Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [110]
Mr. Waugh rose, bent-kneed, to his feet and was sternly pressed down again by well-wishers. Richard continued. “I’m sorry about it, but I need some information from you, in a hurry, and you won’t be out of pocket over it.” He threw a small bag, chinking, on the glover’s lap. “You can pay the damage to your sobriety pretty quickly with that, and have some left to spend at Pasche, perhaps.”
Jamie Waugh opened the bag, and the whole almond face altered. “Man, if it comes up your back again just send word to Jamie, and I’ll spend Lent in a stickleback’s front parlour. What did you want to know?”
“Something very simple.” He threw Lymond’s glove on top of the money. “Can you tell me who ordered that?”
The glover’s broad, brown fingers fondled the work. “I’ll have to look up the books in my shop, sir. But it’s my work, right enough. I remember it fine. I got the gold for it off Patey Liddell in Stirling.”
Richard got up. “Can we go to your shop now?”
“Surely, surely.” The other laid down his mug, picked up money and glove and made for the door, slapping his sister in passing. “I’m off to the Yard for a minute, Jess: be a fine lass and put on the ham for when I’m back; my insides are clapping together and my mou tastes like a haddock’s spit-oot.” He eyed Richard diffidently. “You’d no care to come back and have a bite with us, sir? It’s ham, just; but, man, I tickled her backside day in, day out when she was fattening, and there’s not a wrong bit in her.”
Lord Culter put a hand on the wiry shoulder. “Jamie Waugh, you can count that ham half gone already.”
* * *
The early dark began to fall as Richard, with Waugh, returned to Glovers’ Yard, and candles in the thick, misted windows patterned the dirty snow below.
Jamie was not one to stand on ceremony. He no sooner set foot on the cobbles, walking smartly by Richard’s stirrups, than he flung back his wet head and roared, “Faither!”
Propelled by curiosity, the windows of the court shot up. After a pause, Malcolm Waugh’s front window glimmered with an approaching taper; the casement opened, and the erratic parent looked out. “Jamie!”
“Aye: Jamie. I want in to the shop, Faither.”
The bristled jowl quivered. Mr. Waugh, senior, leaned farther out of the window. “Jamie! Are ye sober, lad?”
The glover, who was getting a little tired of the continuing stress on his condition, frowned. He said tartly, “A damned sight too sober to stomach the sicht o’ the wagglin’ chops on ye muckle longer. Will ye come down?”
But Faither only hung farther out. “Jamie! Tell me! Ye havena had an encoonter with a sleekit-spoken chiel …”
Richard, leaning on his pommel, looked up.
“Oh, it’s yourself!” said the old man hurriedly. A yellow grin, hastily summoned, jerked into place. “Man, you’re a great case. From the Mull tae Dunnet Heid there isna another body could have brought Jamie Waugh to his faither as stone-sober and ill-tempered as the day he was weaned.” He ducked smartly as a stone, flung by his impatient son, cracked on the woodwork. “Just wait; wait now. I’ll be down.”
He let them in and watched as Jamie, having lit a candle, opened his ledger and conned it. Richard, looking around the perfumed and flickering gloom, saw something wink on a table, and strolling across, picked up his dagger. Slipping it back in his belt, he grinned into a lugubrious bloodshot eye. “I’ll excuse you the gloves I’ve won, Mr. Waugh. It’s been worth the experience to know you.”
The loose mouth wobbled. “Man, I can just say the same: there’s many an alehouse would keep you in drink for life for a loan o’ your talents.” He melted unobtrusively into the gloom as his son came forward slowly, the big book spread in his hands. There was a pause, then the man Jamie gave an exclamation, laid down the book and held the glove over to the light. “The deil!” he said. “He’s used it as a shooting glove!