Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [183]
“The truth?” said Scott harshly. “What good will the truth do to anybody? What good has it done Christian Stewart? The only thing that will help her now is a piece of good, solid lying.” The memory of a promise came back to him. “And I’ve got the job of doing it … I suppose she’s back at Boghall?”
“No,” said Sybilla. “She takes her friendships a little more seriously than that. The last time I saw her, she was on her way to visit Sir George Douglas at Dalkeith in an effort to neutralize the effects of your little plot here.”
Scott shot to his feet. “Dalkeith!”
“Yes,” said Sybilla pleasantly. “The place the English raided on Sunday. Not a very clever thing to do under the circumstances, was it?”
* * *
In delivering Lymond at Flaw Valleys and then returning himself to Berwick, Gideon faced a round trip of something like a hundred and forty miles. It was a measure of his interest that he took it without hesitation, and a measure of his speed that he and his retinue arrived, with the outlaw, in the early afternoon of Monday.
The inevitable skirmish took place as he was changing into fresh clothes, under the amazed brown eyes of his wife. “And where,” said Kate Somerville expansively, “did you say you had put him?”
Her husband’s expression, already wary, became turgid. “In the bedroom at the end of the top passage. Under lock and—”
“Tut!” said Kate. “What are you thinking of! No silk sheets! No goose-feather mattress! And two stairs and a nasty muddy yard to cross before he can even round up the livestock, unless he starts with the mice.”
“Kate—”
“And then food. Is he choosy? We could manage stavesacre and dwale, with a little fool’s parsley and half a thorn apple, stewed, with toadstools.”
“Kate!”
“I think you’re suffering from necrosis of the brain,” said Kate, a little less passionately. “Have you told Philippa?”
Gideon nodded. “I told her he was here to be punished.”
“Oh. In that case she’s probably in the room at the end of the passage with a chabouk. Or is it locked?”
Gideon held out a key. “I must eat and go, sweet. Some of my men will take in his food and look after the room—”
“And here was I, preparing to recede into a gentle old age like Philemon and Baucis. Don’t you think you should retire again? The first retiral seems to have got mislaid. No? Well, I shall have to look after your nasty friend, but don’t blame me if he isn’t quite the same person when you get back,” said Kate Somerville.
* * *
She put off no time. With Philippa out of the way and Gideon eating, Kate set off along the top passage and, leaving her bodyguard militantly outside, unlocked the end bedroom and went in.
The room seemed empty. Nobody at the window, or on the window seat: no one in the bed; nobody before the empty grate. That left the Legacy, a chair inherited from Gideon’s family and carved by a failed student in zoomorphics. Snarling with oaken tooth and paw, the Legacy was drawn before the window, its back to the door. Kate walked firmly round it and found him.
Slack by the palsied Behemoths, hands open, head thrown back, Lymond slept. It was an uncommonly sound sleep. Stretching one finger, Kate drew aside the stained jerkin without rousing him. It was enough to tell her what she wanted to know.
Below, she confronted her husband. “Why, Gideon?”
He was obtuse. “Why what?”
“Invoke the maternal instinct precisely now. I should rather be rancorous too.”
Somerville wiped his mouth. “Scourge away. That’s what he’s here for.”
“Whatever he’s here for, he’s bleeding over Grandpa Gideon’s oak chair like a Martinmas pig,” said Kate bluntly.
There was a faint smile in Gideon’s eyes. “Not my doing. But I admit to setting a fast pace this morning. He didn’t complain.”
“Then allow me to make up for it,” said Kate. “The air is filling in a familiar way with hideous subtleties. All right. Instinct it shall be. After all, everybody always brings the old broken-down things for me to patch up: there