Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [26]
A man’s foot, lying in his path, proved to be attached to a body, and the body to an English cloak. He bent, gripped and rolled it over. Among a wealth of impressive detail there appeared a young man’s profile, splendidly unconscious. “Whoops, cock and the devil!” said Simon Bogle breathlessly and pounced, like divine Calypso, on his prey.
He reached the postern with his burden, dispensing pulses of excitement and bog smells as his mistress opened it from the inside; and as he explained, Christian Stewart knelt beside their captive in her garden, her dark red hair fallen forward, her blind eyes resigned.
What to Sym was an English magnifico, ripe for ransom, took, bearlike, a different shape under the hypertactile fingers—the shape of an unconscious boy, with a dirty wound, raised and sticky, in the short hair over the nape. She drew together the shirt cords thoughtfully and rose.
“Um. Well, you’ve hooked a twenty-pounder this time, my lad, by the feel of his clothes.… If I were married or promised to that young gentleman I’d sell the lead off the roof to ransom him back. Unless he’s a Spaniard, do you think?”
“Not with that hair, m’lady. Maybe,” said Sym with a sort of agonized calm, “maybe it’s the Protector Somerset? Or Lord Grey?”
“Och, Sym, he’s too young,” said Christian. “Although in a way it’s a pity he’s not, because, Sym my lad: what are you going to do about Hugh?”
“Oh, cock!” said Sym, his excitement checked. “Right enough. Hugh’s in an awful bad temper about the English.”
“Hugh’s bad temper takes practical forms,” said Christian thoughtfully. “Ransom or no ransom, your gentleman will find himself in multiple array on the wall spikes if Hugh sets eyes on him.”
Sym devoted some thought to this. “Of course, we can’t write for ransom anyway until he wakes up and says who he is.”
“No.”
“And by that time, Hugh might be feeling more like himself.”
“I find the resemblance to himself at the present moment quite startling,” said Christian. “But never mind. Go on.”
“So,” said Sym hurriedly, “if we got him up the privy stairs and put him into Jamie’s room, no one need know. All that wing’s empty except for me, and I could look after him. Until he says who he is … and the window’s too high to let him escape and the door could be lockit.”
Christian said slowly, “We could, I suppose, certainly …”
“And if he’s nobody,” said Sym fairly, “we can just hand him over to Hugh.”
“In which event,” said Christian, “he will certainly become nobody in record time. All right. I agree.”
* * *
To carry the prisoner within, to strip, wash and bed him, to surround him with hot bricks in socks and light a fire to heat cock-a-leeky and milk and honey sneaked from the buttery took Sym, borne on the wings of simple cupidity, less time than bedding a child.
Christian, pulled by outside necessity, set aside ten minutes to examine his handiwork and used the time to relax, hands clasped, on a chair by the bedside while Sym, a cudgel beside him, bestowed himself hopefully on the window seat.
Blessed silence, and the slow dissolving of the nagging images of the day into something near dreams. Flurried movements of the big fire, to her left. Silk, pricking her right hand as the bed curtains stirred in an eddy. A rustle from Sym’s feet in the rushes. A voice far below in the courtyard, crying something she could not quite catch. A creak from the bed.
Another.
A languid stir of the bedclothes.
It was, thought Christian, fully awake and gripped with laughter, like attending a birth. Were they wrong and he was Scottish, a purebred orthodox achievement with full honours: all well?
There was a thin crackle of pillow-feather; a stifled expletive;