Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [145]
“Then she can continue to wait,” said Richard.
“My lord!” This time it was a new voice, a second page. “You’re wanted to come right away—”
Unstirring, Richard flung words at his mother. “I may be mistaken. It is for you to prove it. I ask you to tell me how to reach him.” The two pages shuffled.
For a long moment Sybilla looked Richard straight in the eyes, and neither pair flinched. Then, still mute, she shook her head.
“Very well,” he said. “I shall not ask you to outrage your feelings.” And, spinning on his heel, he was out of the room before they knew it. The two pages started, looked at each other, and made for the door. “Lord Culter! You’re wanted.…”
Inside the room, Christian slipped to the floor and laid her cheek on the Dowager’s warm, velvet lap. After a moment she felt Sybilla move, and the thin, pretty fingers began gently to caress her hair.
* * *
Much later, Sybilla left the room quietly. She was on her way downstairs when Buccleuch rounded a corner and pulled up tiptoe on the landing, nose to nose. “Sybilla, dammit!” He gave a kind of choking whoop, then stopped and eyed her closely. “Have ye been ailing?”
“No,” said Sybilla, and returned the compliment. “And what’s happened to you? You look as if you’d been boiled in a pot with a Pasque flower.”
Sir Wat’s beard lurched sideways, a sure sign of embarrassment, and he crowed again. A glimmer of amusement shone in the Dowager’s wan face. “Come on, Wat. Something to do with my family?”
Guilt and a sort of nervous self-satisfaction struggled on Buccleuch’s face. “You’ll want to kick my bottom through my merrythought,” he warned. “And Dod, I’m telling you: you’ll have an a priori case for it.”
“What have you done?”
“I’ve had that lunatic Culter stotted into a punishment cell under close arrest!”
“What!”
“It’s a fact,” said Buccleuch with undisguised pleasure. “You’ve no idea, Sybilla! He’s been flouting orders right and left—he shouldn’t have left the Queen to go to Crumhaugh in the first place; and since he came in today—”
“He kept the Queen waiting: I know.”
“Dod, yes: pages running about on their shinbones and he ups and flits; but that was the least of it. When he did come in he began by snapping the faces off the lot of us, and then stalked through and told her Majesty that he wasn’t just ready to do what she wanted.”
“Which was?”
“Oh, to ride through to Edinburgh and help the Governor who’s in a stoory panic because he’s expecting Lord Grey and the English to march in again on the hour like the bell for Prime. You know Arran. So does everyone else, but no one’s going to tell the Queen that he’s a jelly-footed puddock with his wits in his wame.”
“Good God!” said Sybilla. “Did Richard?”
“Not just in so many words,” allowed Sir Wat. “But he was damned rude. He couldna see the need to go; he didn’t have the time for it; he wouldna go; he wouldna say why: Peely-whatsit on Ossy-whatsit until the de Guise, who has a strippit tongue in her head herself, snapped that she supposed the affairs of his womenfolk were claiming all his attention.”
“Oh, good Lord!” said Sybilla weakly. “Did he knock her down and jump on her?”
“Well, hardly,” said Buccleuch, eying the Dowager with a touch of curiosity. “But he sucked in his cheeks, looked her up and down, and said that she could think what she pleased, but he had done his share of work for the King of France and wasn’t doing any more. And then—well, Dod,” said Sir Wat defiantly, “someone had to take a hand—”
“So you exercised your usual tact.”
“Well. I said that likely enough Lord Culter was anxious to lay hands on that brother of his, which would be doing a public service—”
“Quite. You’re an unprincipled ruffian, Wat,” said Sybilla. “And of course, seeing that Richard had already disobeyed her because of a private family feud—”
“She told him what she thought of him and his loyalty, and he answered back. Man, I havena heard him speak so many words at the ae time since I taught him all the verses of Sir Guy—and the upshot was, he was