Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [156]
Douglas was flushed. “All that is wanted is a message in your writing which will bring the boy here. Your gypsy friend can take it … but you will not, of course, be allowed to tell him the conditions under which it is being sent.”
“I see. You expect this to give you, personally, some security?” said Lymond suddenly.
Douglas’s voice was sharp. “If there were any alternative, be sure I should take it—” And broke off as the Commander came in.
Sir Robert Bowes straightened, nodded, and surveyed the Master at leisure from fustic head to silver spurs. He smiled. “Is this the fellow?”
“—But even a gib-cat has claws,” said Lymond, returning the smile and answering the thought. “Where is Samuel Harvey?”
“In London,” said Bowes comfortably. “Are you going to send this message to Scott for us?”
Lymond surveyed him with mild distaste. “Why should I?”
“Thumbscrews,” said Bowes picturesquely. “The iron glove—hot lead—pincers—knives. And the whip.”
The Master’s eyes were hilarious. “What, all in your baggage? There’s the English army for you. My God, do you have to whip them from behind as well?”
But it was bravado. He told them almost immediately all they wanted to know, and inscribed a letter to Will Scott with which Bullo uncomplainingly set off.
Arriving with the rest of the army on Monday, Lord Grey was charmed with the news. “This afternoon, at the pond belonging to that old house at Heriot,” said Bowes. “He’d already made a verbal arrangement with the boy, to be confirmed with his letter, and we thought it best not to change it.”
“Splendid. Good work. Thought all he had to do was collect Harvey, send the message and leave, hey? That’ll show him!” said the Lord Lieutenant. And on learning that a party, including Lymond and Sir George Douglas, had already left for the fateful appointment with Will Scott, Lord Grey collected Gideon and trotted off on the same path to enjoy the denouement.
Sir George Douglas was extremely uncomfortable.
To begin with, his elegant length was curled frondwise round the base of a holly tree whose bulk was a perfect screen, and whose eavesdrip was agony. And secondly, thus fixed and transfixed, he was being pricked, railed at, attacked and generally sacrificed to the playful god Momus.
The patch of ground at Heriot chosen by Lymond for the vigil for Will Scott had once been the kitchen garden of a large, fortified house, long since burned and bombarded and reduced to a masons’ boutique.
Among the twisted remains of medlar and apple trees, kale and gooseberries, thyme, catmint and pennyroyal, bramble, blaeberry and camomile and a bower of nettles, a select squad of Bowes’ own men lay in approximate concealment, watching the moors to the west. In the open, beside the green mud of an ancient fishpond, sat Lymond, on a block of hewn stone, with his ankles and wrists inconspicuously lashed to each other and to the block.
Although tethered like a billy goat, he had no impediment to speech. Thus suited Lymond, happily aware that for an hour or two he had never been safer. Despite almost tearful threats from Bowes, he sat amber-headed in the April sunlight, melting as the tears of the Heliades, and tore them to shreds. After a while he got quite carried away himself.
“… He and the King of Naverne
Were fair feared in the fern
Their headēs for to hide—
“—The other extremity, I see, is harder to conceal, the merry merry holly. It might, of course, help to stand up: why not stand up? No? Well, yours are the marybones: I am perfectly comfortable and capable of reciting verse until the thyme withers and the pennyroyal is debased. Give me death, but not dumbness. Let Parrot, I pray you, have lyberte to prate. And a captive audience; an attentive audience—an increasing audience. Your noble commander, no less, and—who else? Art thou Heywood, with the mad, merry wit? Good lord, no. It’s Flaw Valleys, in person.”
Lord Grey of Wilton, stalking into the clearing with a fine scorn of concealment and Gideon at his heels, had his eyes fixed on its soliloquizing centre.