Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [133]
Maxwell’s men, pouring over the hills half an hour later, found the English troops streaming south with Culter at their heels; in minutes they had closed the gap and themselves caught the skirts of Wharton’s army. It staggered in its tracks, turned uncertainly, and willy-nilly, came to grips with the combined Scottish troops, renegades and all.
This time they fought side by side, the Maxwells and Douglases, Buccleuch and Culter, and if they were irresistible, it was partly because they despised each other and partly because they dared not lose. Wharton, even in his despairing rage, could make nothing of them. He recoiled, and recoiled again, leaving his dead and wounded where they lay, and within an hour it was nearly over, and a rider was off, wearing his exhausted horse to the hocks, to tell Carlisle of the annihilation of the whole of Lord Wharton’s army.
Tom Wharton, the Warden’s older son at Carlisle, sent the news to Lord Grey at Haddington. It told of the total overthrow of the entire company led by Lord Wharton and the Earl of Lennox, including the loss of his father and his brother Harry, and it was the death knell of the combined plan. Lord Grey dared not hesitate. Leaving a garrison to fortify the town of Haddington, he marched straight home to Berwick.
There he learned with a shrill and incredulous fury that Harry Wharton was alive; that escaping with some men from Durisdeer he had been able to rescue his father from his later sad straits and that, although much diminished both in numbers and in confidence, Lord Wharton, the Earl of Lennox, Harry and a large proportion of their troops were all happily safe at Carlisle.
What he did not learn, and what the Earl of Angus, much mystified, could have told him, was that when the Douglas returned to Drumlanrig after the fighting, his daughter Margaret Lennox had totally disappeared.
Sybilla took the news to the Queen, hesitating outside the sickroom where Mary of Guise had remained now all day. Then she gently opened the door.
The priests and the doctors had gone. Alone in the room, the Queen Mother knelt by the bedside, her cheek on the smooth coverlet. For a moment Sybilla paused; then she walked steadily to the bedside and looked.
The child had turned, and was sleeping quietly under the fresh sheets, one hand under her cheek, her breath stirring peacefully in a deep and feverless sleep.
Sybilla blew her nose with muffled energy, and touched the Queen Dowager on the shoulder.
2. But Proves to Be Covered
By sheer chance, Lord Culter’s irreverent cadet was less than fifty yards away from him when he swept down the Durisdeer road in murderous pursuit of Wharton. Lymond let him go. Except for an episode which he made memorable both for John Maxwell and Lord Wharton’s son, he took no part in the fighting, his concern at the time being solely to supervise an extramural activity on the part of Turkey Mat.
Will Scott, sitting under orders in his room, the Buke of the Howlat open on his knee, heard the party leave Crawfordmuir for Durisdeer. They came back much later, and Turkey’s voice was audible, first on the floor below him; then travelling up the stairs which passed Lymond’s room, off which his own opened. The jostling of several feet came next; they passed Lymond’s door and ascended to the third and top story, where they halted. The lock of a door clicked, and a woman’s voice said icily, “Assuming that you now feel safe, will you be good enough to unbind my eyes?” Then a door banged, the lock turned again, and the tramp of feet repassed the door and disappeared below.
In the racket from the first floor he nearly missed the soft opening and closing of the stairway door into Lymond’s room. Then the firelit walls in the adjoining room bloomed yellow in new-lit candlelight and his own door swung open. “Bored?” asked Lymond.
Scott dropped the book he had not been reading. “I heard Mat and a woman. Was that the Countess?”
“That was Margaret Douglas.” The mobile face was virginal. Lymond said, “The