Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [149]
She said dully, “Why do you hate each other? What does it matter—a paltry title—can’t you forget?”
“Forget! With Richard tapping on my funny bone like a yaffle on a pear tree?”
“You’re brothers!”
“Well: I am his brother as much as he is mine,” said Lymond with perfect clarity. “One gets a little tired of too much Suivez François and Fan Fan feyne. It’s Richard’s turn, dammit, to call off the hounds.”
In her weakness and misery Mariotta was crying, the tears washing unchecked over her thin face. “Why shouldn’t he hurt you? You tried to kill him at Stirling!”
Lymond looked shocked. “Mariotta, my Sarmatian poppy! Such a violent volte-face! I thought you loved me as the marabou loves its one-legged mother. I thought we should be shikk to shikk, indivisible, like Richard and his piglets. And now!”
But drowned in dreary, heartbroken tears, Mariotta was beyond retort, or argument or complaint; beyond speech and beyond the lash of his mockery. She did not even hear the door slam as he left.
Lymond received Molly’s scolding that night without comment, only remarking that if the girl needed company she had better tell her sorrows to Will Scott for a change, and they could moan together.
The fine, sharp eyes had already noted the redheaded boy, so high in favour at the Ostrich. Because he was like the son of one of her girls and she was sorry for him, and because in the long run she usually did as Lymond asked, Molly did send Will upstairs to sit with the invalid. It was the last time anyone did so.
Next morning Mariotta had vanished. Lashed by the Master’s furious tongue they hunted for her all that day, but of his sick and errant sister-in-law there was no trace.
* * *
It was a chance meeting with a drunken piper of Argyll’s which led Sir Andrew Hunter to haunt the Ostrich Inn where, eventually, he met and spoke to Will Scott. From there, he went straight to Branxholm.
Buccleuch listened to Hunter’s account of the meeting in relative silence. At the end, he spoke sharply. “Lymond’s selling my son, you say?”
“Will isn’t sure. But I’ve told him what I know. Lord Grey is being pushed by the Protector, and he’s even more anxious to lay hands on Will than before. And Lymond’s been seen twice in the neighborhood of George Douglas’s house. The boy won’t leave Lymond. He won’t say anything about his life, or the Master’s plans—”
“Or about young Lady Culter?”
Janet, listening, interjected. “Dandy didn’t know that Lymond had Mariotta, and Will never mentioned her although—”
“Although he looked ill, Wat,” said Hunter soberly. “I made him promise to tell me if ever he thinks the Master is about to get rid of him. It was all I could do. And if that happens, of course I shall send you word instantly.
“Instantly,” he repeated; and the slightest rough edge was audible in the kindly, courteous voice.
* * *
Prinked and painted and stencilled with spring sunlight, the city of Edinburgh celebrated the wedding of the Lady Herries and John, Master of Maxwell, and the sound of its bells ploughed the fields of Linlithgow nearly deep enough for the barley, and made the coals quake underground at Tranent.
Inside the palace of Holyrood, the scene seized the eye with light and flowers, cloth of gold and bunting, and a sparkling multitude, their rents and pensions glittering on their sturdy backs. Agnes Herries had a smile—a blinding smile full of teeth—for everybody; and an unaccustomed vivacity in John Maxwell was also noted. “And wha wouldna leer like a sprung joist,” said the cynics, “that’s just merrit the hale chump-end of Scotland?”
Once, during the evening, bride and groom slipped away to keep a private appointment. In a remote room of the Palace, John Maxwell introduced his wife to a stranger: a cool, fair-haired figure with an easy, disturbing voice.
“Agnes, this is someone without whom we might never have been able to marry. He—made it possible in