Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [325]
A FEW DOORS away, Avandale’s voice had become very level. ‘Darnley isn’t there. The King is almost at Lauder and Darnley hasn’t arrived. What has happened? They had enough warning?’
‘Rain,’ said the Archbishop. ‘They have to come from Lochmaben. It’ll slow everything down. Gloucester too. And the guns.’
Whitelaw grunted. There was nothing to say about the guns that had not already been said. The great ordnance, thank God, was still in the Castle. But despite all they could do, Cochrane had persuaded Cathcart and the rest to take the medium artillery with them. He had designed the carriages, and fashioned the balls, and planned the trajectories, just as he had constructed the defences of Berwick. Whatever anyone said, he was going to put his work to the proof. He was going to save Berwick for the King.
The fight over the guns had been lost. As a result, their artillery was exposed in the field, instead of where it would be needed. Darnley’s absence posited an even greater disaster. The King was marching to war with a quarrelsome, incomplete army, and nothing between him and annihilation but the golden tongue of Argyll, the broad-spoken persuasion of Huntly, the short admonitions of Buchan his uncle, and James’s own understanding, if it ever dawned, of the odds now against him.
They had always known that he would hurl himself south without thinking. Given time, he would sometimes reconsider. It was thanks, one supposed, to the slowness of the guns that he had progressed initially no further than Soutra. By now, crawling to Lauder, he would be aware of the power of the English army and the sparsity of his own. And Argyll, fortified by the news from Cortachy’s courier, could give him an honourable reason for retiring. Sandy was not the traitor he seemed. In return for little more than free reinstatement Sandy would abandon the English and come back to his brother. He had said so to de Fleury in York. He had written it down.
It might be enough. Taking counsel; setting his mind to what he was being told, James might well, at his best, take the responsible action of stopping the march and electing to return to his position of strength, there to negotiate. It was what they had hoped, even before de Fleury had supplied concrete evidence that it was possible. But since a nation’s security cannot depend entirely on chance, the King’s ministers had made a further provision, these many weeks past. If the King marched, and if the English attacked on the east, the Warden of the West March would bring his men to join the King’s host. And if, having joined him, the Lord Darnley found the King’s position untenable, and the King deaf to the advice of his officials, he would return him to Edinburgh by force.
John Stewart of Darnley had agreed. He had undertaken to perform, if necessary, what was an act of high treason because he, too, was a Stewart; second cousin to both King James and Avandale; kinsman to the three royal uncles; claimant to Lennox and grandson of the first seigneur of Aubigny. Darnley would bring with him men from the greatest families of Lennox and Ayrshire and Renfrewshire. Afterwards, he and they would be sure of indemnity.
But if he did not come, who would stop the King?
‘Where is de Fleury?’ said Whitelaw. ‘Where is Adorne?’
‘You heard the courier,’ Avandale said. ‘Adorne will be here tomorrow; de Fleury cannot be long delayed. Their usefulness, we agreed long ago, lies in Nicol’s relations with Albany, and Adorne’s with the King. This still obtains, whatever happened in York. We do not wish the Burgundians to play any part