Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [106]
For a moment Mariotta continued to twist the necklace. Then she got up, with a sudden impatience that made Hunter step back. “Surely there’s some way out of it other than setting them at each other’s throats? … Oh, never mind! But I doubt very much who’s going to be safer and happier if Richard finds out about all this …” said Mariotta.
2. A Queen’s Knight Fails Signally to Adjust
A letter lay on the round, cypress table in the parlour at Bogle House.
Christian knew it was there. Passing and repassing, she was aware of it; it sat among her innocent and mundane thoughts like a tiger among peahens. In all Stirling, none was gladder or more relieved than Christian when at nightfall on the 23rd the yard exploded into life and Lord and Lady Culter, the Dowager, Agnes Herries and all their formidable train arrived.
Agnes pounced. “Another letter! From Jack?”
“Jack?” said the Dowager, turning.
“Jack Maxwell. I wrote him we’d be in Stirling for Christmas.” And she broke the seal and read it, standing. “Christian! he says will I answer him as usual, but he may be with me before I get a reply … he means to come to Stirling!”
“Does he say so in English?” inquired Christian warily.
“Yes, as plain as can be. Listen!” said Agnes.
Christian heard her read, thanking heaven for the child’s verse-infested mind which saw nothing strange in the outrageous metaphor in which her messages were wrapped. He had managed, she gathered, to eliminate one of the two men he must see, and was in train of seeing the other. A suitable moment, obviously, to break off the correspondence; to snap the whole tenuous link; for Johnnie Bullo, former ally and messenger, seemed now to avoid her.
So a curious, painful episode in one’s life bid fair to end. But she had to admit that, whatever it purpose, the dignities of happiness had transformed Lady Herries.
* * *
That night, snow fell on the Lowlands, and Stirling woke to its Christmas Eve bowered in white above grey river and eye-aching plain. Against tender blue the distant hills gave eye for candid eye with the sun, and above castle and Palace the griffins sat, capped and chaliced in snow.
Warmed by the snow and melted by the season, Mariotta sought early for her husband and found he had left the house, no one knew why. While sharing her bafflement with the Dowager, the thought struck Mariotta. She marched to Sybilla’s inlaid French cabinet and flung it open.
The top drawer was empty.
“It’s gone!” said Richard’s wife, spinning around, her violet eyes black. “The glove we found at the Papingo has gone. Richard’s taken it—on Christmas Eve, on his own, without a word to any of us—our fine, cold, brass-blooded hero has taken it to try and trace Lymond.”
* * *
Culter had indeed taken the glove, but had not carried it far.
The bullion with which it was decorated must have been supplied by a goldsmith; and since some time today he must call at Patey Liddell’s for the completed miniature of his mother, he took the glove with him to Patey’s, and left very early so as to be back before Mariotta missed him.
Patey was not yet up. After an interminable amount of banging, a moplike head thrust itself from a top-storey lattice and Patey’s voice yapped, “Chap away: I’m as deif as a board—oh! It’s yourself, my lord. Wait you, and I’ll be down.”
Below in the shop, a purple robe over his nightgown, Patey handed over the miniature, not without an involved search, and after pocketing the outrageous cost of it, bent over the glove Richard produced. He held it at arm’s length and smirked at it.
“The bonny piece! The bonny, bonny stonewark!” He tapped the twinkling cuff with a threadlike finger. “You wouldna get finer gin you