Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [39]
“Good,” he said. “Yes, I shall keep in touch. Not as often as I should like, but certainly more than I ought by all the tenets you quoted.” They were almost out of the shelter of the box hedges, and he stopped and took her hand, as if examining it. “What in God’s name are you going by?” he said. “Instinct? Intuition?”
“Common sense. Which describes your case as fortunae telum, non culpae.”
He answered, bleakly, in the same language. “Heu! The darts which make me suffer are my own. Common sense can be a poor guide and an uncertain surgeon. Better—much better—be foolish, like me. God clip you close,” he said, and was gone.
Christian walked to the shore and there blew a nerve-racking blast on the whistle.
IV
Several Moves by a Knight
A Knyght ought to be wise, liberall, trewe, stronge and full of mercy and pite and kepar of the peple and of the lawe.… And therefore behoveth hym to be wyse and well advised, for some tyme arte, craft and engyne is more worth than strengthe or hardynes … for otherwhyte hit happeth that whan the prynce of the batayll affieth and trusteth in his hardynes and strength, And wole not use wysedom and engyne for to renne upon his enemyes, he is vaynquyshid and his peple slayn.
1. Mishap to a Queening Pawn
ON SUNDAY, the day after the affair at Lake of Menteith, Lord Culter was also taking aquatic exercise of a kind which all but turned his epithalamics into elegies.
Mariotta, it is certain, was not alone in finding her husband baffling. Whatever his thoughts about being separated from his wife after three weeks of marriage, Richard kept them to himself and applied his undeniable ability to work.
Under his remote, laconic leadership, the Culter men spent an enlivening week, racing through the night after Wharton, harrying his outposts and nibbling his tail as he recoiled on Carlisle. Then, changing with equal aplomb to the politician’s bonnet, Lord Culter set about taping and testing the mood of the southwestern districts which had been the theatre of Wharton’s operations, and still lay open to foray and seduction from the south.
The English had left garrisons at Castlemilk and Langholm. These, with his small force, he could not touch; neither could he do a great deal at Dumfries or Lochmaben, or with those unlucky citizens—“assured Scots”—who lived nearest the shadow of Carlisle and had in sheer self-preservation to buy immunity with promises, and even carry them out sometimes.
But with those nineteen hundred who had promised help for England in August he had surprising success, and when he turned back north for Midculter on Friday, September 23rd, his train was slightly out of hand with high spirits and very little damaged; and he left behind him a number of impressed Johnstones, Armstrongs, Elliots and Carruthers.
Halfway home, he remembered a promise, and sending on most of his men to disperse to their homes, turned aside at Mollinburn with six horsemen to ride through the Lowthers to Morton.
On Sunday afternoon, the party he was expecting came in from Blairquhan, and he left Morton on the Sanquhar road to take the Mennock Pass north. With him rode the Baroness Herries, his six men and two women servants.
Agnes Herries was thirteen years old, inexpressibly rich, and not very pretty. In spite of two years in the Culter household acquiring, supposedly, polish and panache, she still had a loud and energetic voice, poor skin and a passion for romans idylliques. Even Sybilla, soul of charity and tolerance, had mentioned to the girl’s grandfather that the child had regrettable taste; adding inaccurately that it came no doubt from the late Lord Herries her father, and not from her mother who had thrown over the joys of widowhood for a well-endowed marriage.
Grandfather Kennedy of Blairquhan, who was waiting with ill-concealed impatience for Agnes’s two younger sisters to qualify also for Lady Culter’s hospitality, had said rapidly that nevertheless she was a dear child and a pleasure about the house. He had then, mindful of his responsibilities, suggested that Lady Culter should take