Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [126]
It was damned unfair. Seizing the first weapon to hand, Scott said furiously, “It sounds well, coming from you. Why should I trouble about them? It wouldn’t hinder you from selling any one of us if it paid you. Unless you restrict yourself to wiping out women in holy orders.”
There was an appalling silence. Then Lymond said carefully, “Ill-advised, Scott. Don’t bluster. And particularly don’t bluster in that direction. You may now get out of my sight.”
There was nothing to add. Scott left the room, mounted and rode off to Crawfordmuir hardly realizing that of all the checkered exchanges between them this was the first in which he had, after a fashion, held his own.
As Scott rode west, his father travelled north.
It was some time before Buccleuch, jogging bitterly home from Crumhaugh, thought to wonder how Culter had heard of his appointment with Will. He had told Sybilla, but she was as anxious to keep Culter away from Will and Lymond as he was. Who else?
He thought. Only one person could have seen the note and was likely to act on it in just that way: Janet. Sir Wat’s hands cramped on the reins. Janet! By God, thought Buccleuch, I’ll teach that longnebbit braying bitch of a woman to keep her nose from now on out of my business.… And he put his horse into a canter for Branxholm and lifted his head to scan the night sky.
There was something wrong with the light in the southeast—an underglow of crimson flushing the low cloud. He stared at it for a long moment doubting his eyes; then wheeled and galloped toward the fire with curses fothering the cleft air at his back.
Lord Grey had been as good as his word. Setting out with foot and mounted hackbutters from Jedworth and Roxburgh, Sir Oswald Wylstropp and Sir Ralph Bullmer marched west with orderly authority, reducing everything in their way to ashes. They took thirty prisoners, all the sheep and goats they could manage, and reduced Hawick to a series of ovens in which the resisters were cooked in their skins like new lobsters.
Buccleuch, flying to the scene through paths choked with women and children and the pitiful domestic debris of flight, found his Branxholm men ahead of him under his own captain, and deploying them, took what vengeance he could, since it was too late to save. In the exploding, light-torn darkness, with all the power still left in the district they snapped and tore at Wylstropp’s heels as he left, and killed some of his men and saved some of the animals. It was a poor enough salvage, and a poor enough revenge. After it, turning back with the west wind sick in their lungs, they scattered through the stricken, smoking district, and gave what help they could.
At dawn, Buccleuch rode back to Branxholm with an ache in his back and red eyes and a great fury inside him. In the hall, he remembered something else and strode to his wife’s room with a streaming candle. “Janet Beaton!”
The woman in the bed stirred and opened her eyes; and the big-nosed, generous face split into a sleepy grin. “Well, stick me if it isn’t Wat,” remarked Lady Buccleuch. “Late as usual.”
“I want to have words with you, my lady.”
“Oh, you do? What about?”
“About the heir to this castle, madam. My oldest son Will.”
“Oldest legitimate son,” corrected Janet. “Did ye miss him?”
“I missed him all right,” said her husband grimly.
Janet appeared remarkably spry with it. “Och well, never mind,” said she. “You know what they say. Ye havena lost a son but ye get a daughter.”
Buccleuch stared from under the eagle-owl eyebrows and Janet stared back. From beyond the bed a wavering and disenchanted wail rose, intensified and died. Janet’s beam developed overtones of beatitude. “The newest Buccleuch,” said his wife. “Unpick that