Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [73]
Buccleuch wriggled. His face got red, then the spaces under his hair; finally he burst into speech which lost no violence through being compressed into undertones.
“Dod, Sybilla: if you want to know, I’m in the hell of a jawboxy mess. Seymour’s Lord High Suleyman the Magnificent Grey at Norham’s been sending me polite notes ever since Will snipped his nose for him at Hume, asking when I’m coming to parley and assure them of help. It’s damned awkward. They know it was Will—how, I can’t understand, for at my last taste of him he was too blasted whaup-nosed to claim his own mother. But there it is, and if I refuse to help, they’ll burn me to the ground on the next raid. I’ve put it around that I’m ill, but short of following it up that I’m dead, I don’t know what to do next.”
The broad, capable Scott hands, with their spatulate fingers and white scar seams, gripped the balustrade and blanched, as he leaned his uneasy weight on them. “I’ll have to disown Will publicly, and hope they’ll believe I had nothing to do with Hume. I doubt they won’t, though; it looks too damned neat, right to the cartload of cutty sarks on my land at Melrose.”
He stared disconsolately at Lady Culter. “And here’s the joke. I’m not a praying man, Sybilla, but I’ve had these baw-heids at the chapel on their knees ever since he went, hoping that Will’d see he’d been a damned stupid fool, and come back. Now, if he does, I’m made to look an accomplice to the fiasco at Hume, and Grey’ll see I suffer accordingly. Whereas if he doesn’t, and I’m forced to disown him to Grey—and if word of it gets to the Queen—and if he’s captured with Lymond—”
“He’ll get the same treatment as Lymond. But not if I catch him,” said Sybilla.
Buccleuch eyed her. “Then, by God, I wouldn’t care to be in Lymond’s shoes.”
“How my sons turn out is rather my affair,” said the Dowager coolly. “And involves rather less risk, on the whole, to Richard. If you’ll co-operate.”
“By not co-operating?” Sir Wat gave a relieved bark. “It’ll give Culter a poor opinion of me, but I don’t mind. No. My dogs’ll be sick; and I’ll be sicker than the lot put together. Listen—someone’s coming.” He broke off hurriedly as light and warmth streamed in on them.
“And so,” said Sybilla placidly, “I had a long talk with him—Johnnie Bullo, his name is; a real gypsy king—and he tells me he knows how to make it.”
“Make what, Lady Culter?” It was Christian who had opened the parlour door on sounds of imminent departure from within. “The gypsies are just going.”
“Make the Philosopher’s Stone, dear,” said the Dowager, driving haphazard but triumphant into her subject. “You know, the thing that turns tin into gold, and makes frisky old gentlemen senex bis puer, and mends broken legs and all sorts of practical things.”
“It’s what we need at Branxholm,” said Sir Wat gloomily. “Janet broke another vase last week.”
For some reason this tickled both Sybilla and Christian. The Dowager was the first to recover.
“Just you wait,” she said. “I have it all from Bullo, and it all sounds remarkably well authenticated, considering. Anyway, he’s coming again to Midculter to explain it to me.”
“Good God!” said Buccleuch, to whom the Dowager was the source and fount of all astonishments. “You don’t mean you believe all that rubbish! I’ve enough of it at home with Janet; and the Lee penny never out the house.”
“All what rubbish?” said Sybilla. “You see, you don’t know yourself what you’re talking about, and neither shall I,” she added as an afterthought, “until Master Bullo has been and explained it again.”
“Well, I don’t know what you want the Philosopher’s Stone for,” said Christian. “It seems to me that as a family you’re quite indecently rich already.”
“Oh, you never know,” said the Dowager mysteriously. “Healing charms—elixirs of life—love potions—”
“What I came to ask,” said Christian, her face rather red, “was whether we might all go to the Fair—Agnes, Mariotta and myself, I mean. The trouble is—”
“The trouble is, Master Bullo won’t read our fortunes here: he hasn’t got his crystal, he says, and he