Part 35 (2/2)

Scott said suddenly, ”I met Lady Douglas yesterday: George Douglas's wife. She said-.

He broke off as a peer, his black hat at a rakish angle, jabbed Erskine in the back. ”My G.o.d, old Slovenly Thomas interpreting:who'd have thought it? I said, if his French hasn't improved since the Rome emba.s.sy, I said, we're just as likely voting on a proposal to crown Archie Douglas. Eh? . . See your friend Culter didn't turn up to this one either. What's the holdup, eh? Buried himself instead of his brother?.

Erskine said, ”Looking after his own affairs, I expect,” and detached himself. To Scott he said, ”What about Lady Douglas?.

The boy was watching their hilarious neighbour take himself off. ”It doesn't matter. But I thought you should know my father is going to try and trace them..

”Buccleuch? Why not you?.

Scott flushed. ”I'm supposed to stay with the army. Probation, of a sort. It would only make trouble.” He lifted his eyes to Erskine's noncommittal face. ”d.a.m.n it: why did you leave them together?.

Someone brought Erskine's horse. He pinned the flapping foot mantle with his glove, put his foot in the stirrup and mounted. Gathering the reins, he looked down for a moment at Scott's upturned face. ”Because my name isn't Crawford,” he said sharply. ”Any more than yours is..

* * *It was the cavorting and immalleable wind, boiling through the rowans and sifting the junipers and baying eagerly through lutelike caves and chasms, that chivvied Lord Culter into proper thought again that night.

A s.n.a.t.c.h of spray touched his hand, and he lifted his head from his arms and was vaguely surprised by the darkness and the noise. He rolled to his knees and stood up, automatically anchoring rugs and collecting his scattered belongings. Moving stiffly he crossed to the neighbouring arbour and found and checked Bryony's tethering and pulled her reproachful forelock. It occurred to him, the first positive thought in a wilderness of dead emotions, that there was nothing to stop him from going home.

The thought, staring at him, divided and became twenty. He hooked one arm over the mare's neck and defied them for thirty seconds before recognizing the childishness of the impulse. Facts. He was bred to respect them: what were they.

The graceless, the dissolute, the debauched, the insolent, the exquisite Lymond was obliterated. As he intended, he had broken his brother. He had, indeed, been more merciful than he had intended.

The wind buffeted his s.h.i.+rt. Home. A hundred and twenty miles with the double packs behind him; a cold house in Edinburgh; his mother's face. Midculter, and an estranged wife. Erskine, with a sharp and speculative gaze; Buccleuch's uninhibited stare. The Court, where he would already be under censure.

The mare's skin was warm; his fingers tightened on her rough mane. G.o.d, Francis had screamed.

Something unused and ritual at the back of Richard's conscious mind stirred, and he stared into the buffeting darkness, quickly denymg it. He a.s.sembled a chain of thought about provisions, about his route home, and about an imminent issue of jacks for his men. He thought seriously about the water problem at Midculter and began to plan, in elaborate detail, a discussion with Gilbert about new spearheads. And all the time the stiff-jointed thing at the back of his mind was flexing its subconscious limbs and shaking its aged neck and rearing nearer and nearer his waking mind.

The wind sprang among the young trees: persecuted beyond reason an ash high above them lurched heaving to its feet and crashed beside Bryony and the mare leaped, whinnying and shaking under Richard's idle hand.

The block of sensation, held so insecurely in check, broke its bar and blundered into the forefront of his mind. It gripped him as he pulled down and soothed the mare, beyond proper a.n.a.lysis: man's infant fear of the irretrievable; a starved yearning for warmth; a childlish speck of uncluttered vision; a tight and tangled warp of reason and emotion become suddenly an obsessive compulsion.

Abandoning sense, revenge, and the role of complacent dempster and letting reason fly like a hag through the night wind, Richard Crawford struck off through the darkness, plunging over myrtle and bracken and torn boughs and boulders, between thorn and furze and blurred trees and low thickets, in the direction last taken by his brother.

Instinct, in belated command on this ultimate journey, had led Lymond into the shelter of the thickest undergrowth and the wildest bushes and the closest trees.

Using them as crutches he had gone farther than seemed humanly possible for a man in his state. Richard, after two fruitless attempts, set out a third time with a flaring brand from his fire, regardless of who might see it, and in the end found him, in a deep and unlikely forme at the foot of a meagre willow.

It was not a heroic picture. Bracken obscured it, with botched and scrabbling hands; the wind whined and ran blenching through the long gra.s.s, split by dim breakwaters of burdock and furze. Lymond himself lay in a tangled abandonment of blood and bruised greenery and torn cloth: unruly; filthy; and emphatically severed from society.

Culter rose, extinguished the light, and gathering the derelict hands, lifted his brother and carried him back to the camp.

He had worked once before, impatiently, to succour the Master. This time he brought his will to bear as well as his strength. By daylight a thin and stammering pulse was his reward. By afternoon he was able, temporarily, to let go and rest, his tired shoulders propped against the overhang and his legs splayed before him in a yellow carpet of silverweed. He watched his brother.

A remarkable face. Like the sea, it promised monts Ct merveilies:you might resent its graces and yet long to unclose its secrets. He began to look forward to the moment-the graphic, revealing moment, when a man opening his eyes on the lentils and salt, found himself greeting the living.

He was there when Lymond woke, and saw neither surprise nor relief, but a dissolving horror, altering the other's already altered face and fading in ineffectual recoil. Richard exclaimed then, and put out a hand; and Lymond flinched as if he had been struck.

Throughout the day, it continued. Throughout the day, Lymond lay motionless, the eyes opaque and open, the mind incurious, inanimate, unaware; except for the terror which sprang into being when Richard appeared.

By nightfall Richard knew that the only thing living within the other man was the memory of a fear. You choose to play G.o.d, and the Deity points out that the post is already adequately filled. During an outburst of besotted philanthropy he had redeemed Lymond, butLymond quite simply was not prepared to be rescued; and least of all by his brother.

Lord Culter was a strong, an honest and a stubborn man. He made his decision, and laying a finger on the one thread anchoring Lymond to reality, proceeded to twist it into a rope.

He talked. As his brother lay, reflecting the vacant sun in his eyes, Richard moved about him, chopping wood, cooking, cleaning, tending with steady hands. Moving and working he talked about the Midculter of his childhood; about school lessons and games and books and sporting excitements; about visits to Edinburgh and Linlithgow and Stirling and his own days in Paris; about the land and their tenants; about nurses and tutors and servants and relatives they had both known.

The empty calyx he was attacking made infinitesimal efforts to avoid him; to refuse his services; to deny his proximity; but he persevered. Hatred was life; shame was life; humiliation was life; the trivial movements Lymond was making in his extremity were life.

Richard Crawford was a very stubborn man.

He went to bed that night hoa.r.s.e but refusing to be depressed, although the next day, confronted by the same eyes and the same rejection, he was sometimes very near to giving it up.

He was unused to sustained talking: his mind balked; topics forsook him. Recent events he had forbidden himself: everything to do with the Master's own adult life; all political and national affairs. That left only the half-forgotten, virgin tracts of their common childhood. He dug, obstinately, into those sealed mines and shuttered bondhouses and in doing so dragged out days and weeks of his life hitherto quite forgotten.

That he should mention his father at all was accidental: it was years since the second baron had died, and he had hardly thought of him since. And that was surprising too, considering the part he had played in his boyhood.

”I don't fancy,” said Richard, thinking aloud, ”that he was fond of children, or even of marriage, much. But he wanted us to reflect his own physical superiority-in hunting, riding, shooting, swordplay, swimming and all the rest of it. My G.o.d, I used to lie like a Gothamite fisherman sometimes about my scores. And yet”- he paused, hands locked around knees, eyes unseeing as he groped after a new idea- ”and yet it wasn't altogether a good thing. He hadn't any other interests, and couldn't tolerate anyone who had. I remember Mother oncegot a case of new books from the stationer's, and he burned .

No. That was one incident better forgotten. At the back of his mind he could hear the two voices, his brother and his father, shouting at one another: or rather, his father shouting and Francis retorting, using the very twin of the voice, he suddenly realized, that Lymond had used to himself in an obscure wood near Annan.

Memory, once jogged, showed him other pictures. A born athlete, at ease with every kind of sport, Richard had been human enough to enjoy his father's delight in him. He was adolescent before he suspected that his younger brother was less of an effete brat than his father made out; that although he was aggressively scholarly he also moved like an acrobat. He had eloquence. He had charm. He submerged himself and his filthy tongue in music and books, and Sybilla abetted him. Why.

The answer to that had been easy, too. Apple of the baron's alcoholic eye, Richard was cut out for a mockery, a figurehead, a subst.i.tute leaking straw inconspicuously at the joints and accepting the respectful plaudits of the tenants. The steeples were being cut down so that the chimney could aspire. And Francis, of the sardonic blue eye, was without doubt a party to it.

It was a bitter discovery, and one that he had never questioned till now. It had never struck him that his brother, seeing their father with a clearer eye than his, might purposefully have turned aside from all that he stood for; might have taken a satirical pleasure in avoiding their father's approval. With Sybilla and the brilliant, worldly shadow of their grandfather behind him, he could afford to go his own way uncaring, and allow Richard his arena. Was that what had happened.

Was it? He looked with sudden, searching eyes at Lymond. The hypersensitive face gave him no answer, but there was a change of some sort: the eyes no longer reflected the sky but were half hidden by his lashes, as though there existed a thought to conceal. Richard lifted the fresh bandages he had prepared and kneeling, unfastened the old ones. The Master's mouth tightened, but he didn't recoil.

Slowly, it came. As well as instinct, there was somewhere a fragment of conscious will: Lymond's eyes recorded what they saw; and he was listening. Richard, talking like a mechanical corucrake, knew that he was listening, and yet he refused to come openly into the living world. He was refusing to fight; refusing the goad evenwhen now at the eleventh hour admitting its p.r.i.c.ks. Having come so far, Culter took a risk. He leaned over, closed both hands on the light tissue and bone of the Master's shoulders, and shook him like a puppy.

”All right: listen!” said Richard. ”I'm scunnered at was.h.i.+ng bandages. I'm sick of cooking; I'm tired of hunting; I'm fed up was.h.i.+ng your ears and combing your hair like a b.l.o.o.d.y nursery maid. Suppose you make the effort now..

It brought him his answer. A frail and pa.s.sionate anger flickered through the other man's eyes; and weakly but distinctly Lymond spoke. ”You can't force me to live..

”No. But I can force you to think..

”You fought for Christian Stewart's good name. Why won't you fight for your own?.

His brother's voice made a mockery of the words. ”My good name?.

”Or Mariotta's, then?.

The fficker of animation died. Lymond said helplessly, ”No! You won't get me to Edinburgh .. . even for that. I won't go; I can'tOh, G.o.d! I can't, now.

To his surprise, Richard found himself shouting. ”Edinburgh! Who mentioned Edinburgh? If I object to playing apothecary in private, I'm d.a.m.ned sure I'm not going to trip about with hot towels in public..

Lymond said something, from which only the word ”trial” emerged clearly. Lord Culter used three adjectives to qualify the same word, and p.r.o.nounced flatly: ”You're not going for trial. You'll travel to Leith, and from there get out of the country. All you have to do is to work at your renovation until you can trust your feet on either side of a horse.~~It was much too sudden, he saw, for a tired mind to grasp. Richard leaned forward, one hand on either side of his brother's young, irresolute face, and said slowly and clearly, ”Listen. You're not going to Edinburgh. You're not going to prison, or the gallows. I'm here to help you. You're going to be free..

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