Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [270]
“Don’t labour the point, Richard.” It was the defendant’s voice, quick and caustic.
“—When intercepted, I was about to help my brother leave the country.”
Sensation. Lymond gave a curious grimace and stayed quiet; the Lord Justice-General sat up. “You realize, Lord Culter, that if this man is found guilty you have made yourself an accomplice to his crimes?”
Richard said briefly, “He is not guilty.”
The Lord Advocate was looking at him very hard. “Your lordship has thoroughly surprised us. I do not propose to question you about your sister, but I must ask this: as to the other accusations on this sheet—do you have any proof that they are false?”
Culter stirred uneasily. Lymond’s malicious voice spoke before he could open his mouth. “No, he hasn’t. I’m sorry to disperse the gentle and evangelical light, but even Richard can’t achieve a complete volte-face as quickly as that. All this whitewashing is intended, I gather, to protect my sister’s reputation: that’s all.”
The Lord Advocate said nothing; he simply lay back in his chair, the blue chin dropped on his chest, and stared thoughtfully at Lymond, who stared thoughtfully back. It was Argyll who said, “We really must have this clear. Do I understand Lord Culter is romancing? That he didn’t help you to escape?”
“Imagination reels,” said Lymond, “before the improbable delights of such an event. No. He was bringing me here to have me hanged, having just failed to kill me in formal combat in England. Mr. Erskine will confirm.”
Mr. Erskine, in a dour voice, confirmed, without looking at Culter, who was on his feet and choked with protests. “I think,” said the panel kindly, “that you should sit down. It makes no odds now, you know.” And after a moment, Richard did so.
An odd silence had fallen. It was late: long past time for the evening meal. They were exhausted with argument and heat and concentration and the concealed ravages of fear.
No darts had been thrown; no mines exploded; no reputations peeled of their tactful patches and splints. All was righteousness and decorum; and the rich, pliant voice of the Lord Advocate, beginning in the stillness and unreeling delicately the case against Francis Crawford.
He was clever enough not to brush again through the harsh Orcadian pastures of Bishop Reid’s imagining. He kept to his indictment—kept concisely and damningly to its severities, and made no appeal to the heart: the time for that was past. Instead, he bent his mind to weaving a fabric of steel: a case so massive, so intellectually secure, so lockfast that no man, however fluent and however gifted, should break it. Of these bright phrases, forged and concatenated, would emerge the gyves which tomorrow would snap into place. He ended very calmly.
“And so I present to you a trespasser of a kind which the law in its grace and impartiality has scarcely knowledge to deal with: a man who has plunged his kindred men into untimely death; has rent blood and limb from them; has forced apart mother and son and scythed sheer to the stubble a meadow of children, for a handful of tainted and murderous coins. A man who, nourished in this generous womb, can turn upon his mother land and hack her, deface her and betray her, deny her and spit upon her as an empty waste, a name upon a map, a race of strangers and a source of wanton exercise and plunder.
“Such a man is Crawford of Lymond: such a man this land may pray never to see again in the difficult ways of her history. I say: busy yourself no longer about him, for he is better condemned, and most harshly dead.”
The silence of his careful making followed him and lay upon the Tribunal for a stricken and pulsing space. Then at the long table Argyll moved, and the twelve Assessors stirred and sighed.
Erskine, lifting his stunned head, saw that Richard’s eyes were wide and full on his brother; but Lymond looked at nobody, the queer cornflower gaze concentrated in space. The Lord Justice-General