Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [5]
It opened with a hissing, fairly oiled ease.
Mungo need not have worried. The lower cellar, the cavern and the long underground tunnel to the Nor’ Loch contained no contraband at all. But, because tuns of Bordeaux wine make hard rowing, all the wells of Edinburgh ran with claret next day; and on this, the eve of the English invasion, the commonality of the High Street were for an hour or two as blithe as the Gosford Close sow.
Late, the laminated sheet of the Nor’ Loch held a faint chord of laughter.
“There was a lady lov’d a hogge
Honey, quoth she
Won’t thou lie with me tonight?
Hoogh, quoth he.”
And, long since ashore with his men and his booty, Crawford of Lymond, man of wit and crooked felicities, bred to luxury and heir to a fortune, rode off serenely to Midculter to break into his new sister-in-law’s castle.
“Won’t thou lie with me tonight?
Hoogh, quoth he.”
* * *
In the Castle of Midculter, close to the River Clyde in the southwest lowlands of Scotland, the Dowager Lady Culter had reared three children of whom the youngest, Eloise, died at school in her teens. The two boys remaining were brought up variously in France and in Scotland: she had them taught Latin, French, philosophy and rhetoric, hunting, hawking, riding and archery, and the art of killing neatly with the sword. When her husband died, violently, in the field the elder boy Richard became third Baron Culter, and Francis his brother received the heir’s title of Master of Culter as well as taking name from his own lands of Lymond.
Until Richard’s marriage, Sybilla Lady Culter had lived alone at Midculter with her older son. What she thought of Lymond’s activities she did not say. She welcomed Mariotta, Richard’s new bride, with warm arms and dancing blue eyes, and today, in the late summer of 1547, had dismissed her son to his eternal local meetings and had invited the women of the neighbourhood to meet her daughter-in-law. And thus, in Richard’s absence, forty women clacked each to each on plush chairs encased by the barrel vaulting, the tapestries and the carving which made the Great Hall of Midculter famous.
Mariotta, black-haired and beautiful, walked on air decorated with compliment and envy. Richard’s mother Sybilla, small and splendid, with cornflower eyes and fair skin, effaced herself as well as she could, controlled the household machinery with half her mind and kept her own counsel about the other half.
“And how’s Will?” she said rashly to Janet, third and most formidable wife of Wat Scott of Buccleuch, and Janet, big-boned and handsome and heartily florid, thirty years younger than Buccleuch and the cleverest of a diabolically clever family, fixed an unwinking eye on the ceiling and groaned.
In Sybilla’s mind, Buccleuch’s heir by his first wife was a pleasing, red-haired child who, losing his mother at five, had been gently reared by Sir Wat’s then chaplain. Then Buccleuch had sent him to France, where he had attended Grand Collège until this year. Nevertheless, Sybilla was able to put her own accurate interpretation on Janet’s groan. “Religion or women?” asked Lady Culter expertly.
“Women!” It was a cry of despair. “Can you see Buccleuch turning a whisker about women! Not a bit of it. Moral Philosophy, that’s the trouble,” said Janet with gloomy relish. “They’ve taught poor Will moral philosophy and his father’s fit to boil.”
“It is theology then,” said Sybilla uneasily. “I suppose he might manage if he sticks like Lindsay to the vulgarities in iambics; but if he’s developing into a Calvinist or a Lutheran or an Erasmian or an Anabaptist it isn’t very healthy: look at George Wishart and the Castillians.”
“He isn’t quoting Luther. He’s quoting Aristotle and Boethius and the laws of chivalry and the dreicher speils of the Chevalier de Bayard on loyalty and the ethics of warfare. He’s so damned moral that he ought to be standing