Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [83]
Mr. Crouch, pot in hand, made to speak. Lymond forestalled him. “No. You spend your speech and waste your brain. Accept our gifts and be grateful. Either Gideon Somerville or Samuel Harvey is a douce and God-fearing man and has nothing but legitimate shock to expect from me. Whatever happens to the other he will probably deserve and would have happened most likely whether you helped or not. But I don’t want my birds flushed, Mr. Crouch. When I’ve spoken to both, you can go home.”
The prisoner was not reassured. “I want to go now,” he said starkly.
“You can,” said Lymond gently. “Oh, you can. Whenever you wish. Fragment by fragment. Drink your wine and learn gratitude. Quoi! Ce n’est pas encore beaucoup d’avoir de mon gosier retiré votre cou?”
Mr. Crouch, succumbing to force majeure, drank his wine: the Master, turning his back on him, rambled to the card table and idly fingered the scattered suits. “Blind Fortune, stumbling chance, spittle luck, false dealing—take to cards if you will, Marigold, but must you stare at me like a kitten with its dam? … Johnnie, are your gypsies all here?”
“A mile away. I smell wind later on.”
“Good. Away thou dully night. Scott, into what impurities has Turkey led you, other than the giddy vaults of gambling?”
“Impurities!” exclaimed Mat, indignant on principle.
“Moral irregularities,” said Lymond. “Diversions.”
“Oh, diversions,” said Mat, with the air of a man who understood all. “God: we’ve been that damned hard at it, we havena had a diversion since the last night at the Ostrich.”
Scott, his face still crimson, said belligerently, “I’ve never been to the Ostrich.”
The familiar, chatoyant glint was in Lymond’s eyes. “The Ostrich is in the hands of a common woman, that dwells there to receive men to folly. The question is, do we seek such madness? The answer is, we do.”
He looked from one to other of the three men, his eyes flickering. “Let us go to Paradise, where every man shall have fourscore wives, all maidens. Let us go tonight, and speir at the Monks of Bamirrinoch gif lecherie be sin.… Scott?”
Will’s eyes were bright. He nodded.
“Matthew? Yes, I’m sure. And Johnnie, who is going in any case.”
Johnnie Bullo smiled, and hissed between his teeth. “Just so.”
Scott, caught watching Lymond again, blushed scarlet. The Master addressed him thoughtfully. “Are you anxious to go? These serpents slay men, and they eat them weeping.”
Sophisticated at all costs, Scott quoted Rabelais. “But the ravens, the popinjays, the starlings, they make into poets.”
“No,” said Lymond. “The popinjays they kill.”
* * *
The four men and the gypsies reached the Ostrich Inn at nightfall in thick fog.
During the long ride, Will Scott stayed with Bullo. In the first moments, the Master’s sorrel disappeared among the hoary beasts of the gypsy troop and stayed there: bursts of muffled laughter and occasional snatches of song excoriated the ears of the other three. Turkey Mat, flesh with the flesh of his horse, rode solitary: long tail, fluid back and supine, sentient wrist. Bullo, at Scott’s side, sat as an owl might sit, listening for the folding of long grasses. Once, with the uncanny thought-sense Scott had noticed before, he said, “He’s wild tonight,” and the boy hardly realized another had spoken.
To the new Scott, the core and engrossment of his days was their central figure. Nothing of the warm vulgarities of Branxholm or the artifice of the Louvre or the ambitious, emotional expediencies of Holyrood had prepared him for the inhumanities of Lymond. To the men exposed to his rule Lymond never appeared ill: he was never tired; he was never worried, or pained, or disappointed, or passionately angry. If he rested, he did so alone; if he slept, he took good care to sleep apart. “—I sometimes doubt if he’s human,” said Will, speaking his thought aloud. “It’s probably all done with wheels.”
A scintilla in the fog was the gypsy’s smile. “He proved very human in September. I seem to recall you had a sore head as well, after the skirmish with Culter and Erskine?”
Scott’s horse halted.