The Game of Kings (7 page)

It was difficult riding. The young horses trembled in the passing glare from burnt thatch and timber. Acrid smoke rolled and hung about the narrow road and caught their throats; the streets, deserted of people, were littered with charred wood and rags and smashed pottery. Scott wondered, with an interest nearly academic, how Lymond was going to extract them from this.

Farther on, when the fires were more infrequent and stone-built houses loomed ahead, a man accosted them. The captain was wanted at the gate.

Captain Drummond was a careful man. He was about to ignore the summons when Lymond spoke, solving his problem. “I don’t suppose Lord Wharton’s son Harry is anywhere about? I once knew his sister, and I’d like to meet him. He could perhaps direct us to his lordship as well.”

It was a happy suggestion. The captain, clearly relieved, spoke to the man who had waylaid them, and in a few minutes they were joined by Henry, younger son of Lord Wharton, commander of the English army on the west. Drummond explained and left with his man, and young Wharton turned to Lymond and Scott. “Of course, I’ll take you both there. It’s the middle house in the square through there.” Restless, energetic, at twenty-five already a leader of horse, Henry Wharton led the way, beginning a long, newsy conversation about his family, which Lymond appeared to be sustaining surprisingly well. But Scott, some of the detachment worn off, thought: By God, hell never make it.…

The pend leading to the square was dim. On it lay the shifting black
shadows of the tall buildings fringing the fires; the darkness was full of movement and the three horses, scared, huddled close.

As the shadows closed about them, Lymond launched himself on Wharton. There was the beginning of a cry, and then nothing but the cracking of hoofs as the other horse shied at the struggling shapes. It was then that Captain Drummond, released from his errand, cantered cheerfully up at the rear and made to join them. Then he said sharply, “What’s happening there?” and peered into the alley.

Scott saw the whistle in his hand just in time. Instinctively, the boy’s hand went to his belt. He found his dagger, stood in his stirrups, and threw. The captain gave a brief cry, and fell to his horse’s mane, and from there to the street.

It was suddenly very quiet. Wharton’s horse stood nose to nose with Lymond’s bay, snuffling gently, and there was an extra dark shadow on the road. The Master’s voice said tartly, “Dropped off to sleep?”

“Oh!” Scott dismounted in a hurry. Young Wharton was, he found, lying face down in the road, a cloth stuffed in his mouth and bent arms savagely clinched by Lymond.

“Where’s Drummond?”

“I knifed him. He’s lying in the road.”

“Then get him out of it, for God’s sake. We don’t want a public wake for him. Take two of the horses and tie them up here. Drag the captain to the wall. Is he dead?”

“I don’t know,” said Scott self-consciously.

Lymond wasted no time on comment. “Gag and bind him if he isn’t, and put him on your own horse with a saddlecloth over his head.”

He was unhitching rope from his own saddle as he spoke, and expertly binding Wharton, leaving only his knees and ankles free. He then pulled the man to his feet and, wrapping the folds of his cloak about him, took the cloth from his mouth.

Wharton said, in a kind of parched croak, “Set me free, or my men’ll burn you alive!”

“If wishes were buttercakes,” said Lymond, and tossed something shining into the air, “beggars might bite. I have a little knife which says you will take us quietly to your father.”

Scott, distrusting his ears, stared.

Wharton said dramatically, “Never!” Lymond’s elbow moved and the young man gave a convulsive jerk. “First scene, second act,” said
the Master. “Stop play-acting, you fool, and take us in. Nobody I ever met could argue with a knife at his ribs.”

Probably, more than anything else, the supreme confidence in his voice convinced the young man. Holding his arm tight against the short incision Lymond had cut, he bit his lip, and began to move reluctantly onward. Scott, leading Lymond’s horse and his own, walked after.

The events which followed were always to have for Will Scott of Kincurd the curious, narcotic quality of a bout of fever. In the course of it, he became dimly aware that they had arrived at a house; that Lymond had again produced the allusive password and, with sullen acquiescence from Wharton, demanded private audience with their lordships for himself, his colleague and a Scottish prisoner with valuable information.

It passed off without a hitch. One of the guard inquired of their lordships above; and then, clattering down, jerked a thumb. “That’s all right: up ye go!” he said. And they went.

*  *  *

The Provost of Annan had built according to his station; and the parlour adopted by the joint leaders of the invading English army was decently panelled in linenfold, with a particularly fine Italian desk pulled near the scarlet peat fire.

At the desk sat my Lord Wharton, knight and member for Parliament, Captain of Carlisle, Sheriff of Cumberland, Warden of the West Marches and loyal and perspicacious servant of the English crown in the north. He was reading aloud passages from a paper covered with his secretary’s writing, pausing for comment as he went. The Earl of Lennox, nose to nose with his own fair reflection in the dark window, was drumming his fingers on the sill and indulging in witty interjections.

Thomas, first Baron Wharton, was a tough little self-made Englishman with a whittled brown face and cold disenchanted eye. But Lord Lennox was a different matter. The Earls of Lennox reached back into the history of Scotland; this one had been reared in France and had lived blithely on his wide lands in Scotland until deciding that wealth and power lay closer to hand in the south. The title Matthew Lennox coveted was King Consort of Scotland. When Mary of Guise,
the widowed Queen Dowager of Scotland, would have no truck with him, he merely turned coat, joined the forces of England and married Margaret Douglas, King Henry VIII’s niece who herself had a strong claim to a crown or two.

He was, incidentally, worried about his wife Margaret. The next day’s march lay through her father’s lands. The Earl of Angus, head of the noble Douglas family once castigated by Buccleuch, had written to him anxiously pointing this out and hoping that his son-in-law and Lord Wharton would, if invading, remember the ties of kinship. Lord Lennox remembered them, but he doubted whether Wharton would; especially if this time Margaret’s turbulent father should plump for the Scottish side and join the Queen’s army against him.

Jubilation over the news from Pinkie had meantime however swept gloom from the air. Wharton was planning his exodus from Annan to the north, and Lennox was dreaming of throne rooms when the door opened.

Being well oiled, it opened quite gently, and Henry Wharton, followed closely by Lymond, was within the room before either commander looked around. By then Scott too was inside, unloading the wounded Drummond in a corner. He retired to the door and stood with his back to it just as the man at the desk turned and half rose. “Harry! You blundering fool! What’ve you done?”

Unequivocably, the firelight showed the bound hands, the glitter of Lymond’s knife.

His son was mute; and the hard eyes of Lord Wharton shifted to the figure behind. “You, sir! Who are you, and what d’you want?”

Lymond laughed. He laughed again as Lennox, who had spun around, took a step forward. With his free hand, the Master pulled off his steel bonnet and tossed it neatly into the hearth. The peats clouded with smoke, then blazed around it, lighting the pallid face and the colourless hair, stained with sweat. “Money,” he said.

Lord Lennox stared. A tide of scarlet, patched and mottled, washed up to the roots of his hair and disappeared, taking horror and disbelief with it, and leaving the face swollen with rage. “It’s Crawford of Lymond!” said the Earl of Lennox, and the pale eyes, china-hard, shot to his lordly colleague. “Here, in Annan. In the middle of your precious guard!” He exploded into ugly language. “Your chicken-livered rabbit of a son … !”

Lord Wharton spoke sharply. “Control yourself, sir!” and his eyes, on Harry, promised payment by someone, in time, for Lord Lennox’s
bad temper. He addressed Lymond. “How did you get past the gate?”

Scott had finished lashing young Wharton to a bench, and was regagging him methodically. Watching him, his knife lingering at Harry’s back, Lymond replied. “My dear sir, how to avoid it? Their hospitality was most pressing. Besides, I got the password from Bannister.”

“Bannister?”

“The Protector’s messenger. He fell in with us.”

Wharton said sharply, “You have his dispatch then?”

The fair brows were raised. “Dear me, no! I’ve finished with huckstering these days. Sweet rose of virtue and of gentleness. I hope to be appreciated for my beaux yeux alone—and those of Harry, of course. Manhood but prudence is a fury blind.”

Too wise a fox to be baited, Wharton kept to the point. “Then I take it this man Bannister is dead?”

“He was in the best of health when I left him,” said Lymond, surprised. “In fact, I had him escorted part of the way. The roads to the north are rather busy with Scottish gentlemen.”

“In fact, you sold him to the other side, this time!” said Lennox, making his first contribution to the conversation.

Lymond looked mildly chagrined. “Not at all. What a reputation to have! Not all of us have your lordship’s gift for trusteeship.”

This was a very shrewd hit. Everyone present knew that Lennox, ostensibly acting for the Scottish Queen Dowager, had once taken delivery of a shipload of French gold and arms on her behalf; and had then shipped himself and the gold south to England.

For a moment the earl was speechless with anger. “You have the damnable effrontery—My God, if I’d only left you lashed to your stinking oars! You were grateful enough when I clothed you and fed you and gave you money … more fool I. I was repaid all right! Bring a cow to the hall,” Lennox snarled, “and she will to the byre again.”

“And foul water slockens fire,” added Lymond. His voice became noticeably mellow. “But then I was brought up in bad company. From oar to oar, you might say.”

If his previous remark had caused an explosion, this one was greeted with a silence which could be felt. Scott, his heart thudding inexplicably, looked from Lymond’s imperturbable face to Lennox, who had gone bone-white.

“And how,” pursued the Master suavely, “is the Pearl of Pearls?”

He was talking about the Countess of Lennox, and this time the allusion was unmistakable. Scott saw in Lord Wharton’s face, for an instant, the same kind of shocked surprise that he felt himself; then Lennox’s sword came hissing from its scabbard and Wharton, with a curse, sprang to put a hand on his arm. “Put up, my lord!”

The Earl of Lennox didn’t even look at him. He said through his teeth, “I’ll suffer insult and insolence for no man’s brat!”

“Then you have me to reckon with as well, my Lord Lennox,” said Wharton furiously. “Put up!”

There was a long pause. The knife glittered in Lymond’s hand, over young Harry’s spine; Wharton’s fingers dug into the earl’s arm. Lennox swore, and rammed home the blade with fingers that shook.

Wharton removed his hand. He said quietly, “I remember this scum. There is no need to play his game for him.” To Lymond he continued, “I understand you are bargaining with my son’s life. Naturally, it is worth a price to me, but don’t expect me to pay too much. What do you want?” Then, natural feeling breaking through for a moment, he said bluntly, “State your business, and get you gone. The very air you breathe makes me retch.”

“Courtesy,” said Lymond, “will get you nowhere.” He fitted his shoulders comfortably into the panelled wall. “I must say you appear to be taking your martial duties very lightly. Don’t you want to know what the Protector’s dispatch said? I read it, you know, before sending it on. There’s been another stupendous victory at Linlithgow, and the Protector thinks you should meet him in Stirling right away to talk it over. Doesn’t that excite you? Scotland conquered at last! Duke Wharton on the Privy Council; King Matthew on the throne!”

Lennox had to know. His eyes searched Lymond’s face; he said, almost against his own will, “A victory on the Stirling road … is that true?”

Lymond stared back. “Why not, your Majesty? The Scottish Queen’s sickly; the English King’s a bastard—or so the Catholics say, don’t they, Matthew?—Arran’s an idiot and his son a fool … lo! my lords, a crown!”

Half mesmerized, four pairs of eyes watched as swiftly he leaned to the fire, seized the hearth tongs and stepped back. High above his head, gripped in the metal, flamed his own helmet, red-hot from the blazing peats, bits of burning stuff falling smoking to the floor.

“A crown!” said Lymond exaltedly. “Who will wear it? Harry, perhaps?”

This was leading the field with a vengeance. The rigor which seized them lasted less than thirty seconds. Then Lennox said, loudly and rather wildly, “The man’s mad!” and Wharton, his face rigid, reseated himself at the desk. “Money?”

“Of course!”

“In the chest.” Wharton indicated a small coffer against one wall. “Get it.”

All the men in the small room, wounded, bound and free, waited, in a tension which knit them together, as five leather bags were placed on the desk, and taken away by Scott.

The Master opened one of them. “O beautiful bagchecks. Bonnets bellissimi; ecus; ryals—Dear me, the assured ones of Dumfriesshire are going to be much the poorer for this. Wrap ’em up, my Pyrrha!”

He ripped off Harry’s cloak and flung it to Scott, who made a rough bundle of the gold, and laid his hand on the door.

“And so,” said Lymond gravely, “we see the final end of our travail. Farewell, my masters!”

But the final paraph, the flourish which in time Scott was to recognize as habitual, was still to come. As he moved from Harry, and both Wharton and Lennox started forward, Lymond let drop his arm. The helmet, dull now with black heat, fell accurately on young Wharton’s brow, and the boy, his eyes staring, gave, behind the gag, an unpleasant choked scream.