The Game of Kings

  Lymond pointed. Below and to the left, a burn wandered into the hills with heaps like molehills about it and the figures of men moving. “—Your colleagues looking diligently for alluvial gold. It amuses them and helps fill the treasury. It also explains our presence and gives us warning of anyone using the valley …” And led the way to their destination, an excellent stone tower, thick-walled and small-windowed, built in a grassy socket of the hill.

  There, in Lymond’s new winter quarters, Scott passed the night and next morning, pleased at the prospect of a little autonomy, left for the Peel Tower. A little later the Master also rode out and, turning sharp east, began the journey to Tantallon Castle.

  * * *

  “It grieves me deeply to break up your manège,” said Sir George, “but I can’t accept the alternative. If you want me to trace Harvey for you, you must sell me Will Scott.”

  Lymond spoke idly. “It sounds as if you have been endearing yourself to the opposition. Can’t you repair your relations in some other way? I have several keen bargains in political information: or is Grey no longer interested in our life, our lust, our Governor, our Queen?” His face expressed only mild inquiry.

  Both men were in a stoutly furnished room in the East Tower of Tantallon. Beyond the window the North Sea crawled and roared at the bottom of hundred-foot cliffs; far out, the Bass Rock stood in a nest of white floss, with gannets plummetting like so many celestial lead lines into the jumping sea. Douglas turned impatiently from the sight.

  “If I could conduct this transaction simply by buying information from you, I would. As it is, I am ready to take on my own account anything you may have to sell. For that reason, as you probably noticed, I avoided addressing my letter to you by name. Nor have I given your name to Lord Grey although—let us be as open as we can, Mr. Crawford—I had very little trouble guessing your identity.… I hope you were less severe on Mr. Somerville than you were with Sir Andrew.” He paused. “You’re swimming in very deep waters, aren’t you, Crawford?”

  “But life in an aquatic kettle can be quite entertaining,” suggested Lymond. “And what keeps out water will also keep out steel between the shoulder blades. Gideon Somerville, if you are interested, is in pristine health, and Jonathan Crouch is at home. That leaves Samuel Harvey and his purchase.”

  Sir George was broadly reasonable. “Why hesitate? Get yourself another disciple, man, and be done with it.” Sir George badly needed Scott to bolster his tattered prestige with Lord Grey.

  “But Scott is extremely useful to me,” said Lymond. “Besides, he gives me excellent cover from Buccleuch.”

  “Once we have him, Buccleuch won’t trouble anyone any more.”

  “He won’t trouble you: he’ll use up all his surplus energy looking for me. And another thing. If I gave you Scott I should want absolute possession of the man Harvey. Would Grey agree to that? I imagine Harvey, for one thing, would object quite violently.”

  “There’s no reason why Harvey should know,” said Douglas after a moment’s quick thought. “I tell you, Grey wants Scott badly enough for anything. If this unfortunate man is your price, I think I can promise he will pay it.”

  “In the siècles de foi you would be irresistible,” said Lymond generously. “But I have arrived in the age of reason. You’ll need to provide some pretty imaginative security before I believe that.”

  “And if I do so?”

  Lymond smiled again, and Douglas’s hands, in spite of himself, opened and closed. “If you do so,” said the Master, “of course I shall give you the person of Will Scott.”

  Before Lymond left, Sir George repeated his own private bid for his services. It met with bland refusal. “My offer was to exchange information for Harvey; not to plunge into general commerce.”

  “If you can afford to say that, you’re a fortunate man. I wish I knew your source of revenue. I notice incidentally,” said Sir George, understandably irritated, “that in your somewhat frenzied quest for Mr. Harvey your other project has fallen from sight.”

  “Everyone credits me with projects. I sometimes feel like a latter-day Hercules. Which one?”

  “The one concerned with preserving your brother from the ills of old age. I imagine Lady Culter’s pregnancy has complicated your problem?”

  It was news to Lymond. The fractional pause told Sir George that, and he was irritably thankful, in passing, that he could still read a man to some degree at least. Then the Master said with amusement, “Are you suggesting that I should add to my tally?”

  Sir George’s answer was ready. “If Lord Grey and I are happily reconciled, and if his lordship’s plans for this country are successful, we shall remember our friends. As to the granting—or reinstating—of baronies, for example.”

  There was a respectful pause, broken mildly by Lymond. “Setting aside anarchy and murder and returning to simple conveyancing—how soon could Samuel Harvey be brought north?”

  The essential bargain, after all, had been made; so Douglas’s exasperation was well-hidden. A common posting station, a hovel they both knew, was agreed as a means of communication, and the pact was sealed. At the door, Sir George turned and smiled. “I can’t imagine a Scott resigned to authority and bars. What will your callow colt make of the snare?”

  “Scott is trained to authority already,” said Lymond. “The bars are a trite enough sequel.”

  He reached the Peel Tower on Sunday the fifth of February, finding it already unrecognizable in the torments of chaotic removal. He walked from room to room, dispensing criticism and looking for Will Scott.

  In this he was unsuccessful. Will had left the Peel early that afternoon for an unknown destination, and had not come back.

  2. Brief Return to Home Squares

  The meeting between Will Scott and his father was due to take place at dusk. After banging violently about the castle all day Buccleuch left, rather too early, for his supposedly secret encounter, and his family was overjoyed to see the last of him.

  Wat Scott of Buccleuch was a man crammed with sentiment, which accounted for the peculiar harmlessness of half his explosions. The sight of his heir at the cattle raid had produced an unwonted tremor among his principles, and he was shy of repeating the experience.

  Of all his brood, Will was least like himself. His oldest and illegitimate son, Walter, was a stuffy and powerful lad, and he was setting him up as befitted his first-born; but Will had a head on his shoulders, if a fat one, and Buccleuch was not the man to underrate that. The boy’s scruples he put down, with some justice, to the company of flute-mouths and dishwashing writers in books; and he rode out therefore alone to meet him at Crumhaugh with a fine determination this time to stand for no stupidity.

  It was still light when he reached the hill and pressed into the copse on its side. At first, peering through the trees, he thought the little clearing was empty. It was a place in the wood, known to Will and himself, where larch and oak and juniper gave way to a quincunx of soaring beeches so old that the aisles between were cushioned with a permanent autumn of red leaves. Then he heard a hoof strike, and the clunk of bit on teeth, and the next moment saw his son’s horse with its reins loosely tied to a bush, and Will himself standing just beyond.

  The boy was quite different. His thick neck was strapped with muscle; he had eyes like sea pebbles, and his red hair roared like a lion. Buccleuch got rid of his surprise and dismounted. “So you came!”

  His son regarded him austerely. “I said I would.”

  There was a slight pause, a bellow as Buccleuch cleared his throat, then Sir Wat waded in. “Ye might like to know that your Englishy friends have burned me out of Newark. Missed Janet and myself and the weans by half a day, just.”

  Will was distressingly calm. “Well, you seem to have survived.”

  “No thanks to you!”

  “Why blame me? If you chose to move all the cannon to Branxholm, it was no fault of mine.”

  This error of judgment was no sweeter for being Buccleuch’s
own. He remembered just in time what he was supposed to be doing, and wiped his mouth with a large hand.

  “Will. We’ve had words in the past, and I don’t mind saying you were damned disrespectful. And wrong, forbye. But you won’t get any righter by burying your carcass to the neb and over in Lymond’s muck heap. As far as I’m concerned you can stop making an exhibition of yourself and come on back home. Unless you’re so damned keen you’ve begun to reform the bastard yourself.”

  His son’s mouth twitched. “I haven’t, cross my heart. But don’t flatter yourself that I’m suffering so that I can read you a homily on crime. I’m with Lymond because I like it.”

  Buccleuch’s face expressed disbelief and disapproval. “Dammit, I believe George Douglas was right. You’re planning a coup. Don’t deny it! You’re going to embroil Lymond as deep as he can get, and then lead the Queen’s men to him. Is that it?”

  Scott didn’t trouble to deny it. He said, “That, I am quite sure, is what George Douglas would do,” in a voice of energetic scorn, and added after a contemptuous interval, “I’m staying with the Master. Why not? We’re a well-regulated, efficient society. We’ve got health and companionship and excitement and money, a common aim and a common justice. We are our own masters, afraid of nobody but the one man, and he’s worth fearing. Show me its like, and I’ll join you.”

  “I can show you its like,” said Buccleuch. “In the jungle. What you’re living by is four-footed law, and what you’re living off is the blood and marrow of the rest of us. You’ve money, you say. Money from where? From spying and stealing and so-called protection—the money of folk who’re poor because they’ve had the stupidity to fight two wars for their country. That’s where your ideal community comes from—from corruption and treachery. And by God, it takes a thick hide to snuffle and drool after your own dirty pleasures while bairns starve in Teviotdale for want of meal. Dod, you’ll fairly have a stitch in your side watching Branxholm burn the same way Midculter did.”

  “I’d nothing to do with that.” The words were nearly cold enough to belie the passionate resentment in Scott’s eyes.

  Buccleuch was shouting. “You’re doing a hell of a lot to stop it. Dod, I’d better warn the wife. We’re to live alfresco this winter, if I don’t get my throat slit the way Culter got his shoulder and Janet her arm.”

  The same frigid voice said, “If the English intend to burn you, how do you possibly imagine I can stop it?”

  “You can stop bleating your name to Grey of Wilton for a start!” bawled Buccleuch. “So that every rotten device you practise on him doesn’t get traced home to me! If you’d done that a bit earlier, there’d be some folk at Newark who’d be much obliged to you.”

  “Oh, God!” said Scott, and let go. “A minute ago I was being overfriendly with the English: you’re not very consistent, are you? And if you’re supposed to be luring me back to the herd, I must say you’re making a damned bad job of it. If you really want to convince, you should at least get your facts straight. And argue them with some sort of logic. And keep your head while you’re doing it. In the first place, I wasn’t responsible for Grey discovering my identity. In the second place, Lymond is doing no more, openly, than half Scotland is doing underhand. In the third place, he is considerably less popular with the English than you are yourself. In the fourth place, you would fare a damned sight worse under the attention of my colleagues if a person like Lymond weren’t there to control them; and lastly, I prefer company where inflated prejudice and intellectual tedium get the place they deserve—among the granddads and dummies and the drink-fuddled half-wits in a fifth-rate common alehouse.”

  A diatribe worthy, Scott felt, of its inspiring genius. The response was the kind he often felt like making to Lymond, and had once made. Buccleuch’s knotted fist came out like a joiner’s mallet and drove at his son’s head.

  With a beautiful, cool-breathing ease, Scott slipped under it, closed his own fist, and released a blow which sent Buccleuch travelling like a cannon ball across the clearing and down with a skid into the beech leaves.

  There was a moment’s stupefied silence. Buccleuch lay, temporarily winded and making repulsive noises, and his son stood looking at him, with the excitement shrinking out of his face.

  It was a standing joke that Sir Wat was incapable of reasoned argument. There was no victory and less virtue in first provoking him to violence and then hitting a man twice his own age. He could imagine what Lymond would say. Scott stood for perhaps two seconds, then took the clearing in two strides and dropping on one knee, heaved his father to a sitting position, one arm around his great shoulder. “Father—”

  Wat’s scarred, knotted hand shuffled tenderly over his jaw, and his small bright eyes turned to his son. “By God!” He sat up fully, and resting an elbow on his knee, moved his lower mandible gently from side to side. “Where the hell did you learn that?” demanded Buccleuch.

  Scott gave a half-laugh and releasing him, sat back on his heels.

  “Lymond.”

  “Well, he’s taught you one thing worth knowing. But there was no need to practise it on me.” He got to his feet with the help of one hand on Will’s shoulder and stood for a moment, holding the boy in front of him. “He’s taught you quite a few things, hasn’t he? A fairly cavalier way with opposition, for one thing.”

  “I notice,” said his son, and grinned, “that you weren’t exactly relying on rhetoric yourself. But I didn’t mean to hurt you.”

  “Just to knock the head off me,” said Sir Wat, raising his hand to feel his jaw again. Scott, disappearing for a moment, returned with his handkerchief folded into a soaking pad, which he proffered Buccleuch. “Was it true about Newark?” he said.

  Applying his back to a root, Sir Wat nodded. “They didn’t get into the house, but they burned the village and nearly stripped me of beasts, Will. Grey’s doing.” He shot a keen glance at his son’s face. The boy had seated himself on a broken trunk and was studying his hands.

  “So they have the better of you both ways,” said Scott thoughtfully. “Grey for my misdeeds, and the Dowager if you dissociate yourself with them.”

  “That’s how it fell out.” Buccleuch, watching him quietly, held the pad to his bleeding face. “It’s been fairly damnable all round—no less for you, of course. You’re no match for a clever sycophant like yon. Whatever his purpose, he’s managed to stick my neck in a cang; and he looks like making a fine scapegoat out of you, if you let him.”

  The boy was silent. Then he said, “I’m supposed to be beyond redemption, am I?”

  Like a sea urchin calling in its needles, Buccleuch’s whiskers withdrew. “There would be some explaining to do. But damn it, I count for something yet in this country. If we went back quietly now, just the two of us, I’d see no one harms you. And you can have the satisfaction of fighting in the open, by the side of your family. You can surely see the way it is. In my position some kind of double-dealing can’t be avoided, and I won’t pretend my hands are clear of it yet. But no one can tell me I’m not a Scotsman as well as a Scott, and the one as much as the other. So what d’you say?”

  Sitting against a tree, one hand clapped to his face and an expression of limpid encouragement on the rosso-antico face, Buccleuch was more persuasive even than he knew. His son got to his feet without grace. “I’ve sworn to follow Lymond.”

  “He’s excommunicated. You know that?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “You have not only the power but the duty to break any pledge to him. D’you know why the Church expelled him?”

  Scott had heard so many possible reasons that he kept quiet.

  “Five years ago, when you were in France, his spying came suddenly to light. Before that, he was taken on trust, the same as Culter, and nobody thought of suspecting where the leakage was coming from. It came to light because a dispatch of his was found—a dispatch referring to other reports he had already made, and enclosing information that led Wharton to find and put an en
d to us at Solway Moss. But by the time it was found Lymond had already got himself to London, and was sitting safe with King Harry heaping land and money on him.”

  “I know that.” Scott shifted uncomfortably.

  “Yes. But did you also know this? In its last page that report described the locality of a damned great gunpowder dump of ours; a store that had been left in or near a convent. Described it fine: Dod, it was graphic enough to put a chorus to. It was so bloody ingenious that a raiding party was sent from Carlisle which blew up the nunnery, killing every last woman in it.”

  “But Lymond—” began Scott.

  “Lymond planned it. God, I saw the letter and the signature, and every stroke of the pen was as much his as that damned doll’s hair. Ask Sybilla. Ask Culter. Ask anyone. Even his own mother didn’t pretend it was a forgery—it wasn’t.”

  The colour had run out beneath Scott’s fair, unpigmented skin. His father said aggressively, “You didn’t know that? Or the other thing about it?”

  “What?” said Scott. “What other thing?”

  But Buccleuch had scrambled to his feet, the pad dropped from his grip, his face changed. Scott turned.

  With a rustle and a squirm, Johnnie Bullo emerged from the juniper and trotted across the clearing, an agile silhouette which made Sir Wat, unrecognizing, put a quick hand on his sword.

  But Will spoke first, all his anxieties turned to acid on his tongue. “What are you doing here! Spying for Lymond?”

  “No.” Johnnie Bullo, keeping a tree between himself and Buccleuch, was unperturbed, though breathing faster than usual. “Just a call from a friend. I thought you’d like to know you’re in a small trap. The wood’s encircled by armed men.”