Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [172]
The captain was anxious to please, but unprepared. “I havena a fast room, Sir Wat. The dungeon’s blocked, and there’s only the cellar …”
“That’s what I mean,” said Buccleuch vindictively. “Put him in the cellar.”
The captain hesitated. “But the Master of Culter’s in the cellar.”
“I know that, you fool!” said Buccleuch. “Put him with Lymond for a night, and let’s see if he’s hare, hound or rabbit, the fool.”
Will Scott fought every plank of the way to the kitchen; he fought while they unbolted the heavy trap door in the floor, and he bit and kicked while they shoved him through it and halfway down the wooden steps which led to the cellar. Then the trap thudded shut above his head, the bolts clattered, and he was left alone with initium sapientiae and the Master of Culter.
* * *
There is nothing very jolly about being locked in a cellar with a man whom, in every possible sense, you have just stabbed in the back. As Will Scott crashed into the stair rail and heard the trap thud above him, his very thews melted with apprehension.
The cellar had been used as a storeroom. Opposite, two barred windows near the ceiling imprisoned the night sky. There was a well in the shadows on his right, and a quantity of sacks, barrels and boxes. On two of these Lymond lay stretched at ease, a solitary candle at his side.
Within the light, shapes and colours were sudden and strong: the butter-yellow head, impeccably neat, with a bag of meal under it; the fresh Hessian bandaging; the silver spark of burst points and the blue of the light cloth at shoulder and raised knee; at neck and cuff, the half inch of cambric glinting white. All that was unsightly had been removed from Lymond’s appearance.
Looking for traces of the day’s humiliations or the languor of bodily weakness, Scott found neither. With the face of a Delia Robbia angel, Lymond spoke. “In a day of gimcrack cannibalism and snivelling atrocities, we have now touched rock bottom. God send,” pursued the voice as Scott, descending, made his way to a trestle by the well, “God send that somebody else is about to flay the gristle from your inestimable backbone.”
Scott sat down. He had already had enough of physical violence. The other kind hung in the air, a raw miasma, sapping his robust and righteous anger. He said curtly, “You challenged me yourself.”
“To attack me. Not to engineer a cheap death for Turkey Mat.”
“It was his own fault. Father would have looked after him.”
“Father would have had his work cut out, after your Jove-like pyrotechnics at the convent. Don’t fancy yourself the neo-Christ of Branxholm, by the way. You weren’t saving anybody. I’m used to being taken for a cross between Gilles de Rais and a sort of international exchange in young mammals, but I draw the line somewhere.”
All the tormented emotion, the anger and fear and vexed and mauled spirit of the unfortunate Scott sprang affronted from his lips.
“I can guess the kind of names you’d like to call me,” he said with cold fury. “I betrayed you to Andrew Hunter; I tricked you into hiding in the convent; I used a knife on you—badly; my God, how ineptly—but at least I made you wince in some sort, once, however briefly. When my father delivers you to the law, I’ll have paid the debts of the cheated dead and the warped living and the wrecked lives of four women.… Can you deny it? Am I not right?”
“Right?” said Lymond. “You pathetic, maladroit nincompoop, you’re never right; but this time you can squat in your misconceptions like duck’s meat in a ditch, and let them choke you.”
Scott, viciously, was on his feet. “Go on. Explain my own motives to me. Or if you won’t explain yourself, shall I try? Someone once said you hated women, and you do, don’t you? You despise everyone—even yourself—but above all you hold women cheap …”
He got no further. “You bloody, insalubrious little fool,” said Lymond, and uncoiled like a whip, forcing Scott to retreat. “I’m not calling you names, my dear: I’m telling you facts. Today you murdered a friend of