Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [274]
It was a losing hand. “My game, I think,” said Will Scott.
The welter of congratulations, of back-slapping and draughts of flat beer and mounting noise hardly penetrated his brain; even when Palmer himself, after upending a pint of ale over his own head and shoulders with thunderous curses, broke into an equal percussion of laughter and embraced him like a son. Scott sat like a marmorean and gently smiling Buddha, the disputed paper safely clutched in his hand, and when he could be heard, spoke mildly. “You can have back all your other stuff if you like. This is all I wanted.”
Surging up, Palmer elbowed his way forcefully to the window and stood with his back to it, flexing his beefy shoulders till the muscles flowed. “What a game. God! What a game. I’ve played in every county in England and up and down France and in and out of Clinton’s boats, but I’ve never met the man who could read my mind like you did. Never. I sat like a bloody plant and you read me as if my brains were thumbing signals from my ears. Where’d you pick it up?”
Scott was hauling on his shirt. “I was taught,” he said invisibly, “by …”
Palmer swept up a fistful of linen and jerked. “What?”
Like the rising sun, Scott’s head reappeared, still talking. “I was taught by a fellow called Jonathan Crouch.”
Sir Thomas’s arms dropped like felled boughs. “An Englishman?”
“Yes.”
“With a wife called Ellen and a tongue with the perishing shakes?”
“Yes.”
“I taught that man to play tarocco!” yelled Sir Thomas.
“Yes, I know,” said Will Scott.
* * *
An hour later he was in Lymond’s room.
The Master was difficult to waken. Under the boy’s insistent fingers he stirred at length, and his weighted lids lifted a little. After a moment he recognized him and said “Scott!” in a voice thickened with opiates. Then his eye caught a movement behind the boy and he turned his head. “… And Mr. Lauder too, I see.”
The lawyer, his clothes rumpled and his hair on end, bowed and shut the door on inquisitive guards. Scott didn’t look around. Instead, he held out the paper with Samuel Harvey’s statement, the superscription lit by the bedside tallow. “It’s Samuel Harvey’s confession,” the boy said. “He made it to Christian at Haddington when he was dying, and it was taken down by their priest. It frees you from every taint of treason.”
The Master’s fingers touched the folded papers, lingering on the broken seal, and delicately flattened them. Scott, watching his downcast eyes, visualized the pages as he had seen them an hour ago, when before his witnesses he had studied his prize.
… summoned from the Princess Mary’s household and taken before the King. Essential to mislead the enemy as to the identity of the spy … Convenient presence of the Scotchman Crawford … Letter to his friends in Scotland already purloined … Forgery affixed and taken north with me …
And the last sentences.
I learned afterwards that, ironically enough, the spy for whom all this trouble was taken died on his next visit to London. Of the others implicated, I have given my word not to mention them, and I do not see that I need do so, since it does not affect the substance of what happened. I am not ashamed of what I did: I obeyed orders in a justifiable act against the enemy.
Although he had reached the last page, the Master did not immediately look up. Scott was glad when at length he spoke. “So she did get her proofs.”
“No one knows what went wrong,” said the boy. “Either she was given the unwritten sheets franked and folded by mistake, or it was a deliberate deception: perhaps Harvey came to regret what he had done. The priest doesn’t know.”
Lymond turned his head, searching the bright, sea-blue eyes under the gaudy thatch. “And you: where did you get it?”
“Sir Thomas Palmer is Harvey’s cousin. I found that out from Lady Douglas after she was released from Haddington. She told me as well that they were keeping Harvey’s belongings for Palmer when he next came north.”
“… And?”
“And when he did come