Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [64]
Sybilla sighed. “Don’t say a word. I can guess. The news of Lymond’s challenge is being shrieked from the chimney tops.”
Sir Andrew had the grace to look uncomfortable. “I’m sorry, Lady Culter. But the crowd have got to know that your sons are to compete—”
“Stuff and nonsense,” said the Dowager irritably. “How can they, with one of them at the horn?”
“They know that,” said Christian from the fireplace. “It’s not a shooting match they’re expecting. It’s an assassination.”
“It’s no use, my dear,” said Sybilla. “We are face to face, like poor Janet Beaton, with a severe case of Moral Philosophy, and there is nothing we can do about it.”
Lord Culter crossed to the settle and bending down, kissed his mother on the hand and on the cheek. “It’ll be over in an hour,” he said. “Don’t be afraid. I’ll come back, if only to teach you the proper meaning of Moral Philosophy.”
The door closed behind them all.
* * *
“Well, I must say,” said Lady Herries definitely, and loudly enough to turn several interested heads, “if I were married to Lady Culter, I shouldn’t let her spend the whole afternoon at the games alone.”
“Thank you very much,” said Tom Erskine, grinning at Mariotta, who sat on his other side.
She smiled politely back, and Mr. Erskine’s soul moaned within him. Reduced, singlehanded, to coping with so much potential gunpowder, he felt himself, like the bird which cleans crocodiles’ teeth, assailed by hideous doubts.
Privately, he agreed with the brat. He couldn’t blame the Dowager for taking her own measures to keep Richard away, but then, she didn’t know how public the thing had become. Neither did the two girls beside him; and the Herries child, ignorant of the challenge as well, insisted on fretting at the subject like a bitch at the spit. Exiled from his own group of friends by his female company and unwilling, in any case, to listen to his neighbours sharpening their wits at Richard’s expense, he wished heartily he were elsewhere. A Lindsay won the butt shooting and his annoyance increased.
Had he but known it, Mariotta too was battling with an acid frustration. The girl was pretty, rich and wearing new clothes. Today, sitting under streaming banners, with peers and pageantry around her, the green grass in front and the castle soaring above, was her first public appearance in Stirling since her wedding. And it was Tom Erskine, not Richard, who sat beside her and supplied the endless introductions. It was all exactly as she had insisted and devastatingly flat.
It was flat when the procession of contestants wound down the hill, flags and livery mincing in the sun, musicians playing apoplectically against the wind. When the Queen and the Governor had made a brief appearance among the royal benches. When the tilting was at its best, with deal splinters flying among the spectators; when one of the wrestlers broke an arm.
Then they were pulling arrows out of straw and targets, and clearing the way for a vociferous, red and white centipede, which turned out to be the 120-foot pole and its rigging for the last of the contests: the Papingo Shoot.
“Come along,” said Tom, getting to his feet. “This is where we move back.”
“Why?” said Agnes. “Oh no, Mr. Erskine: we must see the Papingo first.”
“Back,” said Tom firmly. “Unless you want a hatful of arrows. Sixty yards’ clearance for spectators: that’s the rule. Look! There’s the parrot in a wicker cage: see it? They’ll take it out and tie it to a crossbar on top of the pole before they hoist it.”
At this precise moment, to Tom Erskine’s heartfelt delight, reinforcing troops arrived in the person of Sir Andrew Hunter, looking not unlike an uncommonly ruffled parrot himself after a stormy passage through the crowd.
He exchanged greetings. “Papingo shoots! If you haven’t the slashed style to begin with, you’re certainly wearing it by the end, and be damned to the Continental rules—I thought you might want to compete,” he explained to Erskine.