The Game of Kings (79 page)

He laced his long fingers and raised them, his gaze resting on the exposed palms. “Patriotism is a fine hothouse for maggots. It breeds intolerance; it forces a spindle-legged, spurious riot of colour.… A man of only moderate powers enjoys the special sanction of purpose, the sense of ceremony; the echo of mysterious, lost and royal things; a trace of the broad, plain childish virtues of myth and legend and ballad. He wants advancement—what simpler way is there? He’s tired of the little seasons and looks for movement and change and an edge of peril and excitement; he enjoys the flowering of small talents lost in the dry courses of daily life. For all these reasons, men at least once in their lives move the finger which will take them to battle for their country.…

“Patriotism,” said Lymond again. “It’s an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land. Patriotism; loyalty; a true conviction that of all the troubled and striving world, the soil of one’s fathers is noblest and best. A celestial competition for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature and bigoted intolerance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power—”

Into the silence, the Master spoke gently. “These are not patriots but martyrs, dying in cheerful self-interest as the Christians died in the pleasant conviction of grace, leaving their example by chance to brood beneath the water and rise, miraculously, to refresh the centuries. The cry is raised: Our land is glorious under the sun. I have a need to believe it, they say. It is a virtue to believe it; and therefore I shall wring from this unassuming clod a passion and a power and a selflessness that otherwise would be laid unquickened in the grave.”

With the unfettered freedom of his voice, with the disciplined and friendly ardours of his mind, he made it plain where he was leading them.

“And who shall say they are wrong?” said Lymond. “There are those who will always cleave to the living country, and who with their uprooted imaginations might well make of it an instrument for good. Is it quite beyond us in this land? Is there no one will take up this priceless thing and say, Here is a nation, with such a soul; with such talents; with these failings and this native worth? In what fashion
can this one people be brought to live in full vigour and serenity, and who, in their compassion and wisdom, will take it and lead it into the path?”

For two, for three, for four seconds, the silence continued. Then Lauder, an expression of pure joy on his face, let out a long sigh; Argyll himself drew a deep breath, and Erskine, dragging his eyes from the quiet chair, found Richard staring at his brother with the privacies of his stubborn spirit exposed, unheeding, on his face.

For a mighty moment Argyll faced Lymond, conjecture and curiosity and a certain sharp respect informing the pallid Campbell features. Then he said, “I understand that you have said something you felt required saying at this time, and that you are not moved to argue and dispute over the complexities of the personal charges which have been put before us today. I am not sure that you are wrong; but this is not the place nor the time to reply to you, nor am I sure that I or any man present could do so—” He paused.

“We have been shown the public interpretation of a remarkable case: a series of events borne forcibly to their close by a strong and unusual personality. Mr. Lauder has given us one reading of its character. He would, I think, be the first to admit that he has not, patently, shown us the whole man and that, whatever the true reading may be, Mr. Crawford, we may know that it is not simple, or obvious, or in any way commonplace.

“We have listened to the evidence most carefully. Most of the charges referring to crimes since 1542 are to my mind much weakened by what we have heard, and would be difficult to sustain. The original accusation however still stands, and the evidence has in no way been shaken by any argument or proof offered by the panel.

“We shall consider these things, however, and tomorrow this court will make its recommendation to the Three Estates, before whom you shall appear. It is this decision you must fear and face, and I warn you now to prepare yourself for it.”

It was as near a warning of doom as the Assize could achieve. Lymond was already standing to receive it, and there was no doubt that he understood what he was being told: the stamp of the day’s assault lay in the very bones of his face. He bowed once, to the Assessors, and again, surprisingly, to the benches which held Erskine and his brother; then, flanked by his guards, he moved quietly to the door.

Neither Lauder nor the judges, nor the silent ranks of the witnesses remembered Will Scott.

*  *  *

A pretence of quiet had fallen on the night.

About the basin of the Tyne, small fires ringed Haddington: the boots of men clicked on the walls of the besieged town and padded in the trenches outside; and the unobtrusive gnawing of pick and mattock betrayed the pioneers still at work.

The river wound its way dimly to the coast; and the estuary, flat and moon-bright, with small ships black as buttons on its surface, lay at the bottom of the sky and rolled in the east-by-east wind which with spare and racking fingers was withdrawing the coasts from the English fleet.

Edinburgh, grimly warded, lay inside her walls, bedevilled by the shadows of her hills, her crag and tail a black and fishy emblem above the apologetic stench of the Nor’ Loch. The moon copied on the cobbles the profile of all the new, high houses: the thatched gables and uncertain slates and the dancetté roofs; and the gutters ran in and out of the shadows like pied and silvery eels.

As always, there were lights at the ports; and tonight there were lights as well at Holyrood, and at Mary of Guise’s palace on Castle Hill. Farther down the slope another candle shone in an upper window at the Tolbooth: behind it Lymond lay, drugged into sleep, with a guard outside his locked door until the night should pass and Parliament meet to pronounce his doom. In the Culters’ house in the High Street his family also waited, and the tapers burned all night.

They burned also at the Castle, where light and heat reeled in mortal embrace in the prisoners’ room. The ceiling, low and plastered, pressed down the strata of exhausted air, stale with old beer and sweating bodies. There was no room left to stand and no air to inhale, but the light beat down on a swaying corymb of heads, and shone on necks craning with a nervous, avid tension like beasts at a water hole.

At the centre sat Will Scott and Sir Thomas Palmer, half-naked: sunburnt thews glistening under multiple lights and sweat slithering down the tough cord of their spines.

For maybe an hour now, Palmer’s string of jocularities and pithy memoirs had stopped, and he was breathing hoarsely into the cards, eyes intent and chin set in three trim folds against his chest. Beside his chair, topped by a bundle of clothes, lay a good half of Scott’s belongings. Beside Scott, kicked into a disorderly tangle by the eager feet
of the onlookers, was every article presently owned by Tommy Palmer except one: his cousin’s statement.

Scott was too tired to think. Often before he had played the night through, ending wild-eyed and unshaven and ravenously hungry and going on to perform prodigies of nuisance-making in his father’s wake. But against Palmer he needed more than a flair: he needed nerve and watchfulness and weblike concentration, with an instinct for bluff, and an inspiration to know when to call it.

He ignored the chaffing of his enthusiastic audience; he refused to be upset by the games he lost and by Palmer’s unworried bonhomie. He played on doggedly with his red hair sticking in cowlicks to his brow and stared at the tarots until they glimmered in his eyeballs like invitation cards
to
hell. He knew that it was dark, that the inquiry was over and, from Erskine standing now at his side, that it had gone against Lymond. He had no idea of the time.

Palmer was preparing his sequences. He did it slowly, as if the feel of the cards gave him pleasure. “My pretty atous,” he said, and admired them, his broad fingers sprawled across the painted backs.

Scott looked at his own hand, and the tarots’ sleek, Egyptian heads with ancient divination in their eyes stared back, warming their painted hands at a world of flesh. His feet were on le chemin royal de la vie and the thin travesties in his hands this time were real: the traitor and the hanged man, death and the fool. Their avid fingers were real, and the scent of an evil nostalgia. He closed the cards abruptly and held them closed until his brain cleared.

He had a good hand, but not a first-class one; and he suspected Palmer’s was better. There was one way he might improve on it: by calling on luck. He had the World and the Bateleur in his hand. He could challenge Palmer for the Fool; if he didn’t have it, his two tarrochi nobili would bring him five points extra and almost certainly the game. It had to. Each article redeemed by Palmer cost him another game to win it back. If he lost this game he had to play a minimum of two more and win both. And he doubted if he had a reserve of mental energy for even one.

It was very quiet. Scott looked at the cards again. Palmer, breathing heavily, had the beginning of a smile compressing his stubbled chins.

“Qui ne l’a,” said Scott, and Palmer’s gaze, arrested, narrowed and shot to meet his. “Qui ne l’a? Well? Have you got one?”

Palmer scratched his nose. He grunted, and the silence moved down on the bruised and foundered men like a wine press.

For as long as he dared, Palmer tested Scott’s nerve. Then slowly he shook his big head. “No. Damn it to hell: I have not.”

Will moved his hands very slowly: red hands like Buccleuch’s. The tarots, throttled and limp, dropped to their places on the table: sullen; maudlin; sulkily protesting the laughterless starvation of a paper world. There was a moment’s pause, then Palmer moved, and his tarots ran like butter from corner to corner of the table.

It was a losing hand. “My game, I think,” said Will Scott.

The welter of congratulations, of back-slapping and draughts of flat beer and mounting noise hardly penetrated his brain; even when Palmer himself, after upending a pint of ale over his own head and shoulders with thunderous curses, broke into an equal percussion of laughter and embraced him like a son. Scott sat like a marmorean and gently smiling Buddha, the disputed paper safely clutched in his hand, and when he could be heard, spoke mildly. “You can have back all your other stuff if you like. This is all I wanted.”

Surging up, Palmer elbowed his way forcefully to the window and stood with his back to it, flexing his beefy shoulders till the muscles flowed. “What a game. God! What a game. I’ve played in every county in England and up and down France and in and out of Clinton’s boats, but I’ve never met the man who could read my mind like you did. Never. I sat like a bloody plant and you read me as if my brains were thumbing signals from my ears. Where’d you pick it up?”

Scott was hauling on his shirt. “I was taught,” he said invisibly, “by …”

Palmer swept up a fistful of linen and jerked. “What?”

Like the rising sun, Scott’s head reappeared, still talking. “I was taught by a fellow called Jonathan Crouch.”

Sir Thomas’s arms dropped like felled boughs. “An Englishman?”

“Yes.”

“With a wife called Ellen and a tongue with the perishing shakes?”

“Yes.”

“I taught that man to play tarocco!” yelled Sir Thomas.

“Yes, I know,” said Will Scott.

*  *  *

An hour later he was in Lymond’s room.

The Master was difficult to waken. Under the boy’s insistent fingers
he stirred at length, and his weighted lids lifted a little. After a moment he recognized him and said “Scott!” in a voice thickened with opiates. Then his eye caught a movement behind the boy and he turned his head. “… And Mr. Lauder too, I see.”

The lawyer, his clothes rumpled and his hair on end, bowed and shut the door on inquisitive guards. Scott didn’t look around. Instead, he held out the paper with Samuel Harvey’s statement, the superscription lit by the bedside tallow. “It’s Samuel Harvey’s confession,” the boy said. “He made it to Christian at Haddington when he was dying, and it was taken down by their priest. It frees you from every taint of treason.”

The Master’s fingers touched the folded papers, lingering on the broken seal, and delicately flattened them. Scott, watching his downcast eyes, visualized the pages as he had seen them an hour ago, when before his witnesses he had studied his prize.

And the last sentences.

Although he had reached the last page, the Master did not immediately look up. Scott was glad when at length he spoke. “So she did get her proofs.”

“No one knows what went wrong,” said the boy. “Either she was given the unwritten sheets franked and folded by mistake, or it was a deliberate deception: perhaps Harvey came to regret what he had done. The priest doesn’t know.”

Lymond turned his head, searching the bright, sea-blue eyes under the gaudy thatch. “And you: where did you get it?”

“Sir Thomas Palmer is Harvey’s cousin. I found that out from Lady Douglas after she was released from Haddington. She told me
as well that they were keeping Harvey’s belongings for Palmer when he next came north.”

“… And?”

“And when he did come north, Father captured him,” said Scott, assailed with unforeseen embarrassments. “Palmer’s at the Castle now, and they also have the friar who wrote it out—I found that out later. I made them all witness the contents too, so that they could …”