Part 43 (1/2)

The silence of his careful making followed him and lay upon the Tribunal for a stricken and pulsing s.p.a.ce. Then at the long table Argyll moved, and the twelve a.s.sessors stirred and sighed.

Erskine, lifting his stunned head, saw that Richard's eyes were wide and full on his brother; but Lymond looked at n.o.body, the queer cornflower gaze concentrated in s.p.a.ce. The Lord Justice-General began to speak, and had to clear his throat.

”We have heard and understood you, Mr. Lauder, and have been well served by your skill and your clarity in this most distressing task today. The panel has also heard you. We now invite him to address us in his own defence on the charges so preferred against him. Mr. Crawford..

From Lymond's pale hair to his finger tips no uncomprehending muscle moved. ”I have nothing to add,” he said.

In the crowded room the atmosphere tightened as if he had shouted. ”Nothing?” exclaimed Argyll. ”You are accused of treason, sir: you have heard the gravest accusations and the gravest doubts expressed about your evidence. Have yau no excuse?.

Bare of irony, Lymond's eyes left the Justiciar and rested on his own immobile and flatly crossed hands. ”The margin is so small,” he said, ”between life and no life, fact and lie, treason and patriotism, civilization and savagery . . . If Mr. Lauder can see it, he is lucky; if you can comprehend it you have a better right to judge than I have to plead. I have nothing to add..

”If you can't tell the difference between loyalty and treason, Mr. Crawford,” said the Bishop, ”then you are certainly safer hanged..

The Master's eyes studied him. ”Why, can you?.

”As long,” said Orkney broadly, ”as I know the difference between right and wrong..

”Yes. The position is very similar. Patriotism,” said Lymond, ”like honesty is a luxury with a very high face value which is quickly pricing itself out of the spiritual market altogether..

”Feeling for one's country,” said the Lord Advocate softly, ”is not usually considered as a freestanding riddle in ethics. . .

The easy voice lifted the comment and the topic, and carried them to deeper waters. ”No. It is an emotion as well, and of course the emotion comes first. A child's home and the ways of its life are sacrosanct, perfect, inviolate to the child. Add age; add security; add experience. In time we all admit our relatives and our neighbours, ourfellow townsmen and even, perhaps, at last our fellow nationals to the threshold of tolerance. But the man living one inch beyond the boundary is an inveterate foe..

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 n.o.blest and best. A celestial compet.i.tion for the best breed of man; a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplos 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 una.s.suming clod a pa.s.sion 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 fas.h.i.+oncan this one people be brought to live in full vigour and serenity, and who, in their compa.s.sion 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 a.s.size 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 a.s.sault lay in the very bones of his face. He bowed once, to the a.s.sessors, 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 un.o.btrusive 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 s.h.i.+ps black as b.u.t.tons 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 dancett~ 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 pa.s.s and Parliament meet to p.r.o.nounce 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, hall-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 hoa.r.s.ely 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 feetof 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 eyeb.a.l.l.s like invitation cards to h.e.l.l. 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 Ia 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-cla.s.s 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 n.o.bili 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. d.a.m.n it to h.e.l.l: 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 b.u.t.ter 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. G.o.d! 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 b.l.o.o.d.y 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 s.h.i.+rt. ”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 peris.h.i.+ng shakes?.