Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [276]
The Lord Advocate rose. “I think there are some people who should be shown this statement, and without much more delay,” he said. “If you’ll trust me with it.”
Lymond’s voice saying “Of course” clashed with Scott’s “No!” His hands lingered a moment longer on the papers, then he ran finger and thumb along the fold and held the document out. Lauder took it.
“I should advise you to dress, if you can. Mr. Scott will help, perhaps. It may be necessary to send for you.”
The door shut behind him. Lymond said, his long mouth twitching at the sight of Scott’s face, “You must trust somebody, Will … in spite of any repeated advice to the contrary you may hear.”
Scott muttered, avoiding his eyes, “You must have thought me the qualified king of the simple-minded.”
“If I did, I should never have allowed you to join me. Your father said as much to the Tribunal today—God, yesterday; and I can endorse it.”
“In spite of my hellish mistakes?”
“I was thinking of tonight. You made no mistake with that.”
With an enslaved eagerness, Scott asked the question Lauder had put in vain. “What will you do now?” But Lymond, stretching, caught him by the arm and forced him into a chair beside him.
“Wait a moment. It is gradually forcing itself on my consciousness that I am not to be divided into four pieces tomorrow. No appointment with Apollyon. You appear to have made a decision about my life far more arbitrary than any I made about yours.”
Scott’s voice was uncertain. “I owed you that much, at least.”
“You didn’t owe me anything,” said the Master. “There’s an unnatural conspiracy to keep me alive, that’s all. I hope to God you don’t regret it. I hope to God I don’t regret it. How the hell did you manage to thrash Palmer at cards?”
Delight rose within Scott’s soul. Not expecting Lymond to say more, and not knowing that he dared not say more, the young Buccleuch explained, while the Master dressed.
* * *
The Culters’ house in Bruce’s Close had a red roof and a motto over every window; but inside it was comfortable and convenient, with two separate bedrooms and a parlour with a wide, light window above the garden for Sybilla’s sewing.
At midnight the Dowager ordered her son and daughter-in-law to bed, promising firmly to retire. But she sat on at her window, a still shadow on the bright square of rosebushes outside, and every separate nerve in her body trembled and ached.
For five days Sybilla had launched herself and all her bountiful possessions—her brains, her charm and her money—in a single-minded bombardment of authority. Her friends and contemporaries of church and nobility, the suitors of the Court of Session, the powerful of both sexes at Court, had all felt the impact of the Dowager’s fear, and many of them tried to help because she was Sybilla, and people would lend her a needle to cobble the moon to her gates if she asked for it.
To no avail. From the start she had known that nothing could save this son’s life for her: the law recognized proof, and there was no proof. On his return from the Committee Richard had been made to repeat again and again the pattern of question and answer. They had thrashed the case out, the three of them, until they were exhausted; and she had sent her son and Mariotta to bed.
She moved, and the dark roses shivered. There was an Ewe had three lambs, and one of them was black. What of it? Sheep are commonly white: does that make white unassailable, any more than the pure light of the sun before the prism? How may a breed freshen except under mutation? How improve its whiteness except by admitting a rogue cobalt to its candid meadows? … Not that the misery had been lived through quite in vain. In all her life she had never heard Richard speak as, distressed and vehement, he had spoken to them that evening.
Sybilla looked out of the dark window. To the east, Moultrie’s Hill and the Dow Craig, with Greenside on its farther slopes; where for nine hours she had once sat and watched Davie Lindsay mock the Three Estates before the Three Estates, and the Crown