The Game of Kings Read online

  She said rather sulkily, “You know. I share them with Cathie and Jean. Terregles, Kirkgunzeon, Moffatdale, Lockerbie, Ecclefechan … next to the Maxwell lands on the Border.”

  “H’m,” said Hunter. “On the Border. You don’t say how many tenants, but I imagine it’ll run to a few thousand. And who do you imagine is going to look after all that for you and protect it from the English? And, if you’ll forgive me for being practical, who’s going to lead them into the field in wartime? You can’t dodge your national obligations, even if you think you can dodge your moral ones.”

  “I knew you were going to sound like Grandfather Blairquhan,” said Agnes pettishly. “Anyway, we’ve all got men kinsfolk who’d do that for us, surely, without having to marry them first. The point is, whether it’s kinsfolk or husbands, they’d do it just because it suits them, no matter whether we were fifty and fat and had bowlegs, and that,” she ended with dignity, “simply isn’t romance as I see it.”

  Mariotta suddenly intervened. “Don’t be silly: what do you want? An altruistic uncle for security and a boudoir full of lovers for pleasure?”

  “I should like,” pronounced Lady Herries with a stately air, “a husband who put me before business or politics.”

  “They don’t exist.”

  “Oh, yes, they do,” said Hunter unexpectedly. (Fifteen.) He glanced down, his lips twitching. “You’re being a bit hard, you know; both of you. It’s pretty well a full-time job, these days, keeping a family housed and clothed and warm and protected. Doesn’t leave much time for poetry under the apple trees. But chivalry hasn’t gone: don’t think it. You’ll even find it paramount still with some people, but a trifle the worse for wear, because it’s not the best protection against an aggressive and materialistic world.…” He smiled again, rather ruefully. “And don’t forget: a man has other claims and duties too—to relatives; and old folk; and his friends. He’s not always free, as you seem to think, to slap down the money and carry off the bride of his choice.”

  Mariotta said, instantly repentant, “We know that, of course. Agnes only means, I think, that often in arranged marriages there’s a good deal of unhappiness on both sides.”

  “—And it’s a pity to go through with it for the sake of posterity if posterity is simply going to repeat the process. Yes. I see that,” said Sir Andrew. “But look around you. I think you’ll find that marital bliss sometimes fights its way to the surface in the end. And then, you see, there are so many other things involved as well—the continuance of a great house, for example—family loyalty’s a powerful thing, and that’s as it should be. Even sometimes the continued existence of a nation—that’s the price royalty pays. And that’s got a romance of its own, of course; not quite the kind you mean, but one that lies perhaps a little deeper.”

  “As far as I’m concerned,” retorted her ladyship, “it can bury itself. They won’t get me to marry anyone I don’t want to, contract or no contract. Oh, look: there’s Menteith shooting.”

  They were already looking, for young Menteith, Mariotta’s host from Inchmahome, was the nineteenth archer, and the crowd was now perfectly quiet.

  He took position, aimed and loosed. His first arrow struck the crossbar on which the parrot was bound. The bar jerked, and held; the arrow twisted and plummeted as the second flew, ruffling the bird’s plumage. Two good shots. A subdued shout went up, followed by a crawling hum of anticipation. The arrow boys, one of them with a goose feather waving in his hatbrim, ran forward briefly into the field; the perch, chipped and scratched, threw a thin wavering shadow toward the castle rock; the autumn leaves, lit by the dipping sun, turned from tawny to crimson.

  Richard Crawford, holding himself uncommonly straight, walked steadily across the field and paused at the foot of the perch, looking down momentarily at the big yew in his tabbed hand, then up at the crossbar. He took his stand, and Mariotta, reaching out panic-stricken, found Sir Andrew had gone.

  The silence was absolute; the stillness profound. But for the ruffling of the trees and the gentle singing of the perch stays, a man might have thought himself deaf. He nocked, raising his arm with the poetic, compact motion of the master bowman; the thin, echoing official voice called “Fast!;” he drew, held lovingly, and loosed.

  His arrow leapt; but another was already airborne. Slender, deadly, red as hot steel in the sun, a shaft came hissing from the farthest suburbs of the crowd. There was never an instant’s doubt of its destination. It drove into the crossbar, slicing off the crude ties with a razor barb, freeing the papingo in the instant that Culter’s arrow flew toward it.

  From the audience, a sea of upturned faces, rose a breathy gasp. Weak and stiff from its bonds, the bird jerked grotesquely, fell, wavered, flapped; and with a sudden strong upbeat, recovered itself.

  As if over its corporate soul the crowd, mesmerized, yearned over the bright wings. At its back Andrew Hunter, his face set in anger, had already reached the higher ground, racing; thrusting; running free like a madman.

  They hardly noticed him. For as the parrot, gaining height, swooped wildly away from the field, a second arrow breathed by and feathered into its mark. The papingo, transfixed in its blundering flight, stopped, tilted, and dropped like a stricken star to the ground. A yellow feather, wanton and unseemly, danced its way after.

  Then, on the wave of a roaring uprush, the crowd was moved to action: too late, for the third arrow was already launched.

  It arched in the air, a gleaming parabola, the feathers susurrant with curses, and found this time its designed, human mark.

  Culter, standing white, taut and watchful at the base of the perch, flung out an arm blindly, held himself a moment upright against the pole, then slowly folded against it and thence to the ground.

  2. Check and Cross Check

  That evening, bright in the dusk, a great fire glowed in the parlour at Bogle House, bestowing light, warmth and comfort on its occupants. It flickered on the faces about it: the Dowager, Mariotta, Buccleuch, Hunter, Agnes Herries, Christian and Tom Erskine. It glittered on the table beside it, on which lay three arrows, two of them dark with blood, a longbow and a leather embroidered shooting glove. It flared, lastly, on the calm face of Lord Culter, lying stiffly bandaged on a long settle before it.

  For the arrow which struck Richard came from a great distance and had to fly over many heads to an almost invisible mark. Unlike the first two, it was not faultless. It had dropped, losing power, and had torn its way across cheek and ear to bury itself beside the collarbone. And so, again charmed, again flouted by tragedy, Lord Culter was able, studying the exhibits on the table, to hold a post-mortem on a parrot.

  “An English bow: that’ll be part of the booty from Annan, I expect. And three arrows from the same source, fully barbed … very naughty, in a perch contest. And a glove.”

  He picked it up and sniffed at it. It was a right-hand glove in white buckskin, its newness betrayed by the absence of rubbing on the first three fingers.

  “Discreetly perfumed,” observed Lord Culter, turning it over. “Beautifully stitched, and some jewellers’ work on the back, to boot. A nice toy, if you can afford it—and since friend Lymond presumably paid for it with my money, he can. God!” he said. “I’d give my chance of heaven, nearly, to match against him, perch or clout.”

  Tom Erskine observed critically, “Wind behind him, of course; and he had a bit of elevation too, hadn’t he, Dandy?”

  Sir Andrew nodded. “He shot from behind one of the dressing tents, just where the ground rose to the wood. I was just too late getting there. Found the stuff where he dropped it.…” He groaned. “We all underrated him. I worked out that he couldn’t possibly shoot from among the crowd. It didn’t cross my mind that a first-class marksman might just do it from the ground behind.”

  “Well, you gave us a shaking-up all right, Culter,” said Buccleuch. “Thought you were away with the papingo, my lad!”

  The Dowager, who had been, for her, unusually silent, remarked at
once, “Well, it wasn’t very reassuring, I admit, coming back fo find Richard laid out all bloody in one bed and Mariotta fainting in the next, but then Wapenshaws are notorious, aren’t they? Did anyone remember to ask who got the prize?”

  Tom said, “Well I suppose, strictly speaking, they ought to give it to Lymond, but I should put it past even his impudence to claim it.”

  “I don’t know.” Mariotta’s voice was detached. “He seems able to do almost anything he wants.”

  Agnes, her eyes fixed on Culter, heaved a sigh. “I thought I was going to die.”

  “Well, you behaved very sensibly, darling,” said the Dowager. “And now we shall enjoy the gypsies all the more.”

  “Gypsies!”

  “Yes, of course. From the fair: had you forgotten? And here they are,” said Sybilla.

  It was a triumphant example, in the outcome, of her own brand of humane genius. Under the spell of the entertainment, even Mariotta’s taut nerves slackened, and colour came back into her face. Christian Stewart, listening gravely to Erskine’s commentary, sat with her hand on Agnes’s shoulder, thus regulating (but not eliminating) her interruptions, aided by a tactful Sir Andrew. Culter himself lay quietly, his eyes heavy, under the watchful gaze of the Dowager, who was having a long and intermittent discussion at the same time with the leading gypsy.

  Toward the end of the performance, and during a phase which involved something noisy with a tambourine and much stamping, she caught Buccleuch’s rather distracted eye, and slipped out of the room, followed by Sir Wat.

  Sybilla shut the door on the noise.

  “Dod!” Sir Wat, breathing the cold air on the deserted landing, wiped his forehead. “Clever rascals, Sybilla, but not just my meat, y’know.”

  “I thought you stood it very well,” commented the Dowager. “And really it’s a great comfort to have you, for I mustn’t bother Richard, and Sir Andrew and Tom are dear boys but a little occupied; and they have their own troubles anyway.”

  Sir Wat looked apprehensive, not without reason.

  “About the bloodhounds,” said Sybilla.

  “Bloodhound yourself,” said Buccleuch, jerked, in his alarm, out of even the nominal form of courtesy he usually practised. “How did you know—”

  “Oh, I know Richard,” said Sybilla. “I always could interpret these silences, you know, more easily than half an hour of his brother’s chatter. He was performing very prettily in there, and I’m sure all the girls felt better for it, but I didn’t. What did he ask you to do?”

  Buccleuch shrugged, and gave up. “Track down Lymond, of course. There’s the glove, and—you’re right—I still have the dogs at Branxholm.” He looked down at her, an unaccustomed diffidence struggling among the appalling burst-whinbush whiskers.

  “He’s been made a fool of—twice, you know,” he said. “Feels like a sulky fat goose in a barrel, being shot at by gutter boys. Can’t stomach it—won’t stand for it. Wouldn’t try to stop him, either.”

  “I shall,” said Sybilla.

  “Why? Discredits you all—sorry, m’dear—as it is. The boy’s no good to himself or anyone else till it’s settled.”

  “Yes,” said the Dowager. “But I shall settle it, not Richard. Anyway, aren’t you supposed to be ill? You are a fool, Wat,” she added, with a kind of affectionate resignation. “You know perfectly well word’ll reach England inside forty-eight hours that you’re playing games at Stirling when you’re supposed to be too ill to go and speak nicely to old Grey at Norham.”

  Sir Wat accepted the stricture with surprising meekness. “Well, as to that—” He scowled at the landing arras. “That’s what makes it unco knotty, if you want the truth, to do what Richard asked.”

  “Which was?”

  “Well, to let go everything else and hoe up the country till we find Lymond. We could do it—but—”

  “—But in Richard’s present mood, in bringing Lymond to face his deserts, he’s also liable to bring Will Scott to face his,” said the Dowager concisely.

  Buccleuch wriggled. His face got red, then the spaces under his hair; finally he burst into speech which lost no violence through being compressed into undertones.

  “Dod, Sybilla: if you want to know, I’m in the hell of a jawboxy mess. Seymour’s Lord High Suleyman the Magnificent Grey at Norham’s been sending me polite notes ever since Will snipped his nose for him at Hume, asking when I’m coming to parley and assure them of help. It’s damned awkward. They know it was Will—how, I can’t understand, for at my last taste of him he was too blasted whaup-nosed to claim his own mother. But there it is, and if I refuse to help, they’ll burn me to the ground on the next raid. I’ve put it around that I’m ill, but short of following it up that I’m dead, I don’t know what to do next.”

  The broad, capable Scott hands, with their spatulate fingers and white scar seams, gripped the balustrade and blanched, as he leaned his uneasy weight on them. “I’ll have to disown Will publicly, and hope they’ll believe I had nothing to do with Hume. I doubt they won’t, though; it looks too damned neat, right to the cartload of cutty sarks on my land at Melrose.”

  He stared disconsolately at Lady Culter. “And here’s the joke. I’m not a praying man, Sybilla, but I’ve had these baw-heids at the chapel on their knees ever since he went, hoping that Will’d see he’d been a damned stupid fool, and come back. Now, if he does, I’m made to look an accomplice to the fiasco at Hume, and Grey’ll see I suffer accordingly. Whereas if he doesn’t, and I’m forced to disown him to Grey—and if word of it gets to the Queen—and if he’s captured with Lymond—”

  “He’ll get the same treatment as Lymond. But not if I catch him,” said Sybilla.

  Buccleuch eyed her. “Then, by God, I wouldn’t care to be in Lymond’s shoes.”

  “How my sons turn out is rather my affair,” said the Dowager coolly. “And involves rather less risk, on the whole, to Richard. If you’ll co-operate.”

  “By not co-operating?” Sir Wat gave a relieved bark. “It’ll give Culter a poor opinion of me, but I don’t mind. No. My dogs’ll be sick; and I’ll be sicker than the lot put together. Listen—someone’s coming.” He broke off hurriedly as light and warmth streamed in on them.

  “And so,” said Sybilla placidly, “I had a long talk with him—Johnnie Bullo, his name is; a real gypsy king—and he tells me he knows how to make it.”

  “Make what, Lady Culter?” It was Christian who had opened the parlour door on sounds of imminent departure from within. “The gypsies are just going.”

  “Make the Philosopher’s Stone, dear,” said the Dowager, driving haphazard but triumphant into her subject. “You know, the thing that turns tin into gold, and makes frisky old gentlemen senex bis puer, and mends broken legs and all sorts of practical things.”

  “It’s what we need at Branxholm,” said Sir Wat gloomily. “Janet broke another vase last week.”

  For some reason this tickled both Sybilla and Christian. The Dowager was the first to recover.

  “Just you wait,” she said. “I have it all from Bullo, and it all sounds remarkably well authenticated, considering. Anyway, he’s coming again to Midculter to explain it to me.”

  “Good God!” said Buccleuch, to whom the Dowager was the source and fount of all astonishments. “You don’t mean you believe all that rubbish! I’ve enough of it at home with Janet; and the Lee penny never out the house.”

  “All what rubbish?” said Sybilla. “You see, you don’t know yourself what you’re talking about, and neither shall I,” she added as an afterthought, “until Master Bullo has been and explained it again.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you want the Philosopher’s Stone for,” said Christian. “It seems to me that as a family you’re quite indecently rich already.”

  “Oh, you never know,” said the Dowager mysteriously. “Healing charms—elixirs of life—love potions—”

  “What I came to ask,” said Christian, her face rather red, “was whether we might all
go to the Fair—Agnes, Mariotta and myself, I mean. The trouble is—”

  “The trouble is, Master Bullo won’t read our fortunes here: he hasn’t got his crystal, he says, and he won’t go and bring it back.” Agnes, squeezing through the door, provided the explanations, fortissimo. “But he says we can call at his tent, and Tom’ll go with us—”

  The Dowager spoke quietly. “What about Richard?”

  “It’s all right.” Christian was quick in defence of the absent Mariotta. “As a matter of fact, he’s asleep, and …” And it won’t do him any harm to be spared a performance of wifely reproach, her hesitation added.

  The Dowager made no objection. So the gypsies left, and a little later, wrapped in heavy cloaks and hoods, the three girls walked out with Tom Erskine, and an unobtrusive following of Erskine’s men. Sir Andrew and Buccleuch left. In the snug parlour the big fire hissed and murmured in the silence, glimmering on mother and son. Sitting beside Richard’s quiet couch, Sybilla put on her spectacles and threaded a needle. Then she put it down and sat quite still for a long time, staring owlishly into space.

  And it was into space that at last she spoke. “Oh, my darling!” said Sybilla. “I do hope I’ve done the best thing.”

  * * *

  “Are you all right?” asked Tom Erskine. And again, later on, “What’s wrong? Are you feeling all right?”

  “Of course. It’s the cold,” said Christian rather snappishly, and relaxing her grip on his arm, tried furiously to still the uncalled-for and humiliating frisson set up by her nerves.

  It was not the cold, as she well knew. It was the crowded strain of the day; the blaring darkness; the devils’ orchestra of uncouth music; the coarse chatter, the catcalls and the mindless, ganting laughter. The Fair had become by night a bloated Saturnalia, sodden, sottish and leering of voice. She was buffeted by blundering bodies and twitched by grasping hands. Smells assailed her: beer smells, food smells and leather smells; the stink of human bodies and once, as two struggling shapes crashed into her, the reek of blood, forcing on the mind the warm fire and the reeking arrows of an hour before—Culter’s voice: “If that’s what a life of depravity does for your archery”; Mariotta’s: “He seems able to do almost anything he wants”; the Dowager, bandaging with cool hands, refusing to panic.…