Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [338]
‘So? Where’s Big Tam, the deil?’
The gunner looked round. His neck was black with bruising, and his face was mottled and glistening with white and red bristles. When he spat his answer, it was to Darnley, not Cochrane. ‘Where he wouldn’t have been, if you’d come when you said. I hope you have an excuse you can sleep with, you bastard.’
‘Where is he?’ said Darnley. His voice was quiet. As the fighting died, his other man gathered about him.
‘Oh, ye haven’t far to look,’ said the man. ‘Just glance over the parapet. Mind you don’t get dizzy, of course. It’s a fair distance down to the water.’ His words, cut from Aberdeen granite, occupied the space where all the drubbing and shouting and clattering had been, and then stopped, so that you could hear the sound of the river, and the jingle and snorting of horses, and the murmur of massed men in the distance.
John Stewart of Darnley dismounted, leaving the boy, and walked to the parapet, and looked over.
Three dead men hung there, swaying lackadaisically in the updraught from the river. Being the heaviest, Big Tam Cochrane had an ox harness bound round his neck, and there was still a trace of surprise on the suffused face above it. To one side of him depended his argumentative kinsman by marriage, Leithie Preston. And on his other side, his throat sealed in perpetuity by the bite of a thong, hung Will Roger.
Chapter 44
All commoun offis suld the massour zou schaw,
And by this purs the customeris ze ken.
Befor the knycht ar situat sic men,
For to this knycht as capitane of the tovne
Thai suld obeye in absens of the crovne.
LATE THAT MONDAY, trembling with fury and weakness, James, King of Scotland, was brought to the Castle of Edinburgh and there delivered to its Governor, his half-uncle Atholl. His other half-uncles also remained with him. So did his captor and escort, John Stewart, Lord Darnley, with sixty-six chief men of his train, including Maxwells and Drummonds, Muirs and Douglases of Morton, a Semple, a Crawford, a Fleming, a Wallace, a Brown and three Cochranes. And, of course, more Stewarts than anyone, including Walter, the half-brother of Avandale.
So quietly was it done that no one realised at first that the King had come back. The horses were left outside the town: only the King and his immediate circle had been mounted, and their animals had been immediately sent out. The rest of the army had already disbanded. Knollys returned to Torphichen. Some leaders—Nowie Sinclair, the Prestons—went back to their castles, taking their dead. Some had set out for their properties in the south, including Alexander Home, grandson of the bailie of Coldingham, sweetened beforehand by Huntly, who had lands down there by Gordon, of which Alex Home was now bailie for life. Others went east, to Haddington, the traditional muster-point for the region between Edinburgh and the east coast. The eastern muster, which included Archie of Berecrofts, had not, of course, been asked to set out for Lauder. Its part had still to be played.
For Tobie, the ride north was wretched, almost as the long journey from Nancy had been grim. The sick man this time was the King, who depended on Tobie, and yet recoiled from him as a traitor. Nor was it a relief, having arrived at the Castle, to relinquish his patient to Andreas, for even Adorne’s physician was tainted, in the King’s eyes, by his presence in what was a prison. By then, the King was in no doubt that his nobles, paid by England and Albany, had turned against him, and that he might end as Johndie had, dead in the care of his doctors. At present, there was no safe way of comforting him.
Leaving the Castle, the participants had been briefly thanked for their part in the stratagem, and asked to remain out of public view until morning. Colin Argyll had already gone, having taken no part in the physical delivery of the King to the Castle. So far as the outside world was concerned, the King’s other ministers had never left Edinburgh, and were innocent of any complicity. The