. After the last book of the six had been published, it was hard to accept that nothing more about Francis Crawford could be written, without disturbing the shape and theme of his story. But there was, as it happened, something that could be done: a little manicuring to repair the defects of the original edition as it was rushed out on both sides of the Atlantic. And so here is Lymond returned, in a freshened text which presents him as I first envisaged him, to a different world.

  CHARACTERS

  These are some of the Scots who play a part in this story:

  RICHARD CRAWFORD, third Baron Culter of Midculter Castle, Lanarkshire

  SYBILLA, the Dowager Lady Culter, his mother

  MARIOTTA, his wife

  FRANCIS CRAWFORD OF LYMOND, Master of Culter, his brother

  SIR WALTER SCOTT OF BUCCLEUCH, a Border landowner

  JANET BEATON, his wife

  WILL SCOTT OF KINCURD, younger of Buccleuch, his heir

  SIR ANDREW HUNTER OF BALLAGGAN

  CATHERINE, his mother

  AGNES, Lady Herries, a young heiress

  JOHN, Master of Maxwell, brother of Robert, sixth Lord Maxwell

  THOMAS ERSKINE, Commendator of Dryburgh Abbey and Master of Erskine

  LADY JANET FLEMING, widow, of Boghall Castle, the Queen’s aunt and governess

  LADY CHRISTIAN STEWART, her godddaughter

  MARGARET GRAHAM, her widowed daughter

  ARCHIBALD DOUGLAS, sixth Earl of Angus, ex-husband of King James IV’s widow

  SIR GEORGE DOUGLAS, his brother

  SIR JAMES DOUGLAS OF DRUMLANRIG, his brother-in-law and uncle of Maxwell

  JOHNNIE BULLO, a gypsy

  TURKEY MATTHEW, a mercenary soldier

  Court:

  MARY OF GUISE, widow of King James V and Dowager Queen of Scotland

  MARY QUEEN OF SCOTS, her daughter, aged four

  JAMES HAMILTON, second Earl of Arran and Governor of Scotland

  HENRY LAUDER OF ST. GERMAINS, Lord Advocate to the Queen

  ARCHIBALD CAMPBELL, fourth Earl of Argyll, Lord Justice-General

  And these, by birth or adoption, are the English:

  EDWARD, Duke of Somerset, Earl of Hertford, Viscount Beauchamp, Lord Seymour; Lord Protector of England and Governor of his nephew, King Edward VI, aged nine

  The Lords Warden:

  SIR WILLIAM GREY, thirteenth Baron Grey de Wilton, Lord Lieutenant of the North Parts for England

  THOMAS WHARTON, first Baron Wharton, captain of Carlisle and Warden of the Western Marches

  SIR ROBERT BOWES, Lord Warden of the East and Middle Marches

  MATTHEW STEWART, Earl of Lennox and Lord Darnley, Franco-Scot turned English

  LADY MARGARET DOUGLAS, his wife, and daughter of the Earl of Angus

  Former officers of the Royal Household:

  JONATHAN CROUCH, prisoner of war

  GIDEON SOMERVILLE OF FLAW VALLEYS, Hexham

  KATE, his wife

  PHILIPPA, his daughter

  SAMUEL HARVEY

  Minor commanders and officers:

  EDWARD DUDLEY, captain of the King’s castle of Hume in Scotland

  ANDREW DUDLEY, captain of Broughty Fort on the River Tay in Scotland

  THOMAS WYNDHAM, captain of the English fleet on the River Tay

  SIR JOHN LUTTRELL, captain of the King’s fortress of St. Colme’s Inch on the River Forth in Scotland

  SIR RALPH BULLMER, captain of the King’s castle of Roxburgh in Scotland

  SIR THOMAS PALMER, soldier and engineer

  Contents

  Opening Gambit: Threat to a Castle

  Part One

  THE PLAY FOR JONATHAN CROUCH

  Part Two

  THE PLAY FOR GIDEON SOMERVILLE

  Part Three

  THE PLAY FOR SAMUEL HARVEY

  Part Four

  THE END GAME

  Reader’s Guide

  About the Author

  Other Books by This Author

 
The Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett

  Opening Gambit:

  Threat to a Castle

  First of ye chekker sall be mēcioune maid

  And syne efter of ye proper moving

  Of every man in ordour to his king

  And as the chekker schawis us yis forne

  Richt so it maye the kinrik and the crowne,

  The warld and all that is therein suthlye,

  The chekker may in figour signifye.

  “LYMOND is back.”

  It was known soon after the Sea-Catte reached Scotland from Campvere with an illicit cargo and a man she should not have carried.

  “Lymond is in Scotland.”

  It was said by busy men preparing for war against England, with contempt, with disgust; with a side-slipping look at one of their number. “I hear the Lord Culter’s young brother is back.” Only sometimes a woman’s voice would say it with a different note, and then laugh a little.

  Lymond’s own men had known he was coming. Waiting for him in Edinburgh they wondered briefly, without concern, how he proposed to penetrate a walled city to reach them.

  When the Sea-Catte came in, Mungo Tennant, citizen and smuggler of Edinburgh, knew nothing of these things or of its passenger. He made his regular private adjustment from douce gentility to illegal trading; and soon a boatload of taxless weapons, bales of velvet and Bordeaux wine was being rowed on a warm August night over the Nor’ Loch which guarded the north flank of Edinburgh, and toward the double cellar beneath Mungo’s house.

  Among the reeds of the Nor’ Loch, where the snipe and the woodcock lay close and the baillies’ swans raised their grey necks, a man quietly stripped to silk shirt and hose and stood listening, before sliding softly into the water.

  Across four hundred feet of black lake, friezelike on their ridge, towered the houses of Edinburgh. Tonight the Castle on its pinnacle was fully lit, laying constellations on the water; for within, the Governor of Scotland the Earl of Arran was listening to report after report of the gathering English army about to invade him.

  Below the Castle, the house of the Queen Mother also showed lights. The late King’s French widow, Mary of Guise, was sleepless too over the feared attack, for the redheaded baby Queen for whom Arran governed was her daughter. And England’s purpose was to force a betrothal between the child Queen Mary and the boy King Edward, aged nine, and to abduct the four-year-old fiancée if chance offered. The burned thatch, the ruined stonework, the blackened face of Holyrood Palace showed where already, in other years, invading armies from England had made their point, but not their capture.

  Few civic cares troubled Mungo Tennant, awaiting his cargo, except that the ceaseless renewal of war against England made a watch at the gates much too stringent; and the total defeat by England thirty-four years since at Flodden had caused high walls to be flung around Edinburgh which were damnably inopportune for a smuggler. And for Crawford of Lymond, now parting the flat waters of the Nor’ Loch like an oriflamme in the wake of the boat. For where a smuggler’s load could pierce a city’s defences, so could an outlawed rebel, whose life would be forfeit if caught.

  Ahead, the boat scraped on mud and was lifted silently shoreward. The rowers unloaded. Burdened feet trod on grass, crossed a garden, encompassed an obstacle, and were silent within the underground shaft leading to the cellar below the cellar in Mungo’s house. The swimmer, collared with duckweed, grounded, shook himself, and unseen followed gently into, and out of the same house. Crawford of Lymond was in Edinburgh.

  Once there, it was simple. In a small room in the High Street he changed fast into sober, smothering clothes and was fed two months’ news, in voracious detail, by those serving him. “… And so the Governor’s expecting the English in three weeks and is fair flittering about like a hen with its throat cut.… You’re gey wet,” said the spokesman.

  “I,” said Lymond, in the voice unmistakably his which honeyed his most lethal thoughts, “I am a narwhal looking for my virgin. I have sucked up the sea like Charybdis and failing other entertainment will spew it three times daily, for a fee. Tell me again, precisely, what you have just said about Mungo Tennant.”

  They told him, and received their orders, and then he left, pausing on the threshold to pin the dark cloak about his chin. “Shy,” said Lymond with simplicity, “as a dogtooth violet.” And he was gone.

  In his tall house in Gosford Close with the boar’s head in chief over the lintel, Mungo Tennant, wealthy and respectable burgher, had invited a neighbour and his friend to call. They sat on carved chairs, with their feet on a Kurdistan carpet, ate their way through capon and quails, chickens, pigeons and strawberries, cherries, apples and warden pears, and noticed none of these things, nor even the hour, being at grips with a noble and irresistible argument.

  At ten o’clock, the rest of the household went to bed.

  At ten-thirty, Mungo’s steward answered a rasp at the door and found Hob Hewat, the water carrier.

  The steward asked Hob, in the vernacular, digressing every second or third word, what he wanted.

  Hob said he had been told to bring water for the sow.

  The steward denied it. Hob insisted. The steward described what instead he might do with the water and Hob described in detail how he had ruined his spine raising the steward’s undistinguished water from the well. Mungo, above, thumped on the floor to stop the racket and the steward, cursing, gave in. He led the way to the apartment beneath the stairs where lived Mungo’s great sow, the badge of his house, the pet and idiotic pig’s apple of his eye, and waited while Hob Hewat filled its water trough. He then sat down suddenly under an annihilating tap on the head.

  Hob, who had done all he had been paid to do, disappeared.

  The steward slipped to the floor, and stayed there.

  The sow approached her water dish, sniffed it with increasing favour, and inserted both her nose and her front trotters therein.

  Crawford of Lymond tied up the steward, left the stye, and climbed the stairs to Mungo Tennant’s apartments.

  In the gratified presence of their host, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch and Tom Erskine were still hard at it. Buccleuch, beaked like a macaw, was a baroque and mighty Scots Lowlander with a tough mind, a voice like Saint Columba’s, and one of the biggest estates on the Scottish Border. Erskine, much the younger, pink, stocky and vehement, was a son of Lord Erskine, who was head of one of the families nearest the throne, and captain of the Queen’s fortress of Stirling.

  “Just wait,” Buccleuch was roaring. “Just wait, man. Protector Somerset will get his damned English rabble together and march into Scotland up the east coast. And he’ll tell off his commander, Lord Wharton, to get his Cumberland English together and invade us at the same time up the west coast. And half the west coast landowners are pensioners of the English already and won’t resist ’em. And all the rest of us’ll be over here at Edinburgh fighting Ned Somerset—”

  “Not all of us,” said Erskine neatly.

  Buccleuch’s whiskers promenaded. “Who’ll stay in the west that’s worth a docken?”

  “Andrew Hunter of Ballaggan?”

  “Christ. Andrew’s a nice, gentlemanly lad, but his estate’s been bled dry; and as for the ill-armed crew he calls followers—Man, they’d lay on a battlefield like dandruff.”

  “The third Baron Culter?” suggested Tom Erskine, and Buccleuch got the derisive note and turned red at the wattle.

  “I know fine the cheeky clack of the court,” shouted Buccleuch. “They say Culter’s not to be trusted.”

  Tom Erskine lifted the broad, brocade shoulders. “They say his younger brother’s not to be trusted.”

  “Lymond! We know all about Lymond. Rieving and ruttery and all manner of vice—”

  “And treason.”

  “And treason. But treason’s not Lord Culter’s dish. There are those that want to take time and men to hunt down Lymond and his band of murderers; and those that demand that Culter should lead them as pr
oof of his loyalty. But if Richard Crawford of Culter won’t interfere; says he has better business to attend to and refuses flatly to hound down his brother baying like the Wild Jagd, that still doesn’t make him a traitor.” And inflating the great chasms of his cheeks, Buccleuch added, “Anyway, Culter’s just got married. D’ye blame him for keeping his shield on the hook and his family blunders all tied up at the back of the armory?”

  “Damn it,” said Tom Erskine, annoyed, “I don’t blame him for anything. It isn’t my fault. And if it’s that black Irish beauty he married, I don’t expect he’d notice if the Protector knocked on the front gate at Midculter and asked for a drink of water. But—”

  The large red face had calmed down. “You’re dead right, of course,” said Buccleuch cordially. “In fact you’ve given me a wee notion or two I can use to the fellow himself. If Culter’s going to be in credit at court at all, he’ll need to bring himself to capture that honey-faced de’il.”

  Mungo Tennant, the silent and flattered host, was able to make respectful comment at last. “Crawford of Lymond, Sir Wat?” he said. “Now, he’s not in this country, as I heard. He’s in the Low Countries, I believe. And when he’ll be back, if ever, God knows.… Bless us, what’s that?”

  It was only a sneeze; but a sneeze outside the door of their chamber, which dislimned every shade of their privacy. Tom Erskine got there first, the other two at his heels. The room beyond was empty, but the door of Mungo’s bedroom was ajar. Taking a candle like a banner in his fist, Erskine rushed in.

  His hair soft as a nestling’s, his eyes graceless with malice, Lymond was watching him in a silver mirror. Before Erskine could call, Buccleuch and Mungo Tennant had piled in beside him and Lymond had taken two steps to the far door, there to linger, hand on latch and the blade of his sword held twinkling at breast level as they jumped, weaponless, to face him, and then fell back.