"Dunnett, Dorothy - The Game of Kings" - читать интересную книгу автора (Dunnett Dorothy)

King's French widow, Mary of Guise, was sleepless too over the feared attack,
for the redheaded baby Queen for whom Arran governed was her daughter. And
England's purpose was to force a betrothal between the child Queen Mary and the
boy King Edward, aged nine, and to abduct the four-year-old fiancee if chance
offered. The burned thatch, the ruined stonework, the blackened face of Holyrood
Palace showed where already, in other years, invading armies from England had
made their point, but not their capture.
Few civic cares troubled Mungo Tennant, awaiting his cargo, except that the
ceaseless renewi of war against England made a watch at the gates much too
stringent; and the total defeat by England thirty-four years since at Flodden
had caused high walls to be flung around Edinburgh which were damnably
inopportune for a smuggler. And for Crawford of Lymond, now parting the flat
waters of the Nor' Loch like an oriflamme in the wake of the boat. For where a
smuggler's load could pierce a city's defences, so could an outlawed rebel,
whose life would be forfeit if caught.
Ahead, the boat scraped on mud and was lifted silently shoreward. The rowers
unloaded. Burdened feet trod on grass, crossed a garden, encompassed an
obstacle, and were silent within the underground shaft leading to the cellar
below the cellar in Mungo's house. The swimmer, collared with duckweed,
grounded, shook himself, and unseen followed gently into, and out of the same
house. Crawford of Lymond was in Edinburgh.
Once there, it was simple. In a small room in the High Street he changed fast
into sober, smothering clothes and was fed two months' news, in voracious
detail, by those serving him. ILIL~ And so the Governor's expecting the English
in three weeks and is fair flittering


about like a hen with its throat cut. . . . You're gey wet," said the spokesman.
"I," said Lymond, in the voice unmistakably his which honeyed his most lethal
thoughts, ILLI am a narwhal looking for my virgin. I have sucked up the sea like
Charybdis and failing other entertainment will spew it three times daily, for a
fee. Tell me again, precisely, what you have just said about Mungo Tennant."
They told him, and received their orders, and then he left, pausing on the
threshold to pin the dark cloak about his chin. ILLShy,~~ said Lymond with
simplicity, aLas a dogtooth violet." And he was gone.

In his tall house in Gosford Close with the boar's head in chief over the
lintel, Mungo Tennant, wealthy and respectable burgher, had invited a neighbour
and his friend to call. They sat on carved chairs, with their feet on a
Kurdistan carpet, ate their way through capon and quails, chickens, pigeons and
strawberries, cherries, apples and warden pears, and noticed none of these
things, nor even the hour, being at grips with a noble and irresistible
argument.
At ten o'clock, the rest of the household went to bed.
At ten-thirty, Mungo's steward answered a rasp at the door and found Hob Hewat,
the water carrier.
The steward asked Hob, in the vernacular, digressing every second or third word,
what he wanted.
Hob said he had been told to bring water for the sow.
The steward denied it. Hob insisted. The steward described what instead he might