Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [136]
A common danger might do such a thing, except that the nation was too weak to resist one. A great leader might achieve unity—but he must be followed by his equal or fail. A corporate religion might do it, but where did one exist which some foreign power had not seized and championed already?
There was another remedy. A decade of peace for quiet husbandry, so that every cottar should have his kale and his corn without stealing from the next; so that peaceful trade should offer rewards as rich as war, and rebuilt castles employ their hundreds without fear of burned harvests, or having to put foot in stirrup at sowing time, or finding their year’s work of wool or leather or herring sunk by reprisal for Scots fisherfolk themselves driven to piracy. ‘How would you set about that? How would you even stop a Kerr killing a Buccleuch, come to that?’ Tom said aloud, and saw from Jenny Fleming’s wondering face that she had been saying something quite different, for probably quite a long time.
Then she left, and he knew that instead of his nurses, soon he would have round him the embarrassed audience of the dying. He did not much care, for now the fire had reached every part of his body, and there washed from him in salty sickening jets the diseased sweat which would kill him.
There was nothing to be done. Water ran through the sheet and into the ticking. Dry sheet and dry mattress were drenched afresh, and again; then they left him as he was. When they brought icy packings soaked in well water he watched the white steam around him twist to the painted ceiling and was only mildly shocked when a clawed brown arm knocked them away and a shawled head, vaguely familiar, bent over him and hissed, ‘Kill ye, wid they, afore the Lord has appointed?’ And as he stared up at the seamed face of Trotty Luckup it relaxed its glare as she smiled and said, ‘I’ll win a little comfort for ye still, my dear, afore they lay ye cauld, cauld i’ the mools.’
He drank what she gave him to drink and let her do with him what she wanted, and perhaps it helped. He listened too, to what she had to say and it came to him that Francis Crawford could make use of that gossip, except that he was dying, and Francis was abroad.
It was Philippa who found him alone in his room, without the cold bags, and learned, rushing out to flare at the women, that they had been forbidden under threat of the evil eye to replace them after Trotty had gone. Jailbird or not, the old woman was wise, and Philippa knew that Tom had always dealt with her gently. So she did not interfere, but went back slowly into the sickroom and sat by the dying man’s side.
To Tom, stupefied with fever, she looked much like her mother, sitting straight in the uncomfortable chair, her combed brown hair clinging over the uncompromising front of her dress. There was no need for her to have come. Her mother had sat just like this at the deathbed of the girl he was once to have married, long before Margaret.
Since then, he had been often to Flaw Valleys, and Lymond sometimes too, until Philippa’s hostility had driven him away. That, or the death of Philippa’s father. And Philippa or Kate, or both, had often enough defied the rules of war and slipped over the Border to stay with him at Stirling or Boghall.…
Lymond, they said, had been fighting in Barbary and was due home soon.… Would Philippa stay so implacable? For a bemused second Erskine wondered if, sanctified by near-dissolution, he could play the peacemaker … but no. Hatred shackled by promises to the dead was the vilest of all.
Time passed. The room was dark and his feet were famished with cold. His feet were cold, and it was too late for a death-bed peroration. Not that he had much of value to say. Or had he?
With great difficulty, on a breath that scarcely lifted his chest, Tom Erskine said ‘Philippa?’ and her voice answered him, steadily, from where she sat framed by the dull glow