Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [231]
“All right: listen!” said Richard. “I’m scunnered at washing bandages. I’m sick of cooking; I’m tired of hunting; I’m fed up washing your ears and combing your hair like a bloody nursery maid. Suppose you make the effort now.”
It brought him his answer. A frail and passionate anger flickered through the other man’s eyes; and weakly but distinctly Lymond spoke. “You can’t force me to live.”
“No. But I can force you to think.”
“—No.”
“You fought for Christian Stewart’s good name. Why won’t you fight for your own?”
His brother’s voice made a mockery of the words. “My good name?”
“Or Mariotta’s, then?”
The flicker of animation died. Lymond said helplessly, “No! You won’t get me to Edinburgh … even for that. I won’t go; I can’t … Oh, God! I can’t, now.”
To his surprise, Richard found himself shouting. “Edinburgh! Who mentioned Edinburgh? If I object to playing apothecary in private, I’m damned sure I’m not going to trip about with hot towels in public.”
Lymond said something, from which only the word “trial” emerged clearly. Lord Culter used three adjectives to qualify the same word, and pronounced flatly: “You’re not going for trial. You’ll travel to Leith, and from there get out of the country. All you have to do is to work at your renovation until you can trust your feet on either side of a horse.”
It was much too sudden, he saw, for a tired mind to grasp. Richard leaned forward, one hand on either side of his brother’s young, irresolute face, and said slowly and clearly, “Listen. You’re not going to Edinburgh. You’re not going to prison, or the gallows. I’m here to help you. You’re going to be free.”
For the second time in a few days, Richard Crawford had made a momentous decision purely on impulse. It made him feel uneasy, the prey of dark and atavistic caprice. But on thinking it over, more or less all night, he found that he regretted nothing.
The odd thing was that Lymond believed him without question. The next day, although catastrophically weak, he replied slowly and sensibly to Richard’s necessary questions. Moved for the first time to imagine how it felt to exchange an oblivion so passionately wanted for such an extremity of defencelessness, Culter dealt with him wisely.
As the days passed, his sense of time perished. Lymond, however spent, was never less than scrupulous, unaffected, undemanding. Avoiding only the recent past, they ranged in their talk over the widest fields. Richard was impressed by his brother’s grasp of affairs. He was well-informed, not at the level of ambassadorial junketings and court levées, but as the product of shrewd observation over the battlefields and spyholds of half Europe.
He spoke without embarrassment of such episodes in his life, but with discretion. Once, when Richard, seizing on a point, began to develop it with uncharacteristic excitement, Lymond himself interrupted with an anecdote so helplessly funny as well as so ribald that Culter was surprised into a shout of laughter and forgot, until afterward, the original issue.
Later, staring up into the night sky, Culter said, “If only you’d come to us after you left Lennox, instead of …” Instead of foundering in self-pity. He could hardly say that.
Lymond flushed. “Instead of surviving to bellow like a barghest?” It was his only reference to the other night, and Richard was caught without a rejoinder, but after the briefest pause, Lymond himself went on. “But I did come back. To my kinsmen I will truly, praying them to help me in my necessity.… I thought you knew. I came to Midculter from Dumbarton in ’44—fully au prodigal son, puffing excuses