Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [120]
Sir George’s answer was ready. “If Lord Grey and I are happily reconciled, and if his lordship’s plans for this country are successful, we shall remember our friends. As to the granting—or reinstating—of baronies, for example.”
There was a respectful pause, broken mildly by Lymond. “Setting aside anarchy and murder and returning to simple conveyancing—how soon could Samuel Harvey be brought north?”
The essential bargain, after all, had been made; so Douglas’s exasperation was well-hidden. A common posting station, a hovel they both knew, was agreed as a means of communication, and the pact was sealed. At the door, Sir George turned and smiled. “I can’t imagine a Scott resigned to authority and bars. What will your callow colt make of the snare?”
“Scott is trained to authority already,” said Lymond. “The bars are a trite enough sequel.”
He reached the Peel Tower on Sunday the fifth of February, finding it already unrecognizable in the torments of chaotic removal. He walked from room to room, dispensing criticism and looking for Will Scott.
In this he was unsuccessful. Will had left the Peel early that afternoon for an unknown destination, and had not come back.
2. Brief Return to Home Squares
The meeting between Will Scott and his father was due to take place at dusk. After banging violently about the castle all day Buccleuch left, rather too early, for his supposedly secret encounter, and his family was overjoyed to see the last of him.
Wat Scott of Buccleuch was a man crammed with sentiment, which accounted for the peculiar harmlessness of half his explosions. The sight of his heir at the cattle raid had produced an unwonted tremor among his principles, and he was shy of repeating the experience.
Of all his brood, Will was least like himself. His oldest and illegitimate son, Walter, was a stuffy and powerful lad, and he was setting him up as befitted his first-born; but Will had a head on his shoulders, if a fat one, and Buccleuch was not the man to underrate that. The boy’s scruples he put down, with some justice, to the company of flute-mouths and dishwashing writers in books; and he rode out therefore alone to meet him at Crumhaugh with a fine determination this time to stand for no stupidity.
It was still light when he reached the hill and pressed into the copse on its side. At first, peering through the trees, he thought the little clearing was empty. It was a place in the wood, known to Will and himself, where larch and oak and juniper gave way to a quincunx of soaring beeches so old that the aisles between were cushioned with a permanent autumn of red leaves. Then he heard a hoof strike, and the clunk of bit on teeth, and the next moment saw his son’s horse with its reins loosely tied to a bush, and Will himself standing just beyond.
The boy was quite different. His thick neck was strapped with muscle; he had eyes like sea pebbles, and his red hair roared like a lion. Buccleuch got rid of his surprise and dismounted. “So you came!”
His son regarded him austerely. “I said I would.”
There was a slight pause, a bellow as Buccleuch cleared his throat, then Sir Wat waded in. “Ye might like to know that your Englishy friends have burned me out of Newark. Missed Janet and myself and the weans by half a day, just.”
Will was distressingly calm. “Well, you seem to have survived.”
“No thanks to you!”
“Why blame me? If you chose to move all the cannon to Branxholm, it was no fault of mine.”
This error of judgment was no sweeter for being Buccleuch’s own. He remembered just in time what he was supposed to be doing, and wiped his mouth with a large hand.
“Will. We’ve had words in the past, and I don’t mind saying you were damned disrespectful. And wrong, forbye. But you won’t get any righter by burying your carcass to the neb and over in Lymond’s muck heap. As far as I’m concerned you can stop making an exhibition of yourself and come on back home. Unless you’re so damned keen you’ve begun to reform the bastard