Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [204]
“I’d prefer to take a nice, quiet journey to Edinburgh and stand my trial. Think how deliciously prolonged it would all be.”
The flat grey eyes were unmoved. “You’ll fight,” said Richard without emotion, and jerked his head. Preceded by Lymond and the rest of his men, he left the room.
Kate saw them go, her brown face stiff with trouble, and then turned back into her bedroom. For a moment she watched the kneeling man, and then bending over him, touched his shoulder. “Mr. Erskine. Please come away.”
For a moment nothing happened. Then he raised a face curiously blurred, as if the subcutaneous fat had melted and recongealed in his grief. He said thickly, “It’s all right.… How did it happen?”
She pulled a chair toward him and he sat, while she told her story. At the end there was a pause, and then he said with difficulty, “I wondered … I couldn’t quite understand why she did it.”
Kate said with care, “She would help anybody, I think: wasn’t that so? And then—you’ve all condemned him pretty thoroughly as a blackguard, haven’t you?”
“What else is he?”
“Well,” said Kate. “I’m not one of the simple kind who spend a jolly time romping on Olympus with the object of becoming a little, leering star at the end. I never met the girl before today: I don’t know what their past relations have been. But I can say that he spoke of your Lady Christian with nothing but respect. By her desire I was with them both till she died, and I should be ashamed to think of guilt or offence in anything they said. And more than that. It was you I was to tell of her regrets, and to you I was to give her love.”
He got up slowly, a man not incapable of a moment of insight. But he said only, “Thank you. I’m glad you were with her,” and walked out, without looking back.
Kate smoothed the crumpled sheets with gentle fingers, and spoke aloud. “He was very nearly good enough for you, that one,” she said; and drawing the yellow curtains, shut out the sun.
* * *
Since he was quite a young man, Gideon Somerville had grown used to the role of bystander. Other men—less intelligent, shallower men—plunged into a tidal race of action, conflict, argument and sinewy bravado. But within Gideon something shrank from pressing his intangible opinions, his doubt-ridden intellect and humane heart on the destinies of others as helpless as himself. He knew the ache of indecision too well.
Today, brought to disturbing acquaintance with new minds, he weighed them up, watching with his clear eyes, and tacitly stepped aside. There was no tangle here that he or any stranger could undo. Flaw Valleys was no prison. His staff could break out if he incited them: he could send a man to Hexham for help if he tried; but he had no wish to try. He asked quietly that his wife shouldn’t be asked to be present; he made sure that Philippa wasn’t left unwatched or frightened; and he brought to Lord Culter a pair of matched rapiers and two daggers.
As the weapons arrived, Tom Erskine came into the hall and took charge.
The fact that he did so sobered them all. In a year he had become used to command: his father, after all, was within the most intimate circle of the Court; his grandfather was Archibald, second Duke of Argyll; his grandmother and his sister had borne sons to two kings. He came now into the room, collected everyone’s attention and said quietly, “Richard: this is a warning. This man is a prisoner of the Crown and has to answer to the Crown for his crimes. To do what you mean to do demands strong cause. Do you have it?”
“You ask me that? Yes. Of course I have.”
“To kill this man in a private house for a private quarrel in foreign territory may lead you to be charged with his murder. Could you refute that?”
“Yes,” said Richard. “As you very well know. At this moment he’s carrying papers that’d mean the end of us as a nation and very likely the death of the Queen if they reached Hexham.”
Lymond, who had been staring out of one of the tall windows and drumming with his finger tips on the shutter, came to life and spun around. “That isn’t true!