Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [266]
He was right, and the grin he exchanged with his audience did nothing to help. “Mine, boys! Any more beer, while I choose me prize? That’s a good belt, Mr. Scott?”
Scott’s chest tightened. Until one or other of them had nothing more to barter … that was the length of the game; and they were so evenly matched that their damned belongings might be passing to and fro for weeks—unless he succumbed and lost all. And the stipulation was that Samuel Harvey’s papers were to be Palmer’s final stake.
The thought of it sickened him with wrath and frustration. After all they’d gone through—after what the Dowager had suffered—after Christian’s death—after the fool he had made of himself twenty times over—no one should present this prize under his nose and snatch it back like a toy from a kitten. He stopped shuffling and flung down the cards with a crack. “My deal.”
Palmer winked. “He thinks he’s going to win this one.”
“I’m going to win them all,” said Will Scott. “I’m going to have the nails out of your boots before I’ve done with you, and if you’ve any pins holding up your breeks you’d best watch them, because I’ll have them skint off the superior Sassenach dowp o’ ye before another day dawns.”
And he began to deal.
* * *
“So here,” said the Lord Advocate, “is the truth at last. I cannot say I expected it. Your confession does you credit, Mr. Crawford. Quum infirmi sumus, optimi sumus, I see.” Lauder was aware, blissfully, beyond doubt, of the success of his onslaught. He was within Lymond’s guard, and the passport was the name of Lymond’s sister.
So he quoted Latin and Lymond, breaking painfully from his numb cataphract, retaliated. “The credit is entirely yours. Quod purpura non potest, saccus potest, Mr. Lauder. But I prefer my truth flat and not concamerate, even with the most dulcet spring of famous rhetoric in spate beneath. The notes were mine. But they were written for Scots, not Englishmen to read. Not for a manor or a woman or the combined keys of Tucker and Schertz’s treasure houses, in spite of your character reading, would I—”
“Harm a woman?” suggested the lawyer gently.
Buccleuch’s grunt reached them all. “You can be a damned fool over women without wanting to blow up fourteen lassies.”
Lauder said, “Mr. Crawford’s tamperings with Christian Stewart were more than those of a damned fool, I should have thought. She also died, remember.”
Argyll contributed. “In any case, Sir Walter, the information about the convent in this document was prefaced by three pages of detailed news about Scottish plans and some explicit references to previous reports to the English Privy Council. It is clearly absurd to imply that any of this was intended for Scotland and not for England.”
“I have been trying,” said Lymond with a deep breath, “to explain. The first three pages of that letter are a forgery, based no doubt on the genuine spy’s report sent to Henry. The letter about the gunpowder is real enough. I hid the powder in my sister’s convent when it was partly wrecked and abandoned after an earlier raid. The man who helped me was killed at Solway: no one else knew of it, and it looked as if I might be kept in London for some time.
“I knew the Government needed the powder, and I was nervous in case the nuns might come to harm if they returned. So I wrote a letter in London and had it taken to the Master of Erskine who was being released to go back to Scotland. I was allowed no personal contact with other prisoners.”
At the high table, Buccleuch’s eyes met those of Tom Erskine. He said, “Robert died at Pinkie.”
“In any case, he never received it,” said Lymond quietly. “I discovered that later. It was intercepted, the superscription cut off and the whole made a tailpiece of the other report, which was rewritten in my