The Game of Kings Page 9

  A ferry, already signalled by its prow lantern, arrived, chuckling; and he got in.

  * * *

  “My dear man,” said Sybilla next day, placidly stitching before Earl John’s big fire. “Admit you’ve never had to live with eight children on an island, and every one with the instincts of a full-grown lemming.”

  The Dowager, who had her own way of reducing tension, sat next to Tom Erskine, her aristocratic nose decorated by a pair of horn-rimmed spectacles hung around her neck on a thin gold chain, the inevitable embroidery on her lap. Christian Stewart was out, and Sybilla was free, which meant that she commandeered both Erskine and Sir Andrew Hunter, newly in with dispatches, to help her entertain Mariotta.

  For the attack on Midculter had tumbled Richard’s wife into a cold bath of nerves which the upheaval of the last three weeks had not helped at all. The theft of their silver had hardly touched the ledger pages of Richard’s wealth: what made her flesh shiver was the thought of Lymond, and the cool, impertinent grip of the mind he had used; in five indifferent minutes pioneering where Richard’s diffident courtesy had never taken him. On her husband, too, the incident had borne grossly. She realized as much during the two sleepless, congested days before he left to join the army in the east. Since then, the only news of or from Richard had been that brought by Erskine—news received without comment by the Dowager, who continued to arrange her affairs without further reference to the uncomfortable and icy springs of satire and denunciation. Mariotta turned to Sir Andrew Hunter.

  He had been watching her. A distant neighbour, a near-contemporary, a gentle and distinguished landowner and courtier, Andrew Hunter was well known to the Culters, and Mariotta had learned to like him, and to enjoy his kindness, his willing attentions, and an articulate turn of speech which made her now and then sick for home. Now, on a sudden impulse, she addressed him. “Tell me, Dandy, what do men talk about? Richard, for example?”

  He was taken aback, but he answered her. “What does Richard discuss with other men? Horses, of course. And pigs. And the state of the barley, and the new cocks, and the hawking, and what the Estates are up to, and the wrestlers, and any new shiploads he’s expecting, and the rates of exchange, and taxes, and poaching, and pistols, and the price of roofing, and his deerhound litter, and Milanese armour, and the lambing.… Richard’s interests,” said Sir Andrew, with a hint of defensiveness in the soft voice, “are pretty wide.”

  “But never dull. I wonder,” said Mariotta, her eyes expressionless, “what Lymond makes of light conversation?”

  Hunter sat up. “Lymond’s conversation doesn’t give me a moment’s alarm. It’s his actions that hurt. Richard’s bent on this challenge at the Wapenshaw and, my God! if he goes, it’ll be suicide.”

  Mariotta’s eyes opened. “But the challenge wasn’t serious! Lymond at Stirling’d be under instant arrest. And besides, Richard’s the finest shot in—”

  She broke off. Hunter was right. What use was all that with an arrow in the back? “God has a thousand handes to chastise,” had said Lymond, and at Annan he had nearly succeeded. Mariotta opened her mouth, but Sybilla, stabbing industriously with her needle, spoke first. “Did you hear any word of Will Scott in town, Tom?” And added, composedly, “We know he’s with my son. Sir Andrew brought back news from Annan of his meeting with Richard.”

  Saved from plunging a second time into the same diplomatic whirlpool, Erskine sat back, relieved. “There’s nothing new. Saw Buccleuch, as a matter of fact, yesterday and broke the news to him. And that fool George Douglas hovering by while I told him.”

  “Where? At Stirling?” Hunter was interested. “I thought Sir George was with his brother.”

  Erskine shrugged. “He’s off to Drumlanrig by now, anyway, thank God: can’t thole the man.” His mind was not on George Douglas, but on Christian, and her odd behavior last night. He had gone to the Priory first, with his report, and had been worried because the Queen Dowager kept him late, and Christian might have gone to bed. But when the ferry took him over to Inchtalla, she was waiting in the hall, pulling him by the arm before the usher led him away. “Tom—in case we have no other chance—the name I asked about? Jonathan Crouch?”

  He had told her what she wanted to know, breaking off because the Dowager materialized, carrying her embroidery and standing on his toe because she had forgotten to take off her spectacles. After that, Christian had done no more than thank him firmly for his help and indicate the matter was closed. He was slightly nettled. Despite the noble disclaimers he remembered making she might, he thought, have let him into the secret.…

  The next day, the autumn trumpets gave tongue, the sun shone like copper, and a flaming row was taking place in the Priory cloisters. To the north the hills of Ben Dearg reared empurpled, and soft airs shuddered on the blue water. On Inchmahome, Discord beat against the ancient pillars, where five adults and a child sat or stood about the green cloisters.

  The Queen Dowager of Scotland was in a state of Gallic rage. “Will someone kindly inform me how this escapade has arrived?” Thus Mary of Guise, seated bolt upright in a carved chair.

  Croaking reply from a middle-aged nurse, white as her tortured apron. “Oh, Madame; that I dinna ken, the puir wee lassie …” and she broke off, shooting a basilisk glance at a younger maid, completely overcome, who was being patted by Mariotta.

  The Dowager Lady Culter, who was also seated, wisely said nothing, partly out of diplomacy and partly from sheer respect for her vocal chords: a very small child with tousled red hair standing before her continued to hammer on her knee in a detached sort of way, screaming gibberish at the top of her voice.

  “Hurble-purple, hurble-purple, hurble-purple!” chanted the child.

  “On the rivage, in broad daylight! Murder! Kidnap!”

  “She’d cuddle a milk jug, the jaud!”

  “Boo-hoo—hic—hoo!”

  “Elspet! You’ll be ill! Be quiet, now!”

  “Hurble-purple, hurble-purple, hurble-purple!” said the child with ascending power.

  Lady Culter winced slightly, and drawing her knee away, put out a kindly but restraining arm. She spoke briskly. “I doubt there’s no need to hunt for villains, Ma’am; the lass was scatterbrained, and Mistress Kemp as bad, to let her go off alone with the child. But there was no worse intention that I can see. Just an escapade.”

  “Escapade!”

  Sybilla, after a daunting glance at the hysterical Elspet, returned to her task.

  “Yes. The foolish girl had a tryst with one Perkin at Portend Farm, and the child wanted to visit the pleasance. There was a skiff unattended, and off they went to the shore, where Elspet apparently left Mary playing while she went up to the farm—”

  “Alone and unattended,” said outraged motherhood grimly. “And then of course my daughter is accosted, attacked! One hears her screams, the girl returns, thrusts her back into the boat and attempts to return unobserved. Oh, I grant you the girl Elspet is innocent: by returning she doubtless foiled the attempt. But how could such a thing be? Is there not a bodyguard, here at Inchmahome … attendants … the good fathers? Are there not armed men surrounding the lake, blocking the roads? Dame Sybilla, but for my daughter’s screams, where would she be now?”

  “Sitting in the Pleasure Gardens, I imagine,” said Lady Culter dryly, “although I must admit that the attractions of Perkin seem to have played ducks and drakes with our safety precautions. Suppose we ask the Queen’s Grace?”

  Mary of Guise, Queen Dowager, stretched an arm and called her daughter. “Marie! Come and tell Maman what the ill-doing man did?”

  “What ill-doing man?” asked the red-haired child, trailing over the grass without lifting her dress, and proffering a sticky mouth. “Can I say my rhyme?”

  Her Royal mother, ignoring this, wiped the mouth thoroughly with a clean handkerchief and said, “The man in the Pleasure Gardens, ma p’tite. What did he say?”

  Her Most Noble Majesty Mary, crowned Queen of all Scotland,
found her pomander and began to play with it, with unsavory results.

  “He wasn’t a malfaisant. I liked him. Can I—”

  “Mary, was he a monk?” said Sybilla gently, mindful of one of the unlikelier aspects of Elspet’s story (“But all the monks are at Sext”).

  “He was a nice monk,” said the child, with a single inflection neatly robbing the statement of all value. She bit the pomander, spat, and relented. “He said the rhyme, and he knew my name.”

  “But …” said the Dowager Queen.

  “But …” said Mariotta.

  “I wonder,” said Lady Culter, recognizing defeat, “if it could be Dean Adam back from Cambuskenneth? He went last Monday, and I suppose—Or a wandering Observant? Oh well, he did her no harm—I think her screams were annoyance when Elspet lost her head and tried to get her into the boat and back.”

  “They found no one?”

  “No one. Lady Christian herself had been walking there, and heard no one at all in the gardens.”

  “Can I,” said the Queen’s Most Noble Majesty, with urgency, “say it now?”

  “What … I suppose so,” said Maman, her brow still furrowed.

  “Eh bien,” said Mary smoothly. She recited.

  “Hurble purple hath a red girdle

  A stone in his belly

  A stake through his arse

  And yet hurble purple is never the worse.

  “What is it, what is it, what is it?” roared the Queen.

  There was a shaken silence.

  Then Lady Culter, in a voice preternaturally grave, said (rather unkindly), “I think—it’s a hawthornberry, is it not, chérie?”

  Her Majesty’s face fell.

  * * *

  Christian laughed outright. “How absurd … ‘Comment le saluroye, quant point ne le congnois?’ Of course I recognized who it was. Credit me with ears, at least.”

  There was a moment more of the kind of constraint she remembered from their last interview in the cave, then the man beside her gave a mock sigh. “Forgive my obtruseness. My voice again? Crying the coronoch on high. I’m sorry about the uproar. I didn’t expect company, but even so, all would have gone well if that blasted girl hadn’t snatched the child so suddenly. Magnificent lungs for her age.”

  They sat in the short grass in the middle of the maze a previous Earl of Menteith had designed on the north shore of the lake. Dusty box hedges with an unused air shut off any view of the water: from the rear a folly in marble overhung them.

  It was warm and still, as it had been at Boghall, where, as her prisoner and her patient, he had played the lute and sung to her of frogs. Christian hugged her knees. “But how did the child find you?”

  He answered ruefully, “I fell asleep. Considerably more than doth the nightingale. And the next thing I knew she was sitting on my chest.”

  “What did you say?” said Christian, fascinated.

  “She said, ‘M. l’abbé’ (you’ll have gathered I’m dressed like a magpie)—‘M. l’abbé, you ’ave greatly insufficient of tonsure.’ And I said, ‘Madame la reine d’Ecosse, you are greatly in excess of tonnage.’ After which exchange of pleasantries …”

  “She got off?”

  “Not at all. She bounced like a cannon ball and said that Dédé—”

  “Her pony.”

  “—That Dédé had long yellow teeth; and did I know—”

  “That,” said Christian in chorus, “you can tell a person’s age from their teeth. That’s a favourite one.”

  “Oh. Well, as you say. So she opened her mouth, and I pronounced her seven years of age, and she admitted to five. (What is she—four?) Then I opened my mouth—”

  “What was it, a pebble?”

  “—I opened my mouth and received inside it a small fish, still resisting delivery to its Maker. After that—”

  “But what did you do? With the fish?”

  “I pretended to eat it,” he said simply. “Then we played a game or two, and sang a bit, and discussed a number of subjects. Then the nursemaid, or whoever she was, arrived, and whipped off the child, crowing like the cocks of Cramond. And you know the echo, to boot.”

  “I wish I’d been there,” said Christian. “Had you been waiting long? I’d walked to the far end of the garden.”

  “Not very long. But I have been, and am, all a-quiver like goose grass. My dear lady, you mustn’t toss the secret of the Queen’s hiding place at the feet of a complete stranger. It’s not in the rules. Quite apart from perjuring yourself on my behalf just now.”

  She said regretfully, “I make some terrible mistakes. But then I’m a very hasty person. You see, they wouldn’t let me bring Sym, and I’d no one to send, even if Tom Erskine had found out by Tuesday—which he hadn’t. Then old Adam Peebles had to go to Inchkenneth, and I asked him to give a message to Sym so that he could go to the cave and tell you to come today. I had to make the message so garbled … and it was a gamble whether Tom would even have reached us by now … but he has, so everything has turned out well. Did you have much trouble coming? And getting the robes?”

  He brushed the questions aside. “It wasn’t difficult—it should have been more so: the guard is wretched. I came by the hill path, and I had your password. There again … I don’t mind being a lame duck, but the pond you’ve put me into has a kingdom in it, my dear. By all means let’s play guessing games. ‘Will you hide me, Yes, par foi! Shall I be found out? Not through me!’—and all the rest of it; but not with your life, or the child’s: and think what happened to Eve, at that …

  “Good God,” he said, coming to a stop. “I appear to be giving you a miserable nagging for risking your life and reputation for me. Look to me as Wat did to the worm, and relieve my conscience.”

  She made no attempt either to answer or to argue with him. “Is your head quite better?”

  To her relief, he accepted the change of subject. “Quite healed, thanks to you. I fall asleep sometimes rather a lot—as demonstrated—that’s all.” He hesitated; then said, “How do you get back?”

  She showed him a whistle at her girdle. “I blow from the shore, and a boat comes. Then Lady Culter or Mariotta will meet me.” She smiled. “We’re a crowded household.”

  He said, “The Culters. Of course. Who else—Buccleuch?”

  She shook her head. “In Stirling. Tom Erskine had to tell him that—” She stopped.

  “What?”

  She said, “Oh, well. It’s common gossip now. His oldest boy Will has joined forces with—”

  “—The God of the Flies, the Lord of the Dunghill—I know,” he said. “How did he take it?”

  “Buccleuch? Terribly shocked, and grieved, and remorseful, I think. He felt he’s driven him off in a fit of temper.”

  “I expect he should have thought of that in the first place,” he said with unexpected asperity, and she heard him get to his feet. “My dear lady, they’ll wonder what’s become of you. Did Erskine really tell you about Crouch?”

  She told him, rising with the help of his arm in its coarse monk’s robe. “Crouch is Sir George Douglas’s prisoner.”

  “Douglas has him!” There was a thoughtful silence.

  “Does that help?” she said tentatively.

  “Yes, of course it helps. Very much.” He appeared to be in a difficulty. “Yes … I have been postponing … Lady Christian, when we last met you were unthinkably kind and generous—for no kind of thanks that I remember making. I swore to myself not to involve you further. Then when I got your message I was irresponsible enough to come here after all. But at least you shan’t be in the dark. You shall hear—now—who I am, and if you want to call the guard, I shan’t try to escape this time.”

  “No!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to know!”

  There was, for the first time, a weary distaste in his voice. “But you require to know—you must see that. This secret—the Queen’s hiding place—”

  “Have you betrayed it? Will you betray it?”

  “N
o.”

  “Then leave me ignorant,” said Christian. “What would make matters easier for your conscience might make them insupportable for mine. I prefer to be selfish. God knows I’ve been wrong—politically, legally, conventionally and every other way—in judgments before. But these always seemed to me the more irrelevant aspects of human decency.… You are at least Scottish, I think?”

  “Yes.”

  “—And in trouble. Well, I’m human,” said Christian. “I don’t want conscience money in the form of secrets: not just now, thank you. But the day you genuinely want help, I’ll be proud to have your confidence. Till then, show your thanks, if you wish to, by letting me have news of you sometimes.”

  The man was silent. Then he said lightly, “I can say naught but Hoy gee ho!—words that belong to the cart and the plough. Your confidence is fully misplaced this time, but I imagine you suspected that all along.… Tell me: would you know again the other voice you heard in the cave?”

  She nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “Yes, I shall keep in touch. Not as often as I should like, but certainly more than I ought by all the tenets you quoted.” They were almost out of the shelter of the box hedges, and he stopped and took her hand, as if examining it. “What in God’s name are you going by?” he said. “Instinct? Intuition?”

  “Common sense. Which describes your case as fortunae telum, non culpae.”

  He answered, bleakly, in the same language. “Heu! The darts which make me suffer are my own. Common sense can be a poor guide and an uncertain surgeon. Better—much better—be foolish, like me. God clip you close,” he said, and was gone.

  Christian walked to the shore and there blew a nerve-racking blast on the whistle.

  IV

  Several Moves by a Knight