Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [227]
‘There’s my place in the Canongate,’ Tobie said. ‘You bastard. You meant me to say that.’
‘You would have said it anyway,’ Nicholas said. ‘But if you mean it, could we do it now, while he’s like this? A horse-litter so far, then a handcart with a few people around it. Cochrane, if you can get him, would disguise it. It’ll be dark. Andreas can go to warn Clémence. Then Avandale will have to know, and the King. You’ll need protection. Perhaps Preston’s men can stay till you get some. And, of course, Robin and Kathi are in the next house. Perhaps Wodman could come down to stay with them.’
‘Or Lang Bessie,’ said Tobie dryly. ‘I have to tell you, I wouldn’t mind some bought-in diversion for Johndie, if he’s to stay till the French envoy goes. And where after that?’
‘I was thinking of the Knights Hospitaller of St John,’ Nicholas said. ‘But I don’t think Johndie’s rich enough.’
‘YOU’RE GOING where?’ Gelis said. Jodi had gone back to Cadzow, after waiting in vain for his father to dance or walk tightropes.
Later, she said, ‘Don’t you think Tobie and Clémence will manage without you? They’ve had a lot of experience. You might have harmed Mar, in Craigmillar, without knowing it.’
He said, ‘That’s why I stopped. I can soothe him, but I can’t keep his attention long enough to do anything with it. It’s as if he has his head full of crickets, and he can only capture a thought when they’re quiet.’
Gelis said, ‘If he were an ordinary person, it wouldn’t matter.’
And Nicholas said, ‘He struck the King. If he were an ordinary person, he would be dead.’
BECAUSE OF THE weather, the French King’s emissary stayed ten more days. Being, like Monypenny, a Scotsman converted to France, he took the chance to see a few kinsmen and fellow graduates, and presented himself, in a well-mannered way, at all the entertainments belatedly devised for him. These were adequate, but less than remarkable, since the excellent de Fleury (at the King’s urgent behest) was absent on business, and Will Roger with him.
This at least was true: they were both on a healthy régime in the Canongate, being sustained by Tobie’s wife while helping to keep John of Mar out of sight. Occasionally they would cross the yard to spend a short interregnum with Robin, testing one another’s wit and eating less healthy food sneaked in by Kathi. These sessions usually ended with music, and when they returned to their duty, Nicholas sometimes found himself continuing to argue across Johndie Mar’s bed, on the other side of which Whistle Willie, instead of soothing harp music, would begin to produce angry bits of lined paper, upon which questionable progressions stood in challenge among batteries of even more questionable rests, dug into the page, as if ready to fire.
But that was at the beginning, before Mar fully emerged from his strange, drowsing coma. In fact, music itself was the best antidote; better than the board games, the card games, the dice; the singing and reading which followed. But even music could not succeed when, very soon, their prisoner began to rebel. While the French envoy still remained, Mar demanded to see him and the King. Refused, he smashed and ripped his way through every article in the room. Soon, if left alone for a moment, he would overturn the brazier, or fling the lamps into his pillows, or continuously bang his own head on the door.
Thinking, with Tobie, that confinement itself was the problem, Nicholas arranged for Wodman and Cochrane to arrive with a guard, and devised secret forays at night: a sail, a ride down to Leith, an evening in Sinclair’s big house next the Cowgate with Betha, his familiar Betha in the room. From everything, with disbelieving anger, Mar tried to escape; and again, a man died at his hand. It was not the fear of confinement, it was the loss of free will that he found intolerable. The doctors conferred. Their next message, of the daily bulletins sent to the Castle, was different in content. The King’s brother’s health