Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [228]
The Crown had given evidence of its good faith. The last word lay with the people; and on a brilliant, wind-filled Saturday in July, the Scottish Parliament met in the Abbey outside English-occupied Haddington and gave their consent to the marriage of the Queen’s Grace their Sovereign Lady and the Dauphin of France—“provided always that the King of France keep and defend this realm and the laws and liberties thereof as his own realm, lieges and laws of the same; and as has been kept in all kings’ times of Scotland bypast.”
Will Scott was there. As soon as the processions had left and the aisles were clearing, he slipped out to the churchyard where Tom Erskine stood talking, the short fur blowing on his hat. The moment he was free, Scott caught his arm. “Any news?”
Erskine, nervously rubbing his face, gave him a nonplussed stare. “What? … Oh. No—there’s no news of either of them.”
Scott said suddenly, “I met Lady Douglas yesterday: George Douglas’s wife. She said—”
He broke off as a peer, his black hat at a rakish angle, jabbed Erskine in the back. “My God, old Slovenly Thomas interpreting: who’d have thought it? I said, if his French hasn’t improved since the Rome embassy, I said, we’re just as likely voting on a proposal to crown Archie Douglas. Eh? … See your friend Culter didn’t turn up to this one either. What’s the holdup, eh? Buried himself instead of his brother?”
Erskine said, “Looking after his own affairs, I expect,” and detached himself. To Scott he said, “What about Lady Douglas?”
The boy was watching their hilarious neighbour take himself off. “It doesn’t matter. But I thought you should know my father is going to try and trace them.”
“Buccleuch? Why not you?”
Scott flushed. “I’m supposed to stay with the army. Probation, of a sort. It would only make trouble.” He lifted his eyes to Erskine’s noncommittal face. “Damn it: why did you leave them together?”
Someone brought Erskine’s horse. He pinned the flapping foot mantle with his glove, put his foot in the stirrup and mounted. Gathering the reins, he looked down for a moment at Scott’s upturned face. “Because my name isn’t Crawford.” he said sharply. “Any more than yours is.”
* * *
It was the cavorting and immalleable wind, boiling through the rowans and sifting the junipers and baying eagerly through lutelike caves and chasms, that chivvied Lord Culter into proper thought again that night.
A snatch of spray touched his hand, and he lifted his head from his arms and was vaguely surprised by the darkness and the noise. He rolled to his knees and stood up, automatically anchoring rugs and collecting his scattered belongings. Moving stiffly he crossed to the neighbouring arbour and found and checked Bryony’s tethering and pulled her reproachful forelock. It occurred to him, the first positive thought in a wilderness of dead emotions, that there was nothing to stop him from going home.
The thought, staring at him, divided and became twenty. He hooked one arm over the mare’s neck and defied them for thirty seconds before recognizing the childishness of the impulse. Facts. He was bred to respect them: what were they?
The graceless, the dissolute, the debauched, the insolent, the exquisite Lymond was obliterated. As he intended, he had broken his brother. He had, indeed, been more merciful than he had intended.
The wind buffeted his shirt. Home. A hundred and twenty miles with the double packs behind him; a cold house in Edinburgh; his mother’s face. Midculter, and an estranged wife. Erskine, with a sharp and speculative gaze; Buccleuch’s uninhibited stare. The Court, where he would already be under censure.
The mare’s skin was warm; his fingers tightened on her rough mane. God, Francis had screamed.
Something unused and ritual at the back of Richard’s conscious mind stirred, and he stared into the buffeting darkness, quickly denying it. He assembled a chain of thought about provisions, about his route home, and about an imminent issue of jacks for his men. He thought seriously about the water