Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
Three days, and the Lord Justice General issued an order and let loose a thunderbolt. On the instructions of the Crown, he desired the prisoner, if his state permitted, to appear for questioning before a Judicial Committee of Parliament on the day before his trial.
Regardless of the tenor of their previous meeting, the boy Scott burst in on Lord Culter with the news. The brisk red hair was wild.
“It isn’t legal!” said Scott. “They can’t have an Assize without a jury, and it isn’t a meeting of the Estates. They can’t condemn him without a technical court: they can’t!”
“They won’t,” said Richard briefly. “They won’t pass sentence, but they’ll examine, and make up their minds, and force the result through Parliament the day after. You ought to be able to guess why. Lymond knows too much. He could shatter half the Government at a public hearing.”
Scott brightened. “He should insist on it. Either they let him off, or else—” At the expression on Culter’s face he broke off. “No.”
“No, indeed,” said Richard. “I really can’t think of any surer way of signing his own death warrant.… And does it matter, anyway? They’ll be out of their minds if they don’t condemn him.”
2. The Queen Moves to Her Beginning
Rumour of the hurried Assize had reached the streets by midday, and by two o’clock the Lawnmarket from the Butter Tron to St. Giles was thick with people.
By midafternoon, a further rumour spread that the prisoner, taken out through the Castle postern, was already in the Tolbooth. As this became known there was a good deal of shouting, and someone with no religious intent started up the 109th Psalm: the grave words, used ceremonially at a degradation for treason, yammered on the wind up to St. Giles’ sunny crown:
“Deus laudem meam ne tacueris.…”
Sybilla at her window in the High Street heard it and rattled on, without pausing, with what she was saying to Janet Buccleuch.
Inside the Tolbooth, the sun piped in through the coloured glass of the windows. The Assize was preparing, in a narrow room above the hall where Parliament would sit tomorrow. Twelve Assessors, drawn from each of the Three Estates and embracing the President and half the Court of Sessions, sat on three sides of a long board at one end. In the centre presided the noble and potent lord Archibald, Earl of Argyll, Lord Justice-General; the Campbell arms on his chair and the Royal arms above it.
On either side of the room, the sun striped red and blue and green the papers littering the desks of the Clerks: short Crawford and big Foulis and Lauder of St. Germains, Lord Advocate to the Queen’s Grace and member of the Governor’s Council, with his long blue chin and shrewd eyes and interminable black-hosed legs folded beneath his chair with the blunt-knuckled inconsequence of a roe deer.
The Lord Advocate had made a wager before starting with Jamie Foulis on whether Argyll was still on speaking terms with the President. He had won, and was watching the golden louis Jamie had thrown him spinning like a sequin against the black rafters when the Justiciar cleared his throat, making him take his eye off the coin so that it dropped unseen into the straw on the floor.
Lauder, catching the Clerk-Register’s ecstatic grin across the room, snorted aloud and assumed his legal face. He was, although he gave little sign of it, one of the astutest lawyers in Scotland.
“… Gathering,” Argyll was saying, skipping briefly and almost unintelligibly through the routine, “at the instance of Parliament … delated and defamed for … imprison his body and try and seek out the verity of the matter by examinations and inquisitions before the Justice … report to the Lords Commissioners of Parliament on this and on the indictment for subsequent crimes as follows …”
Henry Lauder scratched his head, running his eye over the gaily dressed twelve. Argyll. Glencairn and George Douglas, both notorious for their dealings with the English. Buccleuch.