Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [227]
Richard, his memory taken by the throat, was mute. With a bitter courage, Lymond raised his head.
“I beg you.”
I will bring him to you on his knees, and weeping, and begging aloud to be killed.
Richard, rising, turned on his heel and walked over the meadow without looking back. Around the next spur of cliff was Bryony. She blew softly at him, pleased to have company, and while he waited, he smoothed down her lustrous neck.
When he went back, the clearing was empty. It was no longer a sanctuary, he knew, but the antechamber to a solitary, a desperately wanted death.
* * *
Beneath the cocked blue sky of summer, in the jostling towns and highways, in the forts hissing with tar and hot iron, the friaries and keeps, the foreshores where salt timber rolled ashore and oxen sprayed sand into wainloads of coal and cables and cannon shot and powder; in granaries rustling with early threshing and the unlacing of tents and the graithing of blades and the polishing of gorgets; and the intent of three European nations fastened to these small acres between Berwick and the Forth—with all that, it occurred to nobody in all this busy month that history was being made.
It didn’t enter the head of Sir James Wilford, captain of English-held Haddington, that in twenty-five years someone would call his defence the most brilliant of the century. He was aware only that he was just seventeen miles from Edinburgh, and had forty-odd more and only two lines of communication between himself and the Borders; and that he had to keep in heart and health and, if possible, a state of truce—not only English but Spaniards, Germans and Italians against the malefic glitter of French arms and the shiftless shuffle of the neighbourly Scot on his patellas.
It was not in the mind of Lord Grey, riding his bones loose between town and town, insifflating the precious troops and horses, the pikes and powder and footmen, the rolls and matches and demilances and oil and flour and money, the working tools and men, men, and more men into the feverish maw of the fort. Or to Wharton, angrily denuded of the men sent to Grey, guarding a weak city and studying, whally-eyed, the ambiguous movements of the western Scots.
To the French, dropping like canescent frost on the discreet slopes about Haddington it was a small, acute campaign ordered by His Most Christian Majesty out of a fine warm regard for Scotland and a need to spit in the Protector’s other eye.
To the Germans, the Swiss, the Italians and the Spaniards who were paid in écus and knifed each other when drunk and fished in the thin streams and picked lice out of their pallets, it was money to take home or to gamble away, some easy love and some more difficult; and leisure for boasting. To the Scots it was pride and fright, a wish to break the will of England and a need to smoke the vermin from one’s little shoots and to pay the price with a hauteur that might make surrender a virtue.
The price was plain, and the Crown was ready to pay it. The Crown made its move on the day that Tom Erskine, altered and withdrawn, came back to Edinburgh from Hexham. Messengers slipped unobtrusively back and forth; Villegagne quietly left Court, and one evening four galleys of the French fleet slipped anchor at dusk and moved with ductile grace out of the Firth of Forth. The alert flickered, as it was conditioned to do, from point to point down the east coast of England; the skiffs fled about the English great ships of war and the stiff sails lay heavy on the decks, and men in the rigging strained at the recalcitrant block and the sullen, bearded ropes.
In vain. The four ships never came. They lifted their airy linen before a southwest wind and sailed out across the dark North Sea; then with four peacocks’ tails at their keels they lay over, gathering the wind from port, the boom hammering to starboard, and hissed on their way north. Then having sailed over the roof of Scotland, turned south again, on her western shore, making with mischievous triumph for Dumbarton, where the Queen