Recently I was idly musing on the way that Dorothy could make a minor character into a vital part of the storyline far more effectively than most writers. Sometimes it’s done very subtly, you may not even like the character, but they turn out to have a pivotal role.
Take for instance our famously long-winded storyteller Jonathan Crouch – I wonder how many people found him tiresome and boring the first time they read Game of Kings. Even despite some of Dorothy’s descriptions of him, such as the memorable
Mr. Crouch, wittily obese like a middle-aged titmouse, sat enthroned on his stomach, giving tongue. Incidents of his boyhood surged to cataclysmic peaks of pointlessness. Episodes from his career in the Princess Mary’s household explored tedium to its petrified core.
However his kind heart is demonstrated well by his attempts to stand up for Dandy Hunter against his fearsome and bad-tempered mother. I love the little drops of humour that she slips in
Mr. Crouch (for once) did not feel competent to answer.
The short fight between the black-masked Lymond and Hunter also bears re-reading for the way she inserts the most unlikely and extravagant description
“a fine stool splintered, its prowling leopards bifurcated”
yet without losing the pace and tension of the encounter.
The next time we see him is watching a game of cards at one of Lymond’s hideouts, there is an easily missed hint at Will Scott’s having improved due to Crouch’s coaching, and he begins to describe Buskin Palmer and his brother’s skills at cardplay when he’s interupted by the arriving Johnnie Bullo, who asks about his time in Princess Mary’s household, and puts some details on the reasons for Crouch’s current detention. Lymond arrives and we are swept into one of his monologues extolling the benefits of Crouch’s situation, and he won’t be allowed to leave until Harvey and Somerville have been interviewed. The cards are soon forgotten and then we have news of the delights of The Ostrich, where we will be completely diverted by many interesting and sometimes hilarious events.
That’s the last we see of Crouch – rather less than we tend to remember. But we will hear his name one more time.
Also in the Game of Kings we have another minor character, Henry Lauder – the Lord Advocate. We see a little more of him than of Crouch, and in a more dramatic situation, but he’s still a minor character. But again he plays a crucial role. A man totally immersed in the intricacies of the law, he loves a challenge and in Lymond he finds a formidable one such as he has never encountered before.
He bore no grudges: the exercise of his wits against a quick and able man was the finest excitement he knew.
An expert orator, he creates his case carefully and accurately while Lymond, weary with illness from his wounds at Hexham, explains the laberynthine complexity of his actions throughout the story and before. They are well-matched, and Lauder recognises it with admiration.
“That,” said Henry Lauder, closing his spectacles and throwing his pen in the wastepaper basket, “is a brain. If I were ten years younger and a lassie, I’d woo him myself.”
The more recent accusations against Lymond are gradually weakened, but the earlier ones; of the treason apparently demonstrated by the acceptance of a grand house from Henry VIII, of the storage of gunpowder which would kill Eloise, and the revealing of that gunpowder to the English – which are backed up by the forged letter – are forcefully marshalled by Lauder into a case that cannot be defeated by Lymond’s eloquence, especially when his dead sister’s honour is threatened and he protects it at all costs.
Dorothy weaves the court hearing with a very different scene – Will Scott is at the castle playing Tarocco for possession of the documents that will clear Lymond of treason. Playing, brilliantly, against a man called Palmer – Buskin’s brother Sir Thomas, and cousin of the now dead Samuel Harvey. At the climax, exhausted with fatigue he makes a bold and inspired play and wins. Sir Thomas, having lost but enjoyed the battle tremendously, and extolling his opponent’s skill, asks where he picked up his knowledge.
“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.
The connection is complete; the crucial role of a minor character perfectly fulfilled. Without him the story would be so much less satisfactory or convincing. How many writers, in their first book, would have thought of that?
And Lauder is mixed in to this as well. He accompanies Will to the Tolbooth where Lymond is being held, and Lymond gives the confession of Samuel Harvey into his safe-keeping against Will’s protest.
“You must trust somebody, Will, in spite of any repeated advice to the contrary you may hear.” He recognises that Lauder’s loyalty is to the truth and to Scotland.
As Lauder says later to Marie de Guise
“Modified regrets,” said the Lord Advocate. “I love Mr. Crawford like a son, but I wouldn’t have missed that examination.”
Lauder and Palmer are shown to be strikingly similar in a way. Both have now lost their respective games that day, but both enjoyed the battle above all else and are big enough men to accept both aspects and be happy about them.
Of course there is one other relatively “minor character” whose actions have led to this point – though I can hardly bear to call her that. Without Christian’s bravery and her hearing of Harvey’s confession, none of this would have possible. She has gone and there are still five more books to go, but no-one who has read her death scene will ever forget it or her.