Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [4]
*
Sentimentally, Will Scott thought, it made his wedding-day perfect. Cantering, easy and big-limbed, through the bracken of Ettrick-side, with leaves stuck, lime-green and scarlet on his wet sleeves, blue eyes narrowed and fair, red-blooded Scott face misted with rain, he was borne on a vast, angry joy.
The lands of Branxholm and Hawick and all Buccleuch possessed in these regions had been a favourite target while King Henry VIII of England and his successor had tried to resurrect their overlordship of Scotland and seize and marry Mary, the child Queen of Scotland, to Henry’s son Edward, now the young English King.
They had failed, despite the great English victory at Pinkie, and timber and thatch had risen in Buccleuch’s lands again, and the thick stone towers—his father’s at Buccleuch and Branxholm, his own at Kincurd, his grandmother’s at Catslack—still survived. After Pinkie, the English army had retired, leaving their garrisons to police the outraged land; and Sir William Scott had left Branxholm to join the roving force then commanded by Crawford of Lymond.
By the following summer, when Francis Crawford disbanded his company, Buccleuch’s heir had turned into a tough and capable leader of men, and the child Queen Mary had been sent for safety to France, at six the affianced bride of the Dauphin.
In return, the King of France had filled Scotland with Gascon men-at-arms, Italian arquebusiers, German Landsknechts, a French general, a French ambassador and an Italian commander in French service, the last of whom was riding now at Will Scott’s left side, his Florentine English further cracked by the jolt of the ride.
‘The little bride shed no tears,’ said Piero Strozzi, Marshal of France, in sombre inquiry. He rode with animal grace; a man of near fifty, just recovered from a hackbut shot outside Haddington which would leave ‘one leg shorter than the other all his life. Beneath the umber skin, the basic shapes of his face were deeply plangent, denying his notoriety as a practical joker: only Leone his brother was worse. But today, riding against the muddling wind, in and out of the rain, his plumes dripping wetly from his bonnet and the black hair before his ears in wet rings, Strozzi’s theme was the bereft bride.
‘She has known you some weeks, it is true?’
‘Grizel? I’ve known her a while, Marshal. Her older sister is my father’s third wife.’
‘There is sympathy between you?’
Will Scott grinned. Grizel Beaton had slapped his face four times, and apart from these four small misjudgements, they had never touched on a topic more personal than which of Buccleuch’s bastards to invite to the wedding. But he liked her fine; and she was good and broad where it would matter to future Buccleuchs, which summed up all his mind so far on the subject.
‘She’s a canty wee bird,’ said Will Scott now to the Marshal. ‘But plain, forbye. Couldna hold a candle, ye ken, to Lord Culter’s wife. You’ve met the Crawfords?’
So, duly turned from discussing the bride, ‘I have met the Crawfords,’ the Marshal Piero Strozzi said. ‘The lord is most worthy and the Dowager mother enchanting. And the youngest brother Francesco is fit for my dearest brother Leone.’
A smile twitched Sir William Scott’s mouth. As Prior of the Noble Order of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem and commander of the King of France’s fleet off the Barbary coast, Leone Strozzi, however practised with infidels, was not necessarily fit for Crawford of Lymond.
Will Scott said nothing. But he wondered why the Marshal Piero also smiled.
*
Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch was happy, too, because he had caught the Kerrs at it again.
All over the middle Borders their land marched with his, and he loved them as he loved the Black Death. It was a Kerr of Ferniehurst whose timely murder