Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [200]
An outside agency stopped that for him, at once, with a jug of cold water slapped full in his face. Gasping for breath, Francis Crawford sat up, and with both hands cleared and opened his eyes.
It was night. He was in the loose robe that had been thrown in front of his fire: someone had undressed him. And the face before him, the grim, grey, rough-bearded face with every line a rut and every rut a channel of agony, was the face of Buccleuch.
Becoming very still, Lymond let his hands drop.
‘Asleep, were ye?’ said Will Scott’s father, and laid down the empty jug in his grasp. Placing his hands behind his broad back he continued to stand, surveying the splendid blue bed. ‘Well-drunken too, I see,’ he said after a moment. ‘At least ye fairly reek of a very nice make of liquor. Things going well, are they?’
Lymond did not speak. The robe he was wearing reeked of spirits, and in his face was the question he had lost the right to ask. Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch answered it for him.
‘You won’t know: my son’s dead. They were sorry ye left him so soon to get at your drink and your slippers, though I’m sure ye deserved them. When he woke, seemingly, they couldna get ye roused tae speil off a kind word or two, just as he died.’
There was a long silence. Then Lymond said, ‘I would have … I didn’t know. They couldn’t have tried.’ He was white.
The grey, matted beard nodded. Buccleuch’s face was covered with a marcasite of fine dust, where he had been riding hard and long against the May wind. ‘His brain was soft a wee, mind. He asked for the Master of Culter, as if ye were his commander; and when they told him ye couldna come, he said you’d be by-ordnar plagued with things to attend to, and we were to tell you never to trouble. But he hoped all the time, they said, that you’d see past it and come.… But that’s no matter. They tell me it was your orders that put him and the rest of them in the castle. There’s just one thing I’ll trouble ye to tell me: which Kerr was it killed him?’
‘Wat.…’ said Lymond, and stopped. All the time he had been speaking, Buccleuch’s face had been bathed unheeding in a ceaseless curtain of tears. He was quite unaware of it, it was clear as he plodded on with what he had to say. Nor was the bitterness of his words at all at variance with it. Only Lymond, wordless for once, had to control his own emotion before he could speak. Then he said quietly, ‘I don’t know, Wat. It may not have been a Kerr at all.’
‘Aye.’ The old man was not surprised. ‘It’s your heaven-given job, of course, to see there’s nae prejudice between the two families. Are ye going tae manage it soon, do ye think? So it may not be a Kerr,’ he said, the tears twinkling in his mirthless eyes. ‘There’s a lot of left-handed folk going up and down stairs in that part of the world, I warrant you. It’ll be one of them.’
One could do nothing with that. Lymond left it. He said, ‘Wat: will you let me tell Grizel?’
‘The younger Lady of Buccleuch will know by now,’ said Sir Wat, rising with his new, painful formality. The hapless, unnoticed weeping had stopped. ‘Yon fellow Malett rode to tell her right away, wounded shoulder and all. I got him to say a prayer over the lad first.… He wasn’t working for ye again, was he? Will?’
‘No,’ said Lymond.
‘Oh. I thocht maybe he was, since he took your orders, it seems. Then ye’ll hae no objection if his cousins and I take the body off home?’
‘Wat. Stop it, for God’s sake,’ said Lymond. He swung out of bed beside the old Warden, and grasped the rigid, powerful arms. ‘Another day I’ll tell you what happened. But meantime, don’t believe me indifferent. You could have had my right hand.…’
‘But you had his, instead,’ said Buccleuch.
The two pairs of eyes met, and held. ‘All right,’ said Lymond at last, and dropped his arms. ‘But blame me. Not the Kerrs.’
‘There’s little,