The Game of Kings Page 16

  The sun shone. Trumpets blared; and drew every nose to the field as one of the heralds, his tabard looking a trifle end-of-season and tarnished, made an announcement, inaudible. More trumpets. Then a temporary barrier was removed and the competitors, fifty noblemen and fifty commoners, filed self-consciously onto the field and around its margin.

  One recognized one’s friends at once from the banners. The pages were obviously enjoying the parade much more than their masters, who were smiling in a resolute sort of way at their friends in the crowd, indicating that they only did this kind of thing to entertain the tenants. One looked for the warmth and hilarity which halfway through, by unexplained custom, would suddenly enliven and vulgarize the proceedings.

  Nevertheless, and not to be carping, the long file of athletic and purposeful bowmen looked very splendid, though not as splendid as if one’s own husband were there. The wind blew the standards straight toward the castle rock.

  Blue and silver. She liked her own standard. The St. Andrew’s Cross; the crest (argent, a phoenix azure), and the highly ambiguous motto, chosen (of course) by the First Baron, which always eluded her, Contra Vita—whatever it was.

  As the thought crossed her mind, the motto itself appeared, almost within touching distance: CONTRA VITAM RECTI MORIEMUR. The Culter slughorn, carried by Richard’s servant. And walking behind it, looking neither to left nor to right, but perfectly self-possessed, unaffected and blasé, Lord Culter himself. Mariotta was aware of a dismayed flutter in the stomach.

  “My God!” said a voice behind her. “There’s old man Culter decided to make a pincushion of himself after all: now we should see some fun. All the same”—generously—“rather him than me.”

  * * *

  Fighting his way uphill to the top of St. John Street, past the corner of St. Michael’s, the almshouse, and then the uneven row of buildings of which Bogle House was one, Tom Erskine found no difficulty at all in stifling his better feelings, which told him he had bequeathed to Sir Andrew a thoroughly unnerving afternoon.

  The death of Lord Fleming had naturally made a good deal of difference to his household. Having buried her husband at Biggar, Lady Jenny had rejoined the court with her children, and the half-life she had always had, as the little Queen’s governess, was now her whole career. Of the older children, Margaret had moved like an uncertain ghost between her late husband’s home at Mugdock, her married sisters’, and Lady Culter’s friendly, undemanding hearth; and the duties Lady Fleming had discarded at Boghall had fallen on her blind goddaughter’s shoulders. And Christian, though now staying with the Dowager at Bogle House, would very shortly be leaving for Boghall to take them up. Which argued a need for haste.

  Tom Erskine therefore hopped in and out of the crowds down St. John Street, got himself admitted to Bogle House and bolted up the stairs fired with missionary zeal, to find himself nose to nose with his loved one on the middle landing.

  “Who is it? What’s happened? Have you news?” said Christian.

  He was startled. “What about? It’s me. Not particularly.”

  Relief showed on her face. “Oh, Tom. That’s all right. Come along in, then.” And she added in sufficient explanation as they walked toward the parlour door, “Richard’s gone to the Papingo Shoot, you see.”

  Erskine was not, at bottom, a selfish man. He said, “Oh, damn,” and paused irresolutely. “I didn’t know. I’d better get back. Left Dandy with the ladies—he didn’t say; must have thought we knew—and there’ll be the devil to pay if …”

  Christian took his arm. “Believe me, if anything’s going to happen, nothing you can do will stop it. Anyway, I want you here.”

  “You do?” He was delighted.

  “Yes. How long will the shoot last? An hour? Two hours?”

  “A hundred men—two shots each: Oh, over two hours, if they all shoot, but of course it will end if someone hits the papingo.”

  Christian said, “Then will you take Lady Culter and myself around the Fair, Tom? Until the shoot is over?”

  This was hardly the programme he would have chosen, but it was understandable enough. He said, “She’s worried, is she?”

  “Well, she’s not exactly tolling the passing bell yet, but she oughtn’t to go out alone, and you won’t get her to go out with you and leave me. I know it’s early and there won’t be much happening yet, but at least we can try and forget that God-bereft bird.”

  Tom looked at her in some astonishment. “I believe you’re as much on edge as Sybilla.”

  This time she snapped. “If you would tear your mind sometimes from backgammon and horses, you’d see something in the Crawfords that’d make your rattlepated friends look pretty thin. If I remembered my own mother, I don’t suppose I’d value her half as much as I do the Dowager. And Mariotta may not be what you fancy, but there’s breeding and spirit there too, if you’re minded to look for it—” She broke off, her brow cleared; and with one of those competent mood changes that was one of her chief characteristics, gave him a friendly push. “Go on. Tell Sybilla we’re all off for a jolly day a-fairing. And don’t let her sidetrack you either.”

  * * *

  “I don’t suppose—” said Sybilla.

  “No!” rejoined Tom Erskine and Christian Stewart in unison.

  “No. I see not. Our hands are rather full, I’m afraid. But Agnes adores gingerbread—I wonder,” said the Dowager doubtfully, “if it would sit in my hood.”

  The progress of Sybilla though a market was the progress of worker bee through a bower of intently propagating blossoms.

  Everything stuck.

  From the toy stall she bought two ivory dolls, a hen whistle, a rattle and a charming set of miniature bells for a child’s skirts: all were heroically received and borne by Tom, henceforth marked by a faint, distracted jingling.

  From the spice booth, set with delicious traps for the fat purse, she took cinnamon, figs, cumin seed and saffron, ginger, flower of gillyflower and crocus and—an afterthought—some brazil for dyeing her new wool. These were distributed between Christian and Tom.

  They listened to a balladmonger, paid him for all the verses of “When Tay’s Bank,” and bought a lengthy scroll containing a brand-new ballad which Tom Erskine read briefly and then discreetly lost. “No matter,” said the Dowager cheerfully, when told. “Dangerous quantity, music. Because it spouts sweet venom in their ears and makes their minds all effeminate, you know. We can’t have that.” He was never very sure whether she was laughing at him, but rather thought not. They pursued their course purposefully, and the Dowager bought a new set of playing cards, some thread, a boxful of ox feet, a quantity of silver lace and a pair of scissors. She was dissuaded from buying a channel stone, which Tom, no curling enthusiast, refused utterly to carry, and got a toothpick in its case instead. They watched acrobats, invested sixpence for an unconvincing mermaid and finally stumbled, flattened and hot, into a tavern, where Tom forcibly commandeered a private space for the two women and brought them refreshments.

  “Dear, dear,” said Lady Culter, seating herself among the mute sea of her parcels, like Arion among his fishes. “I’m afraid I’ve forgotten which are the squashy ones. Never mind. If we spread them out, they can’t take much hurt, I should think. Unless the ox feet … Oh. What a pity, Tom. But I’m sure it will clean off.”

  They sipped their wine and chatted. The sun, doing its best for an October day, threw the crow-stepped shadow of the Town House on the quantities of gay little booths, the bunting and the coloured wares; and the drone of professional singers made comic counterpoint with the chorus of street cries and exhortations, the gypsies’ pipes and tambours. It was bright, airy, innocent and gay.

  “Ribs o’ beef!”

  “Fine, skinned hides!”

  “Crusty pies, hot as hell!”

  “Rushes green!”

  “Fine broken geldings, stark and stout!”

  “Hoods for my lady!”

  “Guts for your playing, six shillings the
dozen!”

  “A rare pretty parrot in a cage …”

  “Well. Ce n’est pas tout de boire; it faut sortir d’ici,” said the Dowager. “There’s a cloud over the sun, and if the saffron gets wet, Tom, you’ll be or as well as gules, and very likely rampant as well. Come along.”

  They left the tavern.

  Almost immediately, Christian, pulled along by Erskine’s hand-clasp, felt a tug at her gown. A voice, very close to her, said in a sort of whine, “Tell your fortune, my bonny mistress!”

  “Wait!” she screamed above the din to Tom, and felt the strain on her arm slacken as he stopped.

  “What is it?” asked the Dowager over his shoulder. “Oh, a fortune-teller, how delightful. Of course. Wait a moment,” she said, cocking her head in its blue velvet hood to one side. “I’ve seen you before, haven’t I? Of course! It’s the gypsies who were in Culter last August. Aren’t you?” she ended in triumph.

  The would-be fortune teller flashed beautiful teeth at her. “Of course, my lady; and had the pleasure of performing for you as well.”

  “Of course,” said Sybilla. “And what are you doing? Fortune-telling—”

  “Tumbling, dancing, singing …” The gypsy waved an airy hand. From a scatter of bright mats behind him, a group of black-eyed young people were watching their leader. “Every kind of entertainment.”

  The inevitable thought struck the Dowager. “Tom! Christian! Why shouldn’t they come to Bogle House tonight? Buccleuch’s never seen them, nor Richard, nor Agnes. We’ll get Dandy Hunter in, and the older Fleming children …”

  Polite argument was futile, and any other kind unthinkable. For an enormous fee, to cover their temporary absence from pitch, the troop undertook to perform that night at Bogle House.

  The Dowager was enchanted. “So good of them. Have you any money, Tom dear? I seem to have spent all I had with me.”

  It took their concerted efforts, hindered considerably by the leaking ox feet, to get at Tom’s pouch and extract from it the necessary number of angels. “Now, straight home,” said the Dowager, a suspicion of tiredness making itself heard in her voice at last; and they made for the end of the Square, arm in arm, and started down Bow Street.

  Dandy Hunter met them at the bottom. They saw him from some distance away, boring weevil-like through the thickening crowd, and waving.

  “Just as well he’s as flat as a turbot,” said Tom Erskine judicially, watching him. “That’s twice he’s breenged through his betters today.”

  But by that time they were close enough to see his face.

  “Something’s happened,” said the Dowager in a voice notable for its unsurprised grimness, and led the way quickly toward him, clutching all her parcels as if these, at all costs, she would preserve.

  * * *

  Owing simply to Lord Culter’s presence, the October Papingo Shoot moved through its stately preliminaries to the beating of a fierce expectancy. Mortal challenge was not only piquant but eerie when the challenger was also wanted for treason.

  Tension brought the automatic reaction. Ten thousand heads, capped, hooded, bonneted and bare, bobbed and jerked as the betting surged from point to point, fed by rumour: he isn’t among the competitors; they’ve got guards all around the field; Culter’s shooting twentieth.

  The odds rose.

  “The brother’s game-shy, man: a shirker. Never finished a contest in his life.” The odds rose higher.

  Andrew Hunter, standing between Richard’s wife and Lady Herries, cursed Tom Erskine continuously under his breath. Mariotta would not go home. Staring in a hypnotized way at the side view which was all she could see of her husband, she seemed unaware, he was thankful to note, of what else was going on around her.

  Agnes Herries, however, was both aware and equipped with opinions on the subject, which palled only as the drawing of lots came to an end. Listening with half an ear, Hunter noticed she was now complaining of the viewpoint she had been given. This, since he could do nothing to improve it, he ignored.

  “It strikes me,” said Lady Herries, reminded suddenly of a sore subject, “that a Ward of the Crown might as well be a by-blow for all the difference it makes. A girl Ward, that is. Who wants to marry John Hamilton? Not me. I’ve never seen the man, even.”

  A more unsuitable place in which to air her opinions about her contracted fiancé could hardly be found. With the speed of a watchful mother, Sir Andrew said, “Look: there’s Buccleuch.”

  He failed, as better men had done before him. “Yes. But if I’d been a boy,” pursued Lady Herries, intent on her theme, “I’d never have been contracted to John Hamilton.”

  This penetrated even Mariotta’s preoccupation. She turned, diverted against her will. “Well, that’s true enough.”

  “What I mean is,” said the Ward of the Crown, frowning, “that people have no business to settle other people’s future for them when they’re five years old. It’s a typical man’s scheme,” said Agnes ruthlessly. “It’s not for our own good; it’s no use saying it is. It’s to add to their rotten lands, or because they need to carry on the family name, or because it’ll bring them enough money or tenants or rights of lineage to stop a war, or start a war, or carry out their own uninteresting masculine affairs.”

  There was a short, respectful silence. “Well,” said Mariotta soothingly, “I wasn’t contracted when I was five.”

  “Yes,” said Lady Herries with devastating frankness. “That’s just what I mean. Trust a man to take advantage. Brood mares and—”

  Whether her own undeniably single-track brain or Sir Andrew called a halt first, it would be hard to say; but in the net result the Baroness shut her mouth rather suddenly and Hunter said, “Look: the shooting has started.”

  On the field, an orderly pattern, pleasing in itself to the eye, had fallen into place. Far out to one side stood the Master and officials of the games, dressed in Arran’s red and white livery; and beside them a group of arrow boys, minute fungi under cartwheel rush hats. Beside that again, in a long line against the painted barriers, the competitors waited; a trifle uneasy; a trifle tense now the moment had come.

  The first bowman, flexing his shoulders, took his place in the centre of the field below the high, painted pole, and footed the mark. The parrot, brilliant in the eye of the sun, struggled and screamed against the backdrop of the castle rock, scarlet with bracken and the autumn glory of beech and sycamore; above the rock, the Palace windows gave back the sun in stabs of flame behind their cage grilles. A voice shouted “Fast!;” the archer raised his longbow smoothly to the sky, nocked his arrow, drew, held and released; replaced his second shaft, aimed, held and released again.

  The papingo squawked bad-temperedly and swore with an Aberdeen accent; the arrows arched and fell harmlessly, six yards to the left. To a roar of sardonic cheering the tension broke, and Sir Andrew suddenly moved.

  “There’s only one place Lymond can shoot from,” he said, almost to himself. “And that’s from the shelter of the rock.”

  Mariotta heard him. She raised her eyes as he had done and studied the broken face of the crag. “Shooting against both the sun and the wind?”

  “That’s the difficulty, of course,” he acknowledged. “But look. The rest of the field is hedged in by the crowd: a man couldn’t raise his arms in it, never mind aim six feet of a longbow.” He hesitated, and then said, “Lady Culter, if you’d give me leave, I’ll climb up and look through some of that scrub there.”

  But Mariotta, unimpressed by the suggestion that he should safeguard Richard’s life at the risk of his own, refused and would not be persuaded. He argued uneasily, found her adamant, and dropped the proposal. In silence they watched.

  The wind, violent and skittish, was making better sport of it than the competitors were. Buccleuch, shooting third, nicked the post with his first shaft and overshot with his second, retiring bellowing amid a chorus of witticisms. The next two were wide; the fifth caused a mild sensation by breaking his bow and nearly
amputating himself with the shards; the sixth lost his thread and bungled both draws; and the seventh squirted off like a firecracker.

  The eighth nearly got it.

  “Oh!” said Agnes, sparkling. “It’s very exciting, isn’t it?” And she added, a little wistfully, “A woman would enjoy being married to a wonderful archer.”

  In the midst of their anxiety, the eyes of the other two met, and laughter sprang into Hunter’s. “My dear girl,” he said, “your mind’s running a great deal on marriage today, surely?”

  Lady Herries looked surprised. “Not specially. But I’ll have to get married this year, I expect; and if I’ve got to be sold like a packet of wool—”

  “Agnes!”

  “Well. I mean, having children and doing embroidery may not be fun, but it’d be more so if at least they fought battles for you and pretended they liked it. Courts of Love, and sonnets, and scarves in their helmets. That’s what I think. Otherwise,” pursued Agnes, “there’s not much point in it all, is there?”

  “Well, I’m afraid Johnnie Hamilton won’t write any odes to your eyelashes,” said Sir Andrew cheerfully. “Besides, that’s a limiting form of courtship, isn’t it? You’d be much more comfortable with a husband who worked up a connection at Court, or developed his lands, or exercised his money in trade so that you had diamond bracelets by the gross and a house in each county.”

  “But I’ve got all the diamonds I want,” said Agnes succinctly. “Like Mariotta. And the little Queen. So I don’t see there’s any point in marrying, unless it’s to get something you haven’t got already. And nine times out of ten, you needn’t marry for that, either,” she added as an afterthought.

  Watching the twelfth bowman loose off, Sir Andrew said unhappily, “How much land have you got, Lady Herries? And how many able-bodied tenants?”

  She looked at him with vague distaste. “You sound like Grandfather Blairquhan.”

  “Never mind. How many, and where are they all?”