Lymond reading notes 9 – Game of Kings – Part 2, The Play for Gideon Somerville
As we move into section two we have had much setting of the background and seen Lymond from a number of different angles, as well as learning more about Sybilla. Now we really get into the meat of the story, with some new characters who will be of great importance to it.
1. Removal of a Blocking Knight
We open with Richard at Branxholme, talking to a rather uncomfortable Wat Scott. The house meanwhile is in a state of juvenile chaos!
Babies bounced and abounded in the Scott household: babies with mouths round and adhesive as lampreys; babies like Pandean pipes, of diminishing size and resonant voice; babies rendering torture and catalysis among the animate, the inanimate and the comatose. The Buccleuchs themselves were totally immune.
Isn’t that a wonderful picture of the household? Dorothy is so good at giving us a visual and atmospheric image. It won’t be the last in this chapter.
Richard is not happy with Wat:
Lord Cutler said, ‘I’ve already gathered you have no intention of helping me. I wondered if, perhaps, you meant actively to hinder me instead?’
Wat is pretending to be ill to avoid having to either give agreement to the English to help them or be raided and probably burned out. He’s waiting for permission from Marie de Guise to pay Grey some lip-service but till then he has to lay low. Richard then asks for a loan of his men and dogs.
Wat reels off a list of all the major problems besetting Scotland and finishes with:
Be damned to your brother!’ said Buccleuch heatedly. ‘I’ve got my own worries.’
Richard’s “I thought perhaps you might consider me less dangerous to Will than Lymond will be.” Is submerged by Wat and Janet arguing – about Will, about children, and about her getting a hole in her shoulder.
Then into this blaring conflict Sybilla arrives, perhaps not by coincidence as Richard shows a degree of caution. Only Sybilla, beloved of everyone and with a profound charisma, is able to interrupt a Buccleuch argument in full flow. Her excuse is to get away from Agnes for a while! However we are bound to wonder if she followed Richard to forestall his talk with Wat.
We hear that Agnes was visited by her long-planned prospective husband, Arran’s son, and it didn’t go well.
‘Good lord.’ Buccleuch stared. ‘There’s nothing wrong with that lassie’s face her dowry won’t correct.’ ‘I don’t think even her dowry can drown her voice,’ said the Dowager. ‘When exercised with intent. Besides, she’s waiting for a thin man with a romantic smile named Jack: palmistry can be so embarrassing.
Sybilla ensures the conversation moves on to the Philosopher’s Stone, and Richard, finding no prospect of continuing his own conversation with Wat, gets up to leave. Sybilla on the other hand is invited to stay the night. On the way out Janet makes it plain to Richard that she doesn’t agree with Wat’s approach and wants to get Will away from Lymond even if that means Lymond is captured. That of course would also put her at odds with Sybilla. Perhaps surprisingly Richard declines her help as it would mean conspiring against Wat, which he seems too honest to do, and tells her that if she can convince Wat they can discuss it then. But Janet finishes with:
‘Och, I’ve finished discussing it,’ she said. And smacking the rump of his horse, she waved him goodbye.
which isn’t at all easy to interpret.
2. Irregular Partie Between Two Masters
At the Peel Tower Will is playing cards with Mat, and it becomes clear that Crouch has been teaching him, and has himself played with the best in England – Buskin Palmer who was hanged by the king for taking too much off him at the table, and his brother. When he mentions being in Princess Mary’s household, Johnnie appears and asks when that was and mentions Solway Moss.
Johnnie expounded. ‘The year the Scots King James died, and the small Queen was born. The year Wharton broke up the Scottish army on the Solway and took half of it prisoner to London, including Lymond. The year Lymond’s pastime was first discovered in Scotland, and the English gave him a fine manor for his pains. Fifteen forty-two.’
Johnnie has worked out what Lymond is doing – looking for one of three men – but still assumes that the treason charges are true – and calls on Mat for confirmation. As Crouch become agitated and demands to see Lymond, he arrives with his usual perfect timing. He neatly deflects and diffuses Crouch’s complaints while making it plain that Crouch won’t be going home until he’s confirmed which of the other two men is his real target.
We also find that he was aware of why Andrew Hunter acquired Crouch and how he learned of him – from the captain at Annan when Richard raids it, and that the reasons were that Hunter is living beyond his means and wants the reward for capturing Lymond, and suggests there may be a further reason that is as yet unknown.
Changing the conversation, Lymond brings up impurities, moral irregularities, diversions and when the Ostrich is mentioned Will admits he’s never been there. They set off and reach it at nightfall.
Noticeably Lymond rides with Johnnie’s gypsies, perhaps cultivating them in case he needs them later, and Mat is on his own, leaving Will and Johnnie to ride together. Johnnie observes that Lymond is “wild tonight”.
In contrast to the situation before Hume, Scott seems rather more aware of how much of a gap there is between him and Lymond – he muses on Lymond and talks aloud to Bullo:
To the men exposed to his rule Lymond never appeared ill: he was never tired; he was never worried, or pained, or disappointed, or passionately angry. If he rested, he did so alone; if he slept, he took good care to sleep apart. ‘ – I sometimes doubt if he’s human,’ said Will, speaking his thought aloud. ‘It’s probably all done with wheels.’
We hear that Scott had also been knocked unconscious in the fight with Erskine’s men and was incapacitated for four days. Johnnie tells him that Lymond was also hit but doesn’t say where he and Mat found him, though he offers to tell the full tale later when they have privacy.
There is a dream-like quality to the arrival – the Ostrich looms out of the mist with a mysterious aura, the lights throwing a weird glow before the building appears.
At the door of the Ostrich they see their hostess, Molly:
“…a monstrous, eighteen-stone shadow of a woman with a fresh, childlike face, who stretched powdered arms, calling, to Lymond.”
We hear of the legendary qualities of the place – that men about to go into battle recount stories of it. The interior of the inn is described in detail along with the copious food and drink available. Will is served by Molly (a rare event) and is rather smitten as she sizes him up. As Will eats the lovely venison, Lymond returns and tells him how Molly acquired the inn and disabuses him of any romantic notions.
A signal brings Molly with a room key and Lymond leads Will upstairs – the latter is feeling rather nervous/excited:
Where there is no custom of reticence in childhood, there is no vice of which a well-brought-up young man need be ignorant – even a young man who three months before has cherished the purest ideals. When Will Scott got to his feet, his heartbeats were behaving oddly, but he was not slow in following the Master across the jammed, leg-strewn room, up a dark stairway leading from arcade to gallery, and along a long, stifling passage railed off on one side from the room they had just left.
Inside the room a man is waiting – the Master of Maxwell!
Maxwell responds robustly to Lymond’s query about heading for Carlisle – it seems he is not overawed. In response Lymond lists a long series of people who have passed through the Ostrich recently, and why they were travelling and who they were going on to meet – a dramatic display of intelligence gathering. Maxwell responds:
‘Do you own the Ostrich? Or only a capacity for pleasing Molly?’
The blue eyes smiled. ‘A distinction without a difference.’
We learn that he was intrigued by their last talk, but we don’t immediately hear what that was about. He gives Lymond the whereabouts of Somerville and Harvey and hears that the Douglases know of it and are plotting.
Lymond brings up the topic of Maxwell’s marriage, but the latter is sceptical given his present standing with the Queen Dowager. Lymond insists that it can be improved and describes how:
In two or three weeks’ time, the Earl of Lennox is due at Carlisle, and if affairs are favourable, he’ll try another experimental march into southern Scotland.’ ‘And so …?’ ‘And so, by pure chance and natural greed, Lennox’s men might bungle the raid. The real nature of the chance being known only to the Scottish Government, acting on your advice. Lennox blames his men for the failure: the Queen knows it is due to the Master of Maxwell.’
Maxwell wonders how this does not disadvantage Lymond but is told that Lennox will pass the road to Hexham, and it’s clear that he has worked out an elaborate plan.
Lymond treats Maxwell as an equal – perhaps the first time we’ve seen that.
The important business of the day being concluded, Maxwell leaves, and Dorothy produces one of her funniest, most madcap set-pieces.
Lymond has decided on action and music and partying, and, waking Mat up by throwing a tankard at him, tells him to open a barrel of wine. Molly tells him the musicians are all drunk but he horrifies her by reminding her that there is a musician in room 1.
‘Hell!’ said Molly, and added a word which even the wives of innkeepers seldom pronounce. ‘Did I not shut the door?’
Then as Mat bring in the barrel:
Then a desolate, mammoth, mourning Troll inflated its lungs and uttered. Through the shocked air tore a stern, snoring shriek followed by another. It became a united bray; the bray a wobble; the wobble a tune. High above the gallery balustrade swam a human head, inhumanly antennaed; the cheeks plimmed, the eyes closed, the fingers leaped, and all audible hell released itself.
Never can there have been a better, funnier, more bizarre description of the Highland Bagpipes let loose on English ears!
Tammas Ban Campbell, piper to Argyll, ransomed prisoner of Pinkie now travelling north and home, stalked around the three-sided gallery of the Ostrich and gave them Baile Ioneraora so that beam roared at beam and door at door; so that glasses smashed and windows rattled and hams vibrated and fell; so that sleepers snorted and leaped awake with their dirks in their fists, sots opened bloodshot, maddened eyes, and the sober dissolved according to temperament into shocked laughter or oaths.
Baile Ioneraora is Gaelic for the town known now as Inveraray, and the melody is the same as The Campbells are Coming.
The scene is a torrent of wonderful phrases:
“…put your walking mandrake on Ben Nevis and myself on the Cheviot, and it’s still too close for my liking.”
“The best piper in Scotland: eight warblers between the bars, and eleven if you give him whisky between the second and third variation.”
‘Give us the piper, that’s all we ask. Or the pipes. But unhabble the one from the other, for God’s sake.
Lymond proposes a series of wrestling matches with the protestors – he and Mat against any of the men below. If he wins he gets one of the girls and if they win they get the piper. Needless to say the piper is in no danger of having to stop!
It is stopped only when Molly pins Lymond to the floor, and they dance and drink the night away. Will is hopelessly drunk but Lymond seems entirely fresh when he wakes him at 5am to ride back to Scotland.
The question is why Lymond acts like this, and the most likely answer is that he’s been worried about pulling off the agreement with Maxwell as so much depends on it. The subsequent antics are probably a means of relieving the tension.
3. Cross Moves by a King’s Knight
After the hi-jinks and hilarity of the Ostrich we now move to the opposite coast for an introduction to the main target of this part of the book – Gideon Somerville. He has been summoned to Norham Castle, seven miles south west of Berwick-upon-Tweed and right on the Scottish border. We learn that Gideon had been successful at court in London, had been in favour with Henry VIII and seems to have been well liked. After Henry’s death he had moved his family to Hexham.
Dorothy immediately shows him in a good light:
‘I suppose,’ said Lord Grey, coming at last to the point, ‘I suppose you’ve heard of the occurrence at Hume?’ Gideon, a compassionate man, shook his head.
We learn that George Douglas has offered to get Grey access to Will Scott, and that they know he’s with an unknown desperado who wants to find Gideon and Samuel Harvey and that he is likely to approach Gideon at his home at Flaw Valleys. Interesting that Douglas doesn’t tell them that the desperado is Lymond. Grey asks Gideon to give the man a letter from Douglas and if Scott is with him Grey’s men will capture him.
Gideon is concerned, even when Grey promises him extra men to guard him and Kate, but agrees.
We are thus set up by all three sections for intriguing possibilities in the next few chapters.