Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [213]
Erskine heard the story five minutes later when he in turn arrived at the gate. Affairs at the wicket were in some disorder, but he made hectoring play with the vacant cover of Acheson’s dispatch, and was admitted immediately and directed to Lord Grey.
Having asked as many questions as he dared, Erskine hesitated. Both Acheson and his assailant, he now knew, had been taken to the Abbey, where the commanders were in conference. No one knew how seriously the messenger was hurt. But if the two men possessing this secret were in the Abbey, then there, clearly, he must go.
He pressed his horse slowly through the crowds and up the steep hill. His chances of coming down it again were something, he thought fleetingly, he wouldn’t care to wager money on. And the decisive factor was whether he had to assassinate one man, or two.
Through several centuries, predecessors of Tom Erskine had found a morbid attraction in the fat cows and silver plate of Hexham, with damaging results to the fabric. It cost Erskine some bluffing, some skin off his knuckles and a bruised shin, but he got inside, unseen and unmolested, and was violently relieved to find his end of the church plunged in gloom.
He was in the west nave; and while cleaving to the White Canons, he gave a passing nod to the Augustinian sense of proportion, material and intangible. About thirty yards ahead there were lights, of a sort, and the murmur of voices: the meeting, or gathering, or conference seemed to be taking place in one of the transepts. As his eyes grew used to the dark, he looked about him.
On his right, a flight of steps rose into the wall, presumably leading to the west offices of the cloister and therefore of no immediate use. But above his head, a row of lancets ran along the south wall of the nave, supporting the upper part of the wall, and with their feet firmly planted on a ledge a full yard wide.
Where staging went, a man could go. Erskine made a silent dash for the stairs, and after two twists debouched through an open door onto a dark and dizzy ledge high above the nave. Moving silently from group to group of its pillars he slipped toward the heart of the church, flattening himself against the wall as the candlelight grew stronger.
Another doorway appeared ahead. Through it, he found the wall turned at right angles. The ledge continued, and the supporting pillars, but instead of looking down into the church, the open side was sealed. Before him instead was a long, narrow tunnel, completely dark, with a glimmering of light at the end. Then he realized what was happening: the wall here turned to run along the west wall of the south transept, and the space between the columns had been hung with tapestries.
He edged his way a little along, feeling the cold stone on his right and touching the hangings on his other side with the tips of his left hand. The dim light at the end came from a stairway which spiralled both up and down. Investigating, he found that a short descent led to the corner of a broad gallery filling the end of the transept. A flight of wide, shallow steps led from the gallery to the floor of the church. He retreated up the staircase and halfway back along his ledge.
His best hiding place was here, and here probably his best view of the transept. Judging his distance, he halted and with careful fingers made a gap in the tapestried wall of his tunnel. Candlelight fell on his fingers, and animated conversation sprang to his ears with a paralyzing vigour.
Then a known voice, Lymond’s voice, beating home some fragment of rhetoric, said startlingly, “I can give you one name that you can’t give me: cuckold, Lord Lennox!”
* * *
Within the Abbey, this singular and unlooked-for capture slipped like a midsummer halcyon upon the sour and surly waters of incompatability.
Lord Wharton, exhausted with the effort of being civil to Grey, irritated by Lennox and stricken at the prospect of parting with a company of excellent horsemen whom he would probably never see again, was sunk in highly secular gloom at one end of the long, polished table.