Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [301]
Robert Kerr with two others made their way to Buccleuch’s house. Ferniehurst, with Andrew Kerr of Primsideloch, George Kerr of Linton and Littledean and his son, made for George Paris’s rooms in the Lawnmarket. And Sir Walter Kerr of Cessford, the old man himself, with John Hume of Coldenknowes at his side, strolled down the main street of Edinburgh, the castle wall at his back and the towers of Holyrood beyond the Nether Bow Port part-way down, and kept well clear, for once, of the weak lanterns slung on each side, flushing the timber jowls of the high, chimney-like tenements, and the outside stairs, their narrow flights vanishing high in the gloom.
On the square stones of the causeway, their soft deerskin boots made no sound; nor did they have a light borne before them, as was the custom. There were few people abroad. After eight o’clock, in October, a fresh little wind blew from the west, pleating the Nor’ Loch; and Frenchmen in taverns drank too well, and came looking for trouble. There was a woman or two in the street, and a light or two, and the noise of laughter, clapping silent and loud as a tavern door swung. An officer of the burgher watch passed, swinging his bowet, and observed them curiously.
Behind them, no brawl had broken out in the Lawnmarket, dirling among the under-carved eaves: the work with Paris must have gone off well. Pacing without haste, Cessford and Hume passed from the wide market into the narrow channel of the Queen’s High Street of Edinburgh, choked by the straggling line of locked timber shops, the Booth Raw down its middle. There they took the foot-passage, narrow and dark, on the right of the Luckenbooths, where the tall bulk of the Tolbooth, prison and seat of justice and Parliament House at once, loomed dark in the night, two of its dim windows lit. And next to it, as they passed, a lamp hung in the Norman porch of the great church of St Giles, the queer masks carved in its nested archways yawning and leering, and the odour of incense preached at them from the big, stately fabric, with its high crown of groined stone, and its great bell, that had rung out the nation’s grief at the disaster of Flodden; and tonight and every night, at ten o’clock, would toll its forty strokes, in warning to the citizens of Edinburgh to keep off the streets. They had to do what had to be done, and leave the city by then.
At nine o’clock precisely, Kerr and Coldenknowes had reached the east end of the Stinkand Style, past the booths and the church, and were in the open High Street, with the Mercat Cross on their left, and on their right the entrance to Conn’s Close, running down to the Cowgate, where George Hoppringle, with a boy, happened to-be having his horses shod in David Lindsay’s smith’s booth. Below that on their right was the Tron, and beside it the tall house with its corbelled oriels, the slatted flats rising crooked above their heads, where Buccleuch had his lodging.
Then the lights went out. Until nine o’clock, the law said, lanterns must be exposed by each householder; and the householders, with the price of lamp oil in mind, made sure that the servant girl ran down the forestairs with not a moment to waste. At the same time, a patter of footsteps coming down-street the way they had come heralded a servant of Ferniehurst’s, who slowed when he saw them in the last extinguishing lights, and in a low voice gave them his master’s message.
They had found George Paris’s lodging, and forced open the door. But they had been too late. Paris had gone, and his papers with him, in the custody of the law officers of Edinburgh under the Lord Provost himself, with Wat Scott of Buccleuch with him.
The Kerrs’ complicity with Paris could no longer be hidden. But there was time for vengeance: all the time in the world.
Neither Hume nor Cessford this time hesitated. Watched over by the pious mottoes and unseen, benevolent statues of the elderly land, they ran lightly upstairs to Buccleuch’s house, the servant following, and raised their fists to bang on the door.
They were forestalled. Robert