Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [38]
He brushed the questions aside. “It wasn’t difficult—it should have been more so: the guard is wretched. I came by the hill path, and I had your password. There again … I don’t mind being a lame duck, but the pond you’ve put me into has a kingdom in it, my dear. By all means let’s play guessing games. ‘Will you hide me, Yes, par foi! Shall I be found out? Not through me!’—and all the rest of it; but not with your life, or the child’s: and think what happened to Eve, at that …
“Good God,” he said, coming to a stop. “I appear to be giving you a miserable nagging for risking your life and reputation for me. Look to me as Wat did to the worm, and relieve my conscience.”
She made no attempt either to answer or to argue with him. “Is your head quite better?”
To her relief, he accepted the change of subject. “Quite healed, thanks to you. I fall asleep sometimes rather a lot—as demonstrated—that’s all.” He hesitated; then said, “How do you get back?”
She showed him a whistle at her girdle. “I blow from the shore, and a boat comes. Then Lady Culter or Mariotta will meet me.” She smiled. “We’re a crowded household.”
He said, “The Culters. Of course. Who else—Buccleuch?”
She shook her head. “In Stirling. Tom Erskine had to tell him that—” She stopped.
“What?”
She said, “Oh, well. It’s common gossip now. His oldest boy Will has joined forces with—”
“—The God of the Flies, the Lord of the Dunghill—I know,” he said. “How did he take it?”
“Buccleuch? Terribly shocked, and grieved, and remorseful, I think. He felt he’s driven him off in a fit of temper.”
“I expect he should have thought of that in the first place,” he said with unexpected asperity, and she heard him get to his feet. “My dear lady, they’ll wonder what’s become of you. Did Erskine really tell you about Crouch?”
She told him, rising with the help of his arm in its coarse monk’s robe. “Crouch is Sir George Douglas’s prisoner.”
“Douglas has him!” There was a thoughtful silence.
“Does that help?” she said tentatively.
“Yes, of course it helps. Very much.” He appeared to be in a difficulty. “Yes … I have been postponing … Lady Christian, when we last met you were unthinkably kind and generous—for no kind of thanks that I remember making. I swore to myself not to involve you further. Then when I got your message I was irresponsible enough to come here after all. But at least you shan’t be in the dark. You shall hear—now—who I am, and if you want to call the guard, I shan’t try to escape this time.”
“No!” she exclaimed. “I don’t want to know!”
There was, for the first time, a weary distaste in his voice. “But you require to know—you must see that. This secret—the Queen’s hiding place—”
“Have you betrayed it? Will you betray it?”
“No.”
“Then leave me ignorant,” said Christian. “What would make matters easier for your conscience might make them insupportable for mine. I prefer to be selfish. God knows I’ve been wrong—politically, legally, conventionally and every other way—in judgments before. But these always seemed to me the more irrelevant aspects of human decency.… You are at least Scottish, I think?”
“Yes.”
“—And in trouble. Well, I’m human,” said Christian. “I don’t want conscience money in the form of secrets: not just now, thank you. But the day you genuinely want help, I’ll be proud to have your confidence. Till then, show your thanks, if you wish to, by letting me have news of you sometimes.”
The man was silent. Then he said lightly, “I can say naught but Hoy gee ho!—words that belong to the cart and the plough. Your confidence is fully misplaced this time, but I imagine you suspected that all along.… Tell me: would you know again the other voice you heard in the cave?”
She nodded.