The Game of Kings (20 page)

Had he but known it, Mariotta too was battling with an acid frustration. The girl was pretty, rich and wearing new clothes. Today, sitting under streaming banners, with peers and pageantry around her, the green grass in front and the castle soaring above, was her first public appearance in Stirling since her wedding. And it was Tom Erskine, not Richard, who sat beside her and supplied the endless introductions. It was all exactly as she had insisted and devastatingly flat.

It was flat when the procession of contestants wound down the hill, flags and livery mincing in the sun, musicians playing apoplectically against the wind. When the Queen and the Governor had made a brief appearance among the royal benches. When the tilting was at its best, with deal splinters flying among the spectators; when one of the wrestlers broke an arm.

Then they were pulling arrows out of straw and targets, and clearing the way for a vociferous, red and white centipede, which turned out to be the 120-foot pole and its rigging for the last of the contests: the Papingo Shoot.

“Come along,” said Tom, getting to his feet. “This is where we move back.”

“Why?” said Agnes. “Oh no, Mr. Erskine: we must see the Papingo first.”

“Back,” said Tom firmly. “Unless you want a hatful of arrows. Sixty yards’ clearance for spectators: that’s the rule. Look! There’s the parrot in a wicker cage: see it? They’ll take it out and tie it to a crossbar on top of the pole before they hoist it.”

At this precise moment, to Tom Erskine’s heartfelt delight, reinforcing troops arrived in the person of Sir Andrew Hunter, looking not unlike an uncommonly ruffled parrot himself after a stormy passage through the crowd.

He exchanged greetings. “Papingo shoots! If you haven’t the slashed style to begin with, you’re certainly wearing it by the end, and be damned to the Continental rules—I thought you might want to compete,” he explained to Erskine. “I don’t—no bow with me, anyway. Oh”—in good-humoured answer to Lady Herries—“I can manage all right at the butts, but I’m a fool at perch shooting. Tom knows.”

“Tom certainly does,” said Erskine, grinning. “The Kilwinning baillies used to hand down their suits of armour like chains of office for when Dandy was perch shooting at the steeple.”

Sir Andrew aimed a friendly cuff at him. “Watch your own step. The old man won’t be pleased if you break one of his windows.”

Since the Keeper’s quarters were not only several hundred feet up the castle rock but invisible, this seemed unlikely. However, Tom replied, “You’re safe, as it happens—I’m not competing either. But if you’d do squire for me, Dandy, I’d be grateful. There’s something I must do in town.”

He received Hunter’s cheerful acquiescence, took leave of the ladies, and burrowed away, to a chorus of exasperated groans.

The field, having encouraged the perilous rearing of the perch, settled down into its new stance. Well back from the danger area there was an air of comfortable expectancy.

Looking around, in the bright, sparkling air, Mariotta found that, like tesserae in a mosaic, her warring emotions had merged, peaceably, into untrammelled pleasure. She was sorry for the papingo, winking blue and yellow in the sun on his high pole; but admired the sunlit castle rock behind him, the wide grass arena, with its elderly, occupied officials which spread on its three exposed sides; and even found something to please her in the crowd, of which she was one, which impinged on three sides of the grass behind the barriers, filling all the space between the arena and the bright rows of pavilions behind.

Protocol, having much the same separatist requirements as a good, fancy jelly, produced much the same results. The layer of peers, in wind-blown furs and large flat hats, was naturally in the best position, next the barrier; then came the clergy, almost indistinguishable except for their plainer headgear; then the merchants and their wives, obviously full of good dinners and dressed at cost, in much better cloth on the whole than the nobles; then the less prominent burgesses and the more reserved professionals, nonclerical lawyers and teachers and Household and other people with minor positions at Court; then all the people one saw in the street, whom one’s steward dealt with, and, occasionally, one visited. The fleshers and brewers and smiths and weavers and skinners and saddlers and salters and cappers and masons and cutlers and fletchers and plasterers and armourers and porters and water carriers, and the one-eyed man who had called at Bogle House selling fumigating pans. And country people on holiday, and beggars, and pickpockets (no doubt) and sorners and the wandering unemployed.

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.