“I will bring him to you,” said Richard. “I will bring him to you on his knees, and weeping, and begging aloud to be killed.” And he went.
It was over.
Mariotta waited until the Dowager, with Christian beside her, had left for Dumbarton, and until Tom Erskine, joining arms with her husband, had ridden out of the gateway and turned south. Then she locked the door and began to pack all she owned.
* * *
The Queen was feverish, the fat wrists pounding and the red, sore limbs thrashing restlessly; the tangled red hair gummed to the pillow, to her brow and eyes.
The doctors had chosen a high, deep-walled room in Dumbarton Castle for her sickroom, with its roots in the rock and the stormy grey tides of the Clyde Estuary slapping at its base. There the child lay in a formidable four-poster nursed by her ladies, by Lady Culter and by Christian. The bedclothes were tumbled night and day, and the satin pillowcase patched and stained from the crusted lips and swollen, broken face.
On the invisible filament of this one life, the two English armies moved in to attack, one on the east coast of Scotland and one on the west. First, Lord Wharton and the Earl of Lennox left Carlisle on Sunday, the nineteenth of February, and in two days had reached Dumfries.
On that same Tuesday, Lord Grey of Wilton led an English army into Scotland from Berwick and camped for the night at Cockburnspath. By nightfall next day he had established himself and his army in the town of Haddington, less than twenty miles from Edinburgh, and was proceeding to dig himself in.
At the same time, Lord Culter’s Scottish force, driving south, discovered the route taken by Wharton and Lennox and veered to come at their flank, thus missing a spearhead of horse sent ahead by Lord Wharton under his son Harry.
Harry was tough and confident. His orders were to bypass the house of Drumlanrig, to destroy the town of Durisdeer, and to give fight only if the Douglases did.
He expected little trouble from the Douglases. Report said most of them had already fled from his way: their head, the Earl of Angus himself, was at Drumlanrig and with him, whispering in his ear and stiffening his gouty resolution, was his daughter, Margaret Lennox.
The disaster exploded in Lord Wharton’s face: Wharton, the most experienced of them all, plodding north with his foot soldiers in his son’s wake.
He was eight miles north of Dumfries when one survivor brought the news. The Douglases had not fled. They had joined up with John Maxwell in orderly ambush, and falling on Harry’s advancing horse, had smashed them to pieces. In this they were helped by the Earl of Angus and Drumlanrig himself, whose house Wharton had spared and where Margaret, ignorant of her appalling failure, must be waiting.
And further aided by one half of young Wharton’s own force of Border English and forsworn Scots who, peeling off the red cross of England, had abandoned him with a ferocious joy at the first onslaught and had joined the Douglases.
There was no time for mourning: in an hour the Scottish army might be upon him. Wharton turned from the messenger and found Lennox beside him, the fair, unreliable face whiter than his own. “Margaret!”
He had his horse gathered to go when Wharton took rough hold of his bridle. “No! I’m sorry, sir, I can’t risk your being taken hostage. The whole Scottish army lies between here and Drumlanrig. Even if you got there, your wife’d be worse off in your company than she is now in Angus’s. For God’s sake—”
He waited only to see the resolution fade from the earl’s face, and began to issue orders. It was then that he heard, unbelieving, that fighting had already taken place on his right wing. Culter, always gifted with a special intelligence in the field, had found Wharton’s outposts and advanced to strike his flank.
Maxwell’s men, pouring over the hills half an hour later, found the English troops streaming south with Culter at their heels; in minutes they had closed the gap and themselves caught the skirts of Wharton’s army. It staggered in its tracks, turned uncertainly, and willy-nilly, came to grips with the combined Scottish troops, renegades and all.
This time they fought side by side, the Maxwells and Douglases, Buccleuch and Culter, and if they were irresistible, it was partly because they despised each other and partly because they dared not lose. Wharton, even in his despairing rage, could make nothing of them. He recoiled, and recoiled again, leaving his dead and wounded where they lay, and within an hour it was nearly over, and a rider was off, wearing his exhausted horse to the hocks, to tell Carlisle of the annihilation of the whole of Lord Wharton’s army.
Tom Wharton, the Warden’s older son at Carlisle, sent the news to Lord Grey at Haddington. It told of the total overthrow of the entire company led by Lord Wharton and the Earl of Lennox, including the loss of his father and his brother Harry, and it was the death knell of the combined plan. Lord Grey dared not hesitate. Leaving a garrison to fortify the town of Haddington, he marched straight home to Berwick.
There he learned with a shrill and incredulous fury that Harry Wharton was alive; that escaping with some men from Durisdeer he had been able to rescue his father from his later sad straits and that, although much diminished both in numbers and in confidence, Lord Wharton, the Earl of Lennox, Harry and a large proportion of their troops were all happily safe at Carlisle.
What he did not learn, and what the Earl of Angus, much mystified, could have told him, was that when the Douglas returned to Drumlanrig after the fighting, his daughter Margaret Lennox had totally disappeared.
Sybilla took the news to the Queen, hesitating outside the sickroom where Mary of Guise had remained now all day. Then she gently opened the door.
The priests and the doctors had gone. Alone in the room, the Queen Mother knelt by the bedside, her cheek on the smooth coverlet. For a moment Sybilla paused; then she walked steadily to the bedside and looked.
The child had turned, and was sleeping quietly under the fresh sheets, one hand under her cheek, her breath stirring peacefully in a deep and feverless sleep.
Sybilla blew her nose with muffled energy, and touched the Queen Dowager on the shoulder.
2. But Proves to Be Covered
By sheer chance, Lord Culter’s irreverent cadet was less than fifty yards away from him when he swept down the Durisdeer road in murderous pursuit of Wharton. Lymond let him go. Except for an episode which he made memorable both for John Maxwell and Lord Wharton’s son, he took no part in the fighting, his concern at the time being solely to supervise an extramural activity on the part of Turkey Mat.
Will Scott, sitting under orders in his room, the Buke of the Howlat open on his knee, heard the party leave Crawfordmuir for Durisdeer. They came back much later, and Turkey’s voice was audible, first on the floor below him; then travelling up the stairs which passed Lymond’s room, off which his own opened. The jostling of several feet came next; they passed Lymond’s door and ascended to the third and top story, where they halted. The lock of a door clicked, and a woman’s voice said icily, “Assuming that you now feel safe, will you be good enough to unbind my eyes?” Then a door banged, the lock turned again, and the tramp of feet repassed the door and disappeared below.
In the racket from the first floor he nearly missed the soft opening and closing of the stairway door into Lymond’s room. Then the firelit walls in the adjoining room bloomed yellow in new-lit candlelight and his own door swung open. “Bored?” asked Lymond.
Scott dropped the book he had not been reading. “I heard Mat and a woman. Was that the Countess?”
“That was Margaret Douglas.” The mobile face was virginal. Lymond said, “The sweet woman doesn’t know yet who has her: I thought it would be nice to let her speculate for an hour or so. When she’s brought to me you will stay here and listen. In the dark with the door two-thirds shut. God knows why it should be left to me to educate you, but I feel in all fairness you ought to be equipped for life.” At the door he added mildly, “Enjoy yourself,” and went out.
Scott tried to read. Except for the muffled voices from the low
er stair, the tower was silent; the hills and half-mined valleys outside lay quiet in the dripping darkness. Next door, there was no movement either, although he could hear the fire crack and see the resulting flare through his own near-shut door. He had no idea what Lymond was doing. He remembered suddenly a revealing expression used at Annan, and wondered if it had been reported to Lady Lennox; and what a well-born majestically reared young woman would make of this wildcat eccentric.
When he thought the time was nearly up, he snuffed his own candles and found a place from which he could comfortably see without being seen. As an afterthought, he took off his boots. Then he settled to watch.
Matthew’s knock on the staircase door, when it came, was thunderous and his voice when it opened rolled like Pluto welcoming one of the damned. “The Countess of Lennox,” he said, and retreated, closing the door behind him.
Margaret Douglas, standing just inside the room, was cloaked to the chin and very frightened indeed. The quality of her startled Scott: the near-leonine vigour, the firm chin and big, shapely hands. Then the unexpected black eyes took on fire from the reflected light, her lips parted and she unclenched and dropped her hands. “Francis!” Few people, except perhaps those with Scott’s opportunities, could have told that the recognition had preceded the fright. “Francis!”
“Yes. Come in,” said Lymond pleasantly, coming into view. He was dressed, as Scott had hardly ever seen him, in white shirt and hose, sleek white and gold in the firelight: the effect was damascened and deliberate.
Momentarily bemused, the Countess of Lennox moved forward, her blue robe brushing the new wood of the floor, until she shared the firelight. Her hair was wet with rain; its fairness darkened. “Was I brought here by your orders? I wish you had told me. I was very frightened.”
Lymond drew out a chair for her, and waited while she sat. “You should perhaps allow yourself to be frightened now. It would be very suitable and maidenly.”
The intelligent black eyes were without guile. “It probably would. But I have a husband.”
“A rather indifferent one.” The silverpoint voice was equally bland.
“A very partial one.… At least I trust him to protect my good name,” said Margaret. So she was not ignorant of what happened at Annan. She added reflectively, “And he saved your life, once.”
“True,” said Lymond. “But then, I spared his at Annan. I’ve regretted it since. I think that, like the dolphin, he would be prettier dying.”
Margaret exclaimed gently. “Dear me: now, what have we here? Revenge or jealousy? You want me as a weapon against my husband?”
“What else should I want you for?”
Her eyes sparkled, but her voice was calm. “To insult me, perhaps?”
“No. What a low opinion of me you have,” said Lymond tenderly. “I haven’t captured you to exchange for Lennox. Not at all. I was proposing to offer you to your husband in return for your small son.”
At last, the Attic tableau exploded. “Harry!” She was on her feet. “Not my baby: no! Francis, please! That’s being vindictive beyond all sense and sanity. Even you can’t be callous enough to ask a small child to suffer for … Matthew won’t send him!”
“Of course he will. He can always have more.”
“Unless you fail to send me back.”
“Unless I keep you both.” He was irradiated with a soft cheerfulness. “But I hardly ever indulge in acts of retribution: they’re usually bad for trade. I propose to offer the child for sale to the Scottish Government, whether alive (which they might find awkward) or dead, which might be more convenient, diplomatically speaking. As a Catholic, you see, his existence threatens the Scottish throne rather more than the English one. I do hope you are not putting all your simple faith in the Protector, because I think that would be most unwise.”
The dulcet voice floated out to Scott, sitting wrathfully in hiding. So that was the scheme. And if Margaret Douglas was sent back to England, who was Lymond proposing to offer to Grey in exchange for Harvey? He felt a surge of sympathy for the Countess of Lennox.
She was saying in a numb kind of voice, “I’ll pay as much as … I’ll pay more than the Scottish Government to save the boy,” and the Master promptly agreed.
“I could get the money that way, of course; but without quite the same moral effect. It would be rather refreshing to upset the Earl of Lennox and enter the good offices of the Earl of Arran at the same stroke. Frankly, I doubt if I could resist it.”
There was a short, tortured silence.
Lady Lennox made a limp gesture with her hands, and suddenly the tears were there, blurring her picture of him before the fire, his hands loose at his sides, his head a little bent. “These things we’ve heard about you—how can this have happened in five years?”
“Cinders dressed up are still cinders. Like Petroneus, perhaps, I take pleasure in committing suicide at leisure.”
She shook her head, the tears streaking her cheek. “When you know the art of living, you don’t look for death, or half-death; you don’t hide in a hole like a chub. One accident; one reverse! You had only to force your way through it, and what mightn’t you have been?”
He shrugged, one arm along the mantelpiece. “Who can tell? One enjoys being the most debauched chub in the kingdom.”
Loosened by the headshake, her thick woven hair was falling loose across her shoulders; she had forgotten both it and her shift, glancing white through the blue cloak. Stung by his tone she said, “You blame me. You blame me for what happened.”
“Why should I? I’ve escaped the grand mal and the petit mal and even the Duke of Exeter’s daughter …”
Her hands were gripping each other hard. “We had to send you to France for your own security. You must remember. Your friends would have killed you. We had to get you away from London. I didn’t even know you were being taken—it was the King who—”
“Who arranged my convalescence in the English fortress at Calais whence, by stupefying bad luck, I fell into French hands. And none of it would have happened but for that very ill-timed dispatch.”
Margaret bit her lip. “I heard about it. The one the Scots found, that our man left by mistake. After the convent was destroyed.”
The blue eyes, unveiled, were directly on hers. “By mistake?”
“But—yes! The destroying party took your letter to follow your instructions, and when the leader was killed it was found by his body.… What else could have happened? What else did you think? There was no double-dealing on our part, I would swear to it.”
“Could you swear to your uncle’s share?”
“The King?” She looked startled. “Surely not. He could be violent, but not—”
“But not what? Was there anything he was not?” said Lymond. “Henry of England had all the virtues and all the faults, and solved the contradiction by making scapegoats and sin-eaters of half his entourage. If it suited him to discredit me between breakfast and dinner he would, like a shot from Buxted.”
He stopped as she laid impulsive hands on his arms, crushing the thick silk. “How can we know what happened, so long afterward? We can’t drag young tragedies forever through our Uves, or carry our years like enemies, as you are doing.”
Extravagantly, the fair brows lifted. “Alas, my sweet nonage. But five years of these vigorous times would remove the bloom from Lord Lennox himself.”
“And bitterness is a new thing.”
“Not at all. My natural habit, like the squirting cucumber. Any further traces of rot?”
Her gaze holding his, she let her fingers slip down his arms until, touching his hands, she felt and turned them palm upward. They lay lax in her own. Then Margaret Lennox looked down.
Scott did not hear the sound she made as, clenching her fists over the two curled hands, she carried them to her breast. “The galleys? The galleys, Francis? Your beautiful hands!”
“And my beautiful back!” he said caustically, and she released him instantly and turned away. r />
“You’re right, of course. Whatever you’re going to do, you have every right. We let you fall into the hands of the French—we betrayed your loyalty even if we did it by accident—”
“And if it wasn’t an accident?” said Lymond mildly.
She turned and faced him. “Then if the King was responsible, I am his niece. Take what revenge you want.”
Moving with exquisite care Lymond came close to Margaret Douglas for the first time of his own accord. With two pensive fingers, he released the clasp of her cloak, and it dropped, a slither of blue, to the ground. The white of her dress, lit by the fire, flowed like summer snow into the eyes. “And what about Matthew?” he said. “The very partial husband?”
Her eyes were wide. “What’s Matthew? One step to a double—perhaps a triple throne.”
“Is that all?”
“Yes. All.”
She was as pale as the silk. Scott saw Lymond’s gaze rest on her, delicately practised, just before he moved. Then he touched her, and the woman’s eyes closed. Folded with infinite care on the sweet edge between agony and delight she suffered a kiss of an expert passion which made itself lord of all the senses, of thought, and the dead fields of time. The fire blazed on Lymond’s shoulder and arm and his bent head, and Scott saw something regal in the still, white and gold figures melted into one, pliant as a painting in honey and wax.
Then Lymond raised his head, releasing her mouth, and taking the woman’s hand, drew her to the long settle by the fire. Margaret slipped to his feet.
“Come away.” Words were choking her. “Come away with me. Work for us again. The Protector will give you all you lost—your manor—your money—more than you can ever have here. This wandering exile is slow death for a man of your sort.… Come back with me!”
He drew a slow finger across her cheek. “With the game so nearly won? I’m heir to Midculter, Margaret. If things go well, my rooftree will be more impressive than any the Protector is likely to offer.”