Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [237]
They were too close. Buccleuch saw Culter’s choice only too clearly: either to hand over his companion, or to label himself accomplice by trying an ineffectual escape.
As once before, Buccleuch filled the notorious lungs, and bellowed.
Long before Richard reached him, Lymond turned and saw what was happening. He straightened and shook the hood from his face, exposing ruffled fair hair and Culter’s stained jacket below. Then he gathered his horse and stampeded artlessly across the moor, regardless of the slick, united hoofbeats of Sir William Cockburn’s troop overtaking, surrounding and closing in on him. He made no resistance.
Buccleuch, riding after with Culter, arrived to find himself the butt of a number of bad jokes and some friendly wrangling over whether he had forfeited his prisoner by allowing him to escape. Since Richard had relapsed into utter silence, Sir Wat dealt with it brusquely, neither admitting nor denying the credit Lymond seemed to have given him; and after a bit they stopped pestering him with questions and offered pleasantly enough to travel back to Edinburgh together.
After his own men had joined him, Buccleuch asked to look at the prisoner and was directed to the rear, where Lymond was lashed flat to a horse-stretcher. He was not conscious.
Sir Wat studied him in silence before making his way back to the Cockburn brothers. He jerked his head. “What’ll happen now?”
“Oh. Well, he’s at the horn, isn’t he? It’ll be the Castle then, I dare say, for a week or two; and then a sweet short trial and a swing in New Bigging Street. Nothing surer than that.”
And so Richard, after all, escorted his young brother to Edinburgh.
2. One Loss Is Made Good
“Quant compaignons s’en vont juer
Ils n’ont pointe tou dis essouper
Cras connins ne capons rostis
Fors le terme qu’ils ont argent …”
It was so long since the Dowager had broken into song that Mariotta and her two guests were surprised. Janet grinned, and Agnes Herries, who was half asleep, blinked and said, “Is it time yet?”
“Not quite,” said Sybilla. The smallest flush under the white skin was the only sign that she was excited: she was beautifully dressed and not at all frayed in manner as was Mariotta, who showed the effects of the three newsless weeks since Tom Erskine’s return from Hexham.
At midnight, in their presence, Johnnie Bullo was to turn a pound of lead into gold. Of the four women, Janet Buccleuch was deeply interested in Sybilla’s experiment. Propping her large green velvet slippers on a footstool, she said, “Did the gypsy want a lot of gold off you for this? I hope you were careful.”
The Dowager raised candid eyes over the rims of her glasses. “Of course, dear. But the gold will have reached him only ten minutes before we do, which is just”—glancing at her enormous German clock—“about now. Shall we go?”
Mariotta, leaning over, touched Agnes Herries awake. She opened her eyes with a jerk, followed the others vaguely to the door, and then seized Mariotta in a vicelike grip. “What if he raises the devil?”
Mariotta laughed, and withdrawing her arm, put it reassuringly around the bride’s shoulders. “What if he does? Sybilla would simply exchange recipes for sulphur ointment and give him a bone for the dog. Come along …”
Outside it was cool and very dark. A wisp of straw, rolling over the cobbles in the light wind, caught the beam from the doorway and scuttled, spider-fashion, into the night; nothing else moved. Sybilla shut the big doors and in the darkness they walked over to where the small window of Johnnie Bullo’s laboratory glowed like a malign and bloodshot eye. The Dowager rapped on the pane; there was a pause; a stealthy rattle of heavy bolts, and the door to the laboratory swung open.
The heat buffeted their faces. The low, square building was lined with scarlet from the glow of the furnace, snoring hoarsely as the wind sucked at its funnel.
From floor to ceiling rose vessels and retorts and bottles, jars, pots and crucibles, matrasses and