Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [212]
‘Wat Scott of Buccleuch!’ shrieked his wife. ‘After all the contumaceous language that dirled in my ears and the ears of your poor innocent bairns from cockcrow to compline, is there a wee naked dirty word on the face of the earth that’s no acquent wi’ Buccleuch?’
‘Hud your whisht,’ said her husband genially, and rode past the first crofts of Hadden. Ahead, flat between river and hill, lay the Stank, the March banners flying. The Homes had arrived, he noted. Also the Elliots, the Armstrongs, the Veitches, the Burnets, the Haigs and the Tweedies, who were the mortal enemies, as it happened, of the Veitches; who were also at loggerheads with the Burnets. Plain in the middle of the field, bright with early sunshine, there flew also the standard of Richard, third Baron Culter, Lymond’s brother.
*
On the stroke of eleven, the English Warden rode on to the field. By that time all the English families were there too: the Dodds, the Charltons, the Milburns and the other freebooting clans: the Ridleys, the Robsons, the Halls and the Grahams who inhabited both sides of the Borders. The banners stuck like gooseberry stalks out of the crowd, helmeted, cuirassed, and spilled like leadshot in heaps throughout the big meadow and along all the roads into it.
The tents were up by then, and the tented booths, score upon score, where anything from a whip to a copper kettle could be bought, at a price. In the middle was the platform under its awning, where the two Wardens of Scotland and of England, with their deputies, clerks and officers, would hear cases and pass judgements. Nearest to these, on the Scottish side, were the stations of the Scotts, and of the Kerrs. Behind Sir James Douglas’s place on the platform there stood, ranged on the dusty grass, rank upon rank of Drumlanrig men. Behind the English Warden, stood dismounted the hundred light horsemen permitted Lord Ogle to discharge his duties.
But Lord Ogle, as they all knew, was sick; and Lord Dacre, whom he represented, was in the Tower. The office of Warden of the Middle and East Marches itself had been appropriated, at a salary of a thousand pounds per annum, by the Earl of Warwick, the Saviour of England.
Since the Earl, owing to pressing duties in London consisting largely of hanging the Government, was unable to attend personally to his office, this was normally occupied by a deputy. The deputy in this instance, brought hither by curiosity as well as duty, and accompanied by Sir Thomas Palmer and by Master William Flower, Chester Herald in person, was Thomas, Lord Wharton, Deputy Warden General of the Three Marches, straight from Carlisle.
Small, tough, self-made; a member of the English Parliament; one of the peers who tried and condemned the Duke of Somerset, England’s Lord Protector, the previous year; veteran of every recent war on the Scottish frontier and ancient enemy of Lymond, Lord Wharton rode on to the field, his helmet pushed back from his grim, teak-coloured face, his hand held high in traditional token of good faith. Francis Crawford, who had been riding, chatting amiably, at his right hand, dropped behind and sat, still mounted, to one side of the dais while behind him the quietly shining ranks of St Mary’s deployed alongside the Warden’s men, officers, mounted also, at their sides.
The meeting with Wharton had been fortuitous. But the staffwork which had united Jerott and Lymond with the company and brought them here, fully armed and provisioned in perfect order, was not. Sitting beside Graham Malett, watching the Wardens cross the green grass, approach and embrace, while all around them the soft earth and flowers of high summer were metalled with armour, blinding under the kind yellow sun, Jerott was elated.
They had done the impossible. And Crawford was good: God, he was good. Good enough to do what had to be done and, in the middle of it, deliberately waste two