Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
That same autumn, Simon de St Pol and his father had moved to Kilmirren, and had stayed in the west ever since. The West March reached down to the Border, close to the Duke of Gloucester’s fortress at Carlisle. Gloucester had repaired the walls recently, and even through winter storms, castles such as Lochmaben and Threave could be subjected to perfunctory raids. It was not long before Simon abandoned the boredom of Kilmirren to join Henry at Threave, and supervise and improve the lad’s idea of how to manage a troop.
It did not occur to him that Henry would resist this: they faced one another in surprise and anger and, eventually, an outburst of violence that left Henry withdrawn and sullen for a week. Then Simon, forgetting, called him out on some expedition involving burning and looting that proved rather hilarious, with old goats, human and animal, running about and his father with a whip galloping whooping among them. They took a lot of booty and got drunk, and when he found his father in a barn with two girls, he just shrugged and went off and found one for himself. Henry never had any trouble with girls. He had been initiated into all that, even before he could do it himself.
And after that, it was much as it had been in Madeira. He had lost command of the Kilmirren muster, and his father had ridiculed his venture with horses, but most of the time it was good. Henry made up a band of local youths and took them on raids of his own.
In Edinburgh that April, Parliament passed the statutes necessary to put the Scottish nation on a footing of war, to counter the known resolution of England. The King’s castles and Dunbar and Lochmaben were to be provided with food and artillery, and the same was to be done in coastal castles of power north of Berwick. Towards victualling Berwick-upon-Tweed itself, the Three Estates had bound themselves to raise seven thousand marks in special taxes, one-fifth from the burghs, two-fifths from the clergy, and two-fifths from owners of land.
Colin Argyll was called to the west, where trouble, not by chance, had broken out again in the Isles. The King’s half-uncle Atholl was to sail with him. Before he left, Argyll summoned Nicholas. ‘I have to go. Do you want to come with me?’
Nicholas had paused. ‘Lord Cortachy—’
‘Seaulme can manage without you, unless all your own predictions are wrong. King Edward is still in the south. So are our envoys, with the kind of offers which should hold his in talk for quite a while. And didn’t you report that the Cardinal legate is threatening to excommunicate both Edward and James if they commit their resources to anything other than war against Turkey?’
‘So King James has been told,’ Nicholas said.
‘Therefore he will do nothing rash. Do not feel,’ said the Earl, ‘that you are required to come. I have sufficient men for my galleys. Even Kilmirren the Younger and his son, although I fancy the son will be of more use at sea than his father. It occurred to me that on such a voyage you could patch up your difference of opinion with that very beautiful youth. He stayed in your house at one time, did he not? And Mar is dead, after all.’
‘I am sorry,’ Nicholas said. ‘There is nothing I should have liked better, but I think I hold with what my lord of Avandale has been saying. We have to prepare for irrational hazards. I want to check the East March without Angus. I am not convinced that the King can restrain his impulses. There is the money. Also, the wind that will be good for