Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [132]
She saw him, with a belated fragment of clear vision, standing against the door, his clothes engrailed with the flash of her jewels; and his eyes were not blank. He spoke slowly.
“I will bring him to you,” said Richard. “I will bring him to you on his knees, and weeping, and begging aloud to be killed.” And he went.
It was over.
Mariotta waited until the Dowager, with Christian beside her, had left for Dumbarton, and until Tom Erskine, joining arms with her husband, had ridden out of the gateway and turned south. Then she locked the door and began to pack all she owned.
* * *
The Queen was feverish, the fat wrists pounding and the red, sore limbs thrashing restlessly; the tangled red hair gummed to the pillow, to her brow and eyes.
The doctors had chosen a high, deep-walled room in Dumbarton Castle for her sickroom, with its roots in the rock and the stormy grey tides of the Clyde Estuary slapping at its base. There the child lay in a formidable four-poster nursed by her ladies, by Lady Culter and by Christian. The bedclothes were tumbled night and day, and the satin pillowcase patched and stained from the crusted lips and swollen, broken face.
On the invisible filament of this one life, the two English armies moved in to attack, one on the east coast of Scotland and one on the west. First, Lord Wharton and the Earl of Lennox left Carlisle on Sunday, the nineteenth of February, and in two days had reached Dumfries.
On that same Tuesday, Lord Grey of Wilton led an English army into Scotland from Berwick and camped for the night at Cockburnspath. By nightfall next day he had established himself and his army in the town of Haddington, less than twenty miles from Edinburgh, and was proceeding to dig himself in.
At the same time, Lord Culter’s Scottish force, driving south, discovered the route taken by Wharton and Lennox and veered to come at their flank, thus missing a spearhead of horse sent ahead by Lord Wharton under his son Harry.
Harry was tough and confident. His orders were to bypass the house of Drumlanrig, to destroy the town of Durisdeer, and to give fight only if the Douglases did.
He expected little trouble from the Douglases. Report said most of them had already fled from his way: their head, the Earl of Angus himself, was at Drumlanrig and with him, whispering in his ear and stiffening his gouty resolution, was his daughter, Margaret Lennox.
The disaster exploded in Lord Wharton’s face: Wharton, the most experienced of them all, plodding north with his foot soldiers in his son’s wake.
He was eight miles north of Dumfries when one survivor brought the news. The Douglases had not fled. They had joined up with John Maxwell in orderly ambush, and falling on Harry’s advancing horse, had smashed them to pieces. In this they were helped by the Earl of Angus and Drumlanrig himself, whose house Wharton had spared and where Margaret, ignorant of her appalling failure, must be waiting.
And further aided by one half of young Wharton’s own force of Border English and forsworn Scots who, peeling off the red cross of England, had abandoned him with a ferocious joy at the first onslaught and had joined the Douglases.
There was no time for mourning: in an hour the Scottish army might be upon him. Wharton turned from the messenger and found Lennox beside him, the fair, unreliable face whiter than his own. “Margaret!”
He had his horse gathered to go when Wharton took rough hold of his bridle. “No! I’m sorry, sir, I can’t risk your being taken hostage. The whole Scottish army lies between here and Drumlanrig. Even if you got there, your wife’d be worse off in your company than she is now in Angus’s. For God’s sake—”
He waited only to see the resolution fade from the earl’s face, and began to issue orders. It was then that he heard, unbelieving, that fighting had already taken place on his right wing. Culter, always gifted with a special intelligence in the field, had