Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [234]
Gold wire twinkled. “Why Udall?” asked Palmer.
“Or any other nimble Latinist you can think of. Don’t you think they need a lingua franca, poor things?” said Kate. “And if your two thousand Germans are coming by sea, and Lord Shrewsbury with eleven thousand Englishmen from all the shires are exchanging dialects at York, and the Swiss and the Spanish and the Germans want to communicate from Haddington, throwing in a few Italian engineers for luck, you’ll have a dear little Babel all of your own.”
Lord Grey’s face was gloomy. “So will the Scots,” he said. “By all accounts. If Henry sends forty thousand more Frenchmen and the King of Denmark throws in—”
“All the more reason for linguistic action. Buchanan against Eton. You’ve been to Haddington, Sir Thomas?” asked Kate.
Palmer grinned. “We all went the day they held Parliament, and popped a good few bags of powder in while they were busy. Bowes took young Wharton under his wing: he did rather well. Between Lord Grey here and his father he was a bit low to begin with.”
“Incompetent young fellow,” said Grey vaguely; and remembered something. “By the way, sincere apologies: Gideon having to bring you that girl who escaped. Nasty business, but unavoidable. Lady Lennox could do nothing with her, I believe.”
Katherine said, “You never caught up with the other, did you?
The man who killed the messenger at Hexham?” and Grey stared moodily at Palmer. “That damned fool Wharton. The father’s worse than the son. Five minutes after the shot he sends a man to collect the body—No body. The fellow had an accomplice. One? The kind of guard my Lord Wharton had on that church, he might have had ten.”
Palmer said cheerfully, “Enterprising fellow. Was that the one who tweaked Ned Dudley’s nose at Hume?” Warned by the silence that he had only half the story he added quickly, “Look out for him if you like, my lord. Never know what you’ll come across, jogging post back and forth through the country like this.”
“I should be obliged if you would,” said Lord Grey. “But the task on hand is to get all these men safely into the fort at Haddington tomorrow. Monday the what?—the sixteenth. That’s our job.”
The point was made. Sir Thomas, butter-tooth veiled, seized a pigeon and said no more until the end of the meal.
Afterward, Gideon took Kate up to the castle ramparts, and with the Tweed running tousled and low beneath them, they studied the green fields to the north, where Palmer’s men would travel that night.
Gideon said, “It’s a dangerous subject, Kate. Better forget it. Whatever happened, we’ll never know now.”
“It doesn’t matter what happened,” said Kate. She turned and looked across the river where the grass, identical, flower-ridden and boisterous, was English grass.
She said angrily, “I don’t like this war. I don’t like the cold-blooded scheming at the beginning and the carnage at the end and the grumbling and the jealousies and the pettishness in the middle. I hate the lack of gallantry and grace; the self-seeking; the destruction of valuable people and things. I believe in danger and endeavour as a form of tempering but I reject it if this is the only shape it can take.”
There was a brightness in the flat, clean plane between her short nose and the cornea and brown cheek. Gideon, who had hardly ever seen his wife in tears, was moved and disturbed, his intuitive mind groping for the reason and the right reply. He said, gripping her shoulders, “Philippa will be all right. She’ll learn. We can explain to her.”
Katherine turned instantly and impulsively and put her own warm hands on Gideon’s. “Don’t mind me. I want to put right the world’s sorrows in a night, and it might take a night and a day. But three stout people like us can afford to bide our time.”
“If need be,” said Gideon. He looked tired, she thought; but he smiled at her. “Trust me.”
* * *
That night,