The Disorderly Knights Read Free

affianced bride of the Dauphin.
    In return, the King of France had filled Scotland with Gascon men-at-arms, Italian arquebusiers, German Landsknechts, a French general, a French ambassador and an Italian commander in French service, the last of whom was riding now at Will Scott’s left side, his Florentine English further cracked by the jolt of the ride.
    ‘The little bride shed no tears,’ said Piero Strozzi, Marshal of France, in sombre inquiry. He rode with animal grace; a man of near fifty, just recovered from a hackbut shot outside Haddington which would leave ‘one leg shorter than the other all his life. Beneath the umber skin, the basic shapes of his face were deeply plangent, denying his notoriety as a practical joker: only Leone his brother was worse. But today, riding against the muddling wind, in and out of the rain, his plumes dripping wetly from his bonnet and the black hair before his ears in wet rings, Strozzi’s theme was the bereft bride.
    ‘She has known you some weeks, it is true?’
    ‘Grizel? I’ve known her a while, Marshal. Her older sister is my father’s third wife.’
    ‘There is sympathy between you?’
    Will Scott grinned. Grizel Beaton had slapped his face four times, and apart from these four small misjudgements, they had never touched on a topic more personal than which of Buccleuch’s bastards to invite to the wedding. But he liked her fine; and she was good and broad where it would matter to future Buccleuchs, which summed up all his mind so far on the subject.
    ‘She’s a canty wee bird,’ said Will Scott now to the Marshal. ‘But plain, forbye. Couldna hold a candle, ye ken, to Lord Culter’s wife. You’ve met the Crawfords?’
    So, duly turned from discussing the bride, ‘I have met the Crawfords,’ the Marshal Piero Strozzi said. ‘The lord is most worthy and the Dowager mother enchanting. And the youngest brother Francesco is fit for my dearest brother Leone.’
    A smile twitched Sir William Scott’s mouth. As Prior of the Noble Order of the Knights Hospitallers of St John of Jerusalem and commander of the King of France’s fleet off the Barbary coast, LeoneStrozzi, however practised with infidels, was not necessarily fit for Crawford of Lymond.
    Will Scott said nothing. But he wondered why the Marshal Piero also smiled.
*
    Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch was happy, too, because he had caught the Kerrs at it again.
    All over the middle Borders their land marched with his, and he loved them as he loved the Black Death. It was a Kerr of Ferniehurst whose timely murder had sparked off the holocaust of Flodden thirty-five years ago. Thirty-two years ago, a Kerr of Cessford had been involved in a little foray led by Buccleuch; and the Kerr had got himself killed. After that, despite damnable pilgrimages on both sides and eternal vows of reconciliation, despite Buccleuch himself, like his father before him, having to take a Kerr woman to wife (she was dead), the Scott-Kerr feud had flourished.
    That it was discreetly refuelled from time to time by the English was subconsciously known to Sir Wat, but he chose to ignore his son’s hints on the subject. A number of Scottish lairds, professing the reformed faith rather than the Old Religion of the Queen Dowager, were interested in an English alliance, and not averse to traffic over the Border. Others with homes at or near the frontier itself had had to give up the costly luxury of patriotism.
    Still others, among whom the Douglases and the Kerrs could sometimes be glimpsed, were not exactly sure which nation would triumph when the smoke cleared away, and were prepared with spacious burrows in all directions. It had been a fairly safe wager for some time that Sir Walter Kerr of Cessford and Sir John Kerr of Ferniehurst, their sons, brothers and diverse relations had been selling information to the English … so safe that, after the late brush with the English at Jedburgh, the Governor of Scotland had been persuaded to place