Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [82]
Will Scott reached it just before him. “Where are you off to?”
“I demand,” said Mr. Crouch, “to see the Master of Culter, or whatever he calls himself. I find his whole treatment of me intolerable, and I intend to tell him so.”
“Lymond isn’t here,” said Will. With dreamlike punctiliousness the door beside them opened and white fog swam and curdled about them. A shadow, beaded and plateresque, spoke. “Ring the bells backwards: on his cue, he is here. Who wants me?”
Mr. Crouch peered and was rewarded with a study, sfumato, of unmistakable hands ungloving themselves deftly. Then the door closed and Lymond became wholly visible, embracing Scott and Crouch in the heavy, unpleasant regard. “Well?”
For a moment the Englishman’s heart failed him. Then he said stoutly, “I demand some satisfaction from you, sir. Four weeks have passed since I left Ballaggan in your company, and no effort has been made to restore me to my home. Had I stayed with Sir Andrew I could expect to be ransomed and back with my Ellen a month before this.”
“I doubt it,” said the Master. He threw the gloves on a chair and took an alepot from a tray hurriedly brought him. “I am disappointed in you, Mr. Crouch. Here you are in our Paestum, warm, fed and rent free, and with a face like cheese rennet. Are your companions dull? Surely you can educate them? Are they poor conversationalists? Then edify them: they should make princely listeners. Do they have little skill at cards? Then ruin them: you have my permission. It is really time,” said Lymond, “that you were developing some sense of social responsibility.” And he walked to the fire and seated himself, his eyes sliding over Matthew and Johnnie and the scattered cards. Will Scott sat down near him. Mr. Crouch, affronted and unhappy, stood stiff-legged before the fire. He began: “If I had stayed at Ballaggan—”
The Master, stretching in a leisurely way, looked up at his prisoner. “The ass with the voice of Stentor,” he remarked. “That was all you were to Sir Andrew, I regret to tell you. The cheese in the mousetrap, Mr. Crouch.”
Will Scott suddenly found his tongue. “A trap to catch you, sir?”
Lymond clicked down his tankard on the table beside him as a fresh one approached. “Who at Annan knew we were asking about our friend here?”
“The captain at the gate, I suppose, who let us in?” said Scott, remembering.
“Who let us in and suffered accordingly. When the English got out of Annan and my dear brother got in, the captain was left to breathe his last. He did so, I fancy, into Sir Andrew Hunter’s ear.”
“—And guessing you had an interest in Crouch, Sir Andrew set about getting hold of him in order to take you … but,” said Scott, working out the problem with some care, “why keep it to himself in that case?”
“It’s not difficult to imagine,” said Lymond dryly. “First, Sir Andrew is a young man living considerably above his means; second, I have a price of a thousand crowns on my head; and third—” He paused, and Scott saw his eyes were cold. “The third reason,” said Lymond slowly, “is still open to conjecture. In any case: the ensuing flight of fancy has cost friend Hunter a broken head and Mr. Crouch—I see—a cold in the head and an unhappy lapse in good manners.”
“Now look here,” said Mr. Crouch, too riled to be afraid. “I’ve had about enough of this. I was taken a prisoner of war, all right and proper, and I’ve got the right to be exchanged or ransomed back, as soon as may be, according to the law on both sides. You talk,” said Jonathan heatedly, “as if it was a privilege to be shut in a damned, filthy—”
“But it is.” Lymond uncurled and rose; with a long index finger he pressed the titmouse into his own seat and closed his protesting fingers around the second mug of beer. “But it is. Such a study you will never meet again. Here we are, our beards smugly shaven, prolixt, corrupt and perpetuall. You have come until the grisly land of mirknes, and with reasonable luck you may leave it yet. And that, Mr. Crouch, is the greatest