Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [118]
Scott came out and took his horse. “What’s happened, sir?”
“Ce n’est rien: c’est une femme qui se noie,” said Lymond, and laughed. “Love Mr. Maxwell, my cherub: he has brought your old age with him today. We require a hostage to exchange for Samuel Harvey. And behold, we have a hostage. My brilliant devil, my imitation queen; my past, my future, my hope of heaven and my knowledge of hell … Margaret, Countess of Lennox.”
Part Three
THE PLAY FOR
SAMUEL HARVEY
CHAPTER I: Bitter Exchange
II: The Queen’s Progress Becomes Critical
III: Mate for the Master
IV: Concerted Attack
I
Bitter Exchange
This knycht he aw his folk for to defend …
Off gret corage he is that has no dreid
And dowtis nocht his fais multitude
Bot starkly fechtis for his querell gud.
1. Offer of a Pawn Is Discussed
MEG DOUGLAS, the boy Scott was thinking, his hands slack on the reins. Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox. What could have forged a link between the refulgent, self-contained Lymond and this woman?
The meeting with Maxwell lay behind them. Riding north with the Master, Scott had time to dwell on these and other matters, other women. He remembered the cold dawn camp after the cattle raid. Lymond was unique: perhaps he was entitled to a unique relationship with the Stewart girl. Perhaps. It was none of his business.
But because of it—every man has his private affairs—he had said nothing to the Master of his promise to meet Buccleuch.
His motives were wholly chaste: he meant to toy a little with the old man, giving his father the chance of a good look at him. He wanted to inspect the banners of the angels so near to the merry ranks of Mahoun, and make self-satisfied comparisons.
But he said nothing of that to Lymond. The devyll, they say, is dede; the devyll is dede. But Kincurd, renegade, would revive him fast enough, thought Will Scott, and kept quiet as they moved toward their new winter quarters.
Affairs around the Peel Tower were becoming a little too busy; and Lymond had decided to move. Tomorrow, Scott was to leave for the old Tower to supervise its final dismantling. Tonight he would spend at the new Tower, at Crawfordmuir.
The gold mines at Crawfordmuir were not very old. For thirty years, Dutch and Germans and Scots had been mining there, and the Queen Dowager Mary of Guise had also brought French miners from Lorraine. Since James V died, the Dowager Queen had not renewed the contract.
So the mines lay derelict, the ruins of workmen’s huts and storehouses littering the broken moorland, with rotting spades and wheelbarrows and crumbling dams and shallow, timbered pits.
The rock yielded no fabulous artery of yellow ore, but pebbles and scourings grained and gritted with gold dust and, rarely, an attenuated nugget. Mining was furtive and unlicensed. Week in, week out, the earth brought down by the spring rains was cherished and riddled, and the sparkling fragments folded in twists and rags and taken to a friendly goldsmith who might choose to forget that a tenth of all lawful takings on Crawfordmuir belonged to the Crown.
This was the land to which the Master brought Scott: up through bog and heather and packed moss and harsh root to two thousand feet above sea level where they stopped, and the boy looked about him. Here were four rivers, Lymond had told him, and Eldorado between them as the ancients thought it lay between the four rivers of Paradise. There were other graces. In this harness of high, safe hills they were surrounded by escape routes.
Lymond pointed. Below and to the left, a burn wandered into the hills with heaps like molehills about it and the figures of men moving. “—Your colleagues looking diligently for alluvial gold. It amuses them and helps fill the treasury. It also explains our presence and gives us warning of anyone using the valley …” And led the way to their destination, an excellent