The Game of Kings (59 page)

A smile twitched her lips again. “I knew you’d be much too high-minded to come back if you suspected I knew. That’s why I stopped you at Inchmahome.”

Lymond’s face was as white as the girl he was talking to, but his voice hardly varied.

“I am grovelling. I also owe you one or two stinging innuendoes for those letters. If Agnes Herries ever stumbles on a glossa interlinearis there will be civil war.”

“Erskine made her burn them.… Is that your hand? It’s colder than mine. I told you not to worry.”

Christian blinked suddenly and roused herself. “My mind’s wandering. Listen: I have something for you. It’s sewn in my saddlecloth. Mr. Somerville will show you. Hurry!” Her face, framed in the strewn hair, was as matronly as a nurse commanding a treat for a child.

For the first time, Lymond’s eyes met Kate’s. He rose slowly and walked to the door. Kate heard her husband speak in the corridor, and then both men’s footsteps receding. After no more than a few minutes, Lymond returned.

This time, his eyes never left the girl in the bed. Sitting beside her, he raised her hand and put under it a crumpled fold of small papers bloodstained—as Kate saw—in one corner.

Christian’s face was alight. “You’ve read them? They’re all there?”

“I’ve read them. But how … ?” Lymond was saying in a kind of lunatic daze. “How the devil—how the
devil
could you do it? To have it in black and white at the eleventh hour … Did you threaten him? Cut off his ears and souse them in vinegar? Propose to confine him in a locked room with Lord Grey for six months?”

The girl gave the ghost of a laugh. “It was on his conscience.
He dictated the whole story and signed it. The priest was there too—that’s the second signature. Is it what you’d hoped?”

There was the fraction of a pause. Then Lymond picked up Christian’s hand and carried it to his lips, holding it afterward folded in both his own. “More than I ever dreamed of,” he said—and like the serpent she had once called him, snarled voicelessly into Kate’s eyes as she looked up, horror-struck, from what the girl’s lifted hand had left revealed.

For the sheets of creased paper which Christian had brought with such pains from Haddington, which Margaret had found not worth her attention, and which Lymond had at last received, were quite blank.

Kate gave nothing away. Christian, it appeared, wanted her company. Since she couldn’t go, she was forced to sit and watch, listening to the murmur of their voices. They were talking of things and people Kate knew nothing about, but she knew contentment when she saw it, and didn’t interrupt even when the girl’s voice began to lapse and the air to falter at last in her lungs.

Christian did what was necessary herself, turning her head painfully toward Kate. “I was never much good at waiting,” she said. “It’s a sign of immaturity, or something. I wonder if maybe music would be soothing? If someone would play … Not you,” she added quickly, as Kate rose. “If you don’t mind. It’s comforting to have you sitting so close.”

“Of course I’ll stay,” said Kate, her mind racing. “Would you like Mr. Crawford to play for you? The music room is only through a door by your bed.”

She had, obviously, guessed right. The smile this time was one of relief. “He still has to finish a song he played for me once. Do you remember?”

“The unfortunate frog. Of course,” said Lymond, straightening. Kate met his eyes and nodded: she thought he looked almost at the end of his endurance, but he could be relied on to make no mistakes. He bent quickly and taking both Christian’s hands, kissed her on the brow. “The frog was a pretty poor creature. This time you shall have music to sound in a high tower—”

“—So merrily that it was a joy for to hear, and no man should see the craft thereof.… You give me such pleasure,” said Christian.

A moment later the music began, and Kate shrank beneath the onslaught of its message: the fury of hope and joy that towered in the notes, outburning the sunlight and outpouring the volumes of the sea. All that was bold and noble and happy in created sound burst from the metempirical quills, and it was a blasphemy not to rejoice.

Christian died in its midst, purposeful and successful; the last struggle unseen by anyone but Kate, and laying no bridle on the living. Kate drew the bright curtains around the bed.

Her eyes were closed with tears: strangers—foreigners—what were they to her? The man was playing still, his eyes resting on the windows as they had done all along. Through the glass she saw that a column of mounted men had come over the moor and up to her lodge gates: like squirrels their faces were pricked at her windows; like Ulysses perhaps their ears were tingling with the music of the sirens. She dried her cheeks and walked forward a little, and Lymond, seeing her reflection in the panes, raised his hands.

The horseman in the lead was bending down, addressing someone very young or very small. Kate saw the white flash of a face, and one bare arm waving toward the house. She was infinitely more afraid of the immobile man at the keyboard. She rested her hands, as in prayer, on the instrument. “It happened peacefully.”

“Did it?” said Lymond.

The entire file had moved forward to the gatehouse. There seemed to be a moment of confusion, then the doors opened and the horsemen came through, rather fast.

“I believe she meant what she said,” said Kate. “About being contented.”

She wasn’t sure if he heard her. After a moment he stirred, and lifting a hand to the keys again, picked out some slow chords. “It was the Frogge on the wall, Humble-dum; humble-dum.”

“You didn’t finish it for her, after all,” said Kate.

The house was alive with noise. He said nothing and did nothing; and at length even Kate’s resolution gave way. “Who are they? What do they want? Who is it?”

He had watched the long file of horsemen sweep over the moor: while he loosed his fierce elegies he had watched them sense the music on the wind and point to him like hounds. He had promised Christian music for her minion and outrider, and he kept his promise.

“What is it?” cried Kate, and Lymond turned with grim finality from the keys. “What is it? The end of the song. Where Dickie our Drake, Mrs. Somerville, takes the Frog.”

And on the last word, the stark and pitiful peace of his anthems had gone. With a crash of bruised post and split panels and an assault which sent gut and sounding board screaming, the door of the music room opened.

“—Richard, my brother,” ended Lymond.

It was Culter, his search over.

Broad, powerful, shivering within the frame of smashed wood, he was a primitive figure, of pantheistic and dreadful force. Standing still, all his mind and his passions embraced the two silent people by the window, allowing the texture, the luxury, the exquisite savour of the prize to drive him to ecstasy. A little sound, involuntary and wordless, broke from him.

For a moment, she thought it was going to strike an answer from Lymond. Another person might have screamed at him, or at the intruders; but Kate did neither: she literally held her breath, watching pressures she could only guess at being licked by this vengeful fire. She obeyed an instinct to keep quiet, and by lending Lymond the support of her calmness, to avert the thing that would destroy them all.

He succeeded. In the teeth of unleashed hatred and on the heels of tragedy he shackled human reaction and, rising smoothly and quickly, addressed his brother as men poured into the room.

“I know. Aha, Oho, and every other bloody ejaculation. Let’s take it as read. You’re delirious at the idea of manhandling me and can’t wait to start. I in turn may say I find your arrival offensive and your presence blasphemous, thus concluding the exchange of civilities and letting us get out of here. If there’s anything novel or extra you want to add, you can think of it on the way home.”

The words struck and fell dead to the ground. Richard made not the slightest movement, his grey eyes wetly shining; the fat veins
visible on his temple and neck. “He’s in a hurry, isn’t he? It’s a love nest, as I live. Who’s the wench?”

“The wench is a lady, and mistress of this house,” said Lymond in the same controlled and insulting voice. “Erskine: take him downstairs. Something’s happened.”

Lord Culter grinned lecherously. “I’m sure it has.”

“Later, Richard. You can have all the sport you want. Erskine—”

Tom Erskine said, “Come on, Richard. We’ve got him: there’s no point in wasting time.”

Lord Culter ignored him. He was wandering around the room, touching things and still smiling. Kate moving quickly before him shut the door to her bedroom and returned to Lymond’s side. “There has been—”

“Be quiet,” said Richard pleasantly. “And you, little brother. How would five years of this sort of thing appeal to you, Tom? Where’s the bed, I wonder? Behind the door they’re not looking at? With another wench in it, maybe?”

He had an unlooked-for agility. He reached the bedroom door a second before Lymond and got it open. The Master’s hard shoulder crashed into him and he hurtled back with the shuddering wood, but already half-braced and with a purchase on his brother’s arm which brought Lymond stumbling with him. Then there was a rush to help, and the Master went down under six others.

They pulled him to his feet as Richard, rising, was confronted by the young woman who had first shut the door. “Get out of this room and listen to me, you uncivilized lout!” said Kate.

Richard struck her to her knees with the hardened flat of his hand, the first blow he had ever aimed at a woman, and wrenched back the yellow silk curtains.

Over their tawdrinesses grieved the benign detachment of death.

At Richard’s blanched rigidity, Lymond fell silent, unstruggling, by the door; Kate rose and found her way obstinately to a chair, one hand to her face; and Tom Erskine, struck by the silence, moved from the doorway. Lymond’s long fingers shot out and halted him.

“There’s bad news. We tried to tell you. It’s Christian.” Erskine broke from his grasp without a sound.

Presently, Lord Culter moved from the bedside, leaving Tom where he knelt. Back in the music room where his men waited, silent and uneasy, he picked out one with a glance. “Send for the man—Somerville, is it? I want him here.” Then he turned to his brother,
his face as hard as the bones of the earth. “I’d neither foul a cage by capturing you nor offend justice by taking you to Court. Covet the sunshine: you are dying.”

“No!” exclaimed Kate Somerville from the doorway. She had dropped her hand from her bruised face. “No, you’re wrong. The girl met with her accident while travelling in English company to Hexham. When Mr. Crawford arrived she was already dying. He did all he could for her.”

“Concluding with jigs and hornpipes over her deathbed. I know. My God, we heard him!”

“What my wife says is true.” Gideon had arrived in the doorway.

Richard didn’t turn his head. “Exposing her to public obloquy at Threave—that’s another fact. Cheating her about his identity. Making this blind girl an accomplice traitor, an accomplice murderer, adulterer …”

Lymond’s voice cut sharply across. “We’ve all had as much as we can stand, Culter. You know perfectly well you can’t kill me here unless I resist capture: it needs one busybody to pipe up in Parliament and you’ll be arrested yourself. Let the fools argue it out in Edinburgh: I’ll go quietly. Come along. Half the English army’s at Hexham. I don’t want to meet Grey, even if you do. And for God’s sake get Erskine out of that room for a start.”

Lord Culter paid not the slightest attention. He was issuing quiet, concise orders to his men, and to Somerville, who listened tight-lipped. When he had quite finished, he turned back to Lymond.

“I don’t murder anybody. I’m offering you a proper trial—trial by combat. Observing all the rules. You may even think you have a chance of killing me. If you do, you are free, of course.”

Gideon’s eyes met his wife’s. He said quietly, “Take him to Edinburgh as he asks. He’s quite right—Grey and Wharton are at Hexham. If anyone calls, you haven’t a chance. And,” added Gideon with some bluntness, “you haven’t seen his swordplay.”

A heretical insolence had found its way back to Lymond. “Why worry, children? I’m not going to fight.”

“I thought we’d have that,” said Richard calmly. Somerville, after hesitating, left, pushed by two soldiers. “You’d prefer to be skewered like a sheep?”

“I’d prefer to take a nice, quiet journey to Edinburgh and stand my trial. Think how deliciously prolonged it would all be.”

The flat grey eyes were unmoved. “You’ll fight,” said Richard without
emotion, and jerked his head. Preceded by Lymond and the rest of his men, he left the room.

Kate saw them go, her brown face stiff with trouble, and then turned back into her bedroom. For a moment she watched the kneeling man, and then bending over him, touched his shoulder. “Mr. Erskine. Please come away.”

For a moment nothing happened. Then he raised a face curiously blurred, as if the subcutaneous fat had melted and recongealed in his grief. He said thickly, “It’s all right.… How did it happen?”

She pulled a chair toward him and he sat, while she told her story. At the end there was a pause, and then he said with difficulty, “I wondered … I couldn’t quite understand why she did it.”

Kate said with care, “She would help anybody, I think: wasn’t that so? And then—you’ve all condemned him pretty thoroughly as a blackguard, haven’t you?”

“What else is he?”

“Well,” said Kate. “I’m not one of the simple kind who spend a jolly time romping on Olympus with the object of becoming a little, leering star at the end. I never met the girl before today: I don’t know what their past relations have been. But I can say that he spoke of your Lady Christian with nothing but respect. By her desire I was with them both till she died, and I should be ashamed to think of guilt or offence in anything they said. And more than that. It was you I was to tell of her regrets, and to you I was to give her love.”