Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [264]
“Not precisely. She is, shall we say, a person of violent but practical enthusiasms. She has already been imprisoned twice for endangering the succession, and one of her lovers, as you may recall, died in the Tower from a surfeit of Scottish heart and English briar. No. At a guess, she wanted … a new stimulus and a new experiment. And encouraged her uncle to leash me permanently by telling him what I had found out; and even perhaps some things I hadn’t.”
Methven’s silly voice cut through the tactful silence. “And what had you found out?”
The Master’s gaze neither looked at nor avoided Sir George. “Something of his immediate plans, which later became common knowledge. I had access to rooms which should normally have been closed to me, and found them out by chance.”
“Bedrooms?” inquired the Queen’s Counsel.
The veiled eyes lifted. “Not every legal document is framed in a bedroom, my lord.” The Justice-Clerk laughed aloud.
“Well,” said Henry Lauder. “You have an estate and a beautiful lady in prospect, and her wicked uncle allows you to enjoy neither. The gift of the estate has already made your fellow Scots suspicious; your return to Scotland is finally made impossible by spreading the news among your countrymen that you were responsible not only for the disaster of Solway Moss, but for a long career of previous spying and intrigue.… Why trouble with all this fearsome plotting, Mr. Crawford? If King Henry didn’t like you, weren’t there simpler and more obvious means of getting rid of you?”
Argyll, surprisingly, said, “I can see the point of some of it. His Majesty learned just after our prisoners reached London that our King had died and Scotland was accordingly under a regency, and he was immediately bent on winning over as many leading Scots families as possible to his interests. Hence all the prisoners being taken from the Tower to better lodgings, and the offer to let the most important go free if they signed an oath of allegiance to England. It wasn’t the time for the sudden murder of a prisoner of war in his hands—even a less important one.”
“Also,” said Lymond, continuing the argument with an unbounded scholarly detachment, “he probably wanted to protect the real purveyor of secrets. If Edinburgh was becoming suspicious, he was calling off the hunt by making me scapegoat. Then, having discredited me at home and with the prisoners still remaining in London, he could dispose of me in safety.”
“And yet you survived?”
“I was taken to Calais and allowed to fall into the hands of the French. Perfectly simple.”
“And after that, the galleys?”
“Yes,” said Lymond with no trace of expression in his voice.
“Now we’re coming to it,” said Buccleuch, and shifted his bulk in his seat. “Lawyers! Dod, look at him: his een glinting like a coo with the yellows.”
The Lord Advocate’s tone was mild and of a grave delicacy.
“How can we stay indifferent to such misfortune? We have before us a man unhappy and deceived; duped by the best brains of the kingdom; enticed by an immoral woman of royal birth; kidnapped; maltreated; shackled to the starving heathen at the galley oar and beaten through the seas for two undeserving summers.
“Look at him! Weak—from the knife of his own underling; but that has no bearing. Innocent—his admitted betrayal and corruption of this young, blind woman has clearly left no stain. Dismiss from your minds the robbing and thieving and murdering of those whom until recently he led—he is virtuous. Dismiss the ruthless plotting, the devious schemes for battle and gain which we have heard about this afternoon—he is simple and vulnerable. Think, last of all, of how he has conducted himself today; of the fluent and malicious tongue from which you, as lords of the highest court in the land, have not been exempt. Does it seem to you that this drunkard, this outlaw, this wastrel son of an ill-starred family, is the man of this pitiful history? Or do you think, as I do, that it is all a pack of lies?”
The echoes died. The Lord Advocate removed his spectacles, and spoke