Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [294]
Margaret Erskine’s sigh was noiseless. She turned round. ‘You weren’t thinking, by any chance, of going with him?’ she said.
Lovely still, Lady Fleming’s vivid face sparkled. ‘Why, dull child? Do you think he’d object?’
It was a long-standing conspiracy. ‘I know he won’t,’ said her daughter briskly. ‘I’ve discussed it for you, in fact. He said he wouldn’t mind, provided you put your rates up. Villeconnin’s mother, he said, got two hundred thousand crowns in the bank from the last King of France for a son.’
She knew her mother too well to fear any damage to her amour propre. Jenny Fleming merely looked exasperated. ‘That young man,’ she said, ‘ought to be plucked out of his pride and impaled on a thornbush. He introduced me to someone as the Controller of the King’s Beam, last time we met.’
Which at least had the merit of making her daughter laugh, if a little wildly.
*
At Branxholm, Janet Beaton had the whole matter strictly in hand.
Bit by bit, her husband had been allowed to learn of Gabriel’s iniquity, and of Joleta’s shortcomings. Of his share in Will’s death Janet said nothing. Lymond had said only, ‘Put him on his guard. Tell him a little. But nothing, for God’s sake, that will send him frothing off to St Mary’s with a noose in his hand. We don’t want Buccleuch dead or Gabriel vanished.’
It was a matter for nice judgement, but Janet knew her Buccleuch. The first time she raised it, he called her a havering ninny, and advised her that the dust was standing in bings under the draw-bed, and she should mind her own feckless business before kilting up other folks’ tails for them.
But he thought about it, and though he poured scorn on the idea at the next airing too, she knew he would surely come round. And soon enough, brows jutting, he was saying bluntly, ‘Yon fellow Crawford’s made a right hotch-potch and mingle mangle o’ it, then. And Sandilands is as bad, by God, letting the de’il stroll in.’
‘Jimmy Sandilands is a creishy wee fox,’ said Dame Janet with emphasis. ‘He’d like fine to line his pockets with the Order’s revenues, and he thinks he sees a way of getting someone else to take the blame for it. Francis had a fair shot at hinting the way things might go, on the way home from Falkland, but the fool whined over his gouty foot and quoted the Scriptures until you would think he was mad. Francis couldna shift the Kerrs, either.’
‘I should hope not,’ said her husband indignantly, allowing a grandchild to drop off his knees. ‘A good-going feud like yon isna put out like a spit on a match. It was going fine long before Graham Malett got his hands on it.’
‘Oh, we all ken that,’ said Janet angrily. ‘Flype a Scott and you find a wee man thumbing his nose at a Kerr. But he pointed out, all power to him, that the lot of ye were no more than playing into the hands of anyone that wanted real power for the asking next to the throne, and no awkward questions from the gentrice. Cessford said,’ she added absently, ‘that as the Scotts werena gentrice, it would make no difference when the Kerrs loused down their points and ran them greetin’ out o’ the land.’
It was next day before she was able to touch on the subject again, and Buccleuch’s feelings were still uncommonly ruffled, but he did agree, growling at last, to take care in all his dealings with the family Kerr. And also, with greater reluctance, to lend an ear, when the time came, to the discourse of Crawford of Lymond.
‘Thank God,’ remarked Janet at this stage, fanning herself with an infantile garment. ‘Ye’re a dogged au’d besom, Buccleuch. But you’re namely for sense, in the end.’
‘Sense! With the blood of me rotted with nagging! Can ye no envisage a decent reticence, woman, but you’ve to knock and chop hourly like the chapel-held clock? Sense!’ bellowed