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

while the three men and the firedog blundered cursing into each other in the
dark; then they got to the far door and wrenched it open. The corridor as far as
the stairhead was quite empty, and the light feet running downward were already
some distance away. They hurled themselves after him.
They were three fibors above the ground, and the staircase was spiral. The
spilth of Buccleuch's bellow rattled the pewter in the kitchens; Tom Erskine
shouted and Mungo piped like a hen-whistle. The servants on their pallets heard
and started up; tallows flared and a patter of bare feet began on the rushes
below.
Mungo's sow heard it too. Drunk as a bishop, she hurtled stair-ward as the first
of the servants arrived. Great blanket ears flapping and rump arched like a
Druid at sunrise, she hurled herself at them as Lymond and his pursuers fled
down. She bounced once off the newel post, scrabbled once on the flags, trotters
smoking, then shot Mungo Tennant backward, squealing thickly in a liberated
passion of ham-handed adoration. Mungo sat down, Buccleuch fell on top of him
and Tom Erskine swooped headfirst over them both, landing on the pack of unkempt
heads jamming the stair foot like stooks at a threshing. Winnowing through them,
utterly unremarked in the uproar, was Lymond.
Screaming, squealing and grunting, the impacted cluster swayed on the stairs,
torn and surging like rack where the pig unseen hooked the bare feet from under
them. Buccleuch was the first to get free, grey whiskers overhanging the swarm
like a Chinese kite at a carnival. "Lvmond!" he shrieked. "Where's he got to?"
They scoured the house in the end without a trace of him, although they found
Mungo's steward mute and bound in the pighouse. "Damn it!" said Buccleuch
furiously. "The windows were barred and the door lockit-he must be here. Where's
your cellar?"


Mungo's face was spotty under the pig-spit. "I've looked there. It's empty."
"Well, let's look again," snapped Buccleuch, and was there before Tennant could
stop him. "What's that?"
It was, undoubtedly, a trap door. In bitterest necessity, Mungo Tennant held
them up for ten minutes protesting: he claimed it was sealed; it was ornamental;
it was locked and unused. In the end Buccleuch stopped listening and went for a
crowbar.
It opened with a hissing, fairly oiled ease.
Mungo need not have worried. The lower cellar, the cavern and the long
underground tunnel to the Nor' Loch contained no contraband at all. But, because
tuns of Bordeaux wine make hard rowing, all the wells of Edinburgh ran with
claret next day; and on this, the eve of the English invasion, the commonality
of the High Street were for an hour or two as blithe as the Gosford Close sow.
Late, the laminated sheet of the Nor' Loch held a faint chord of laughter.

"There was a lady lov'd a hogge
Honey. quoth she
Won't thou lie with me tonight?
Hoogh, quoth he."

And, long since ashore with his men and his booty, Crawford of Lymond, man of
wit and crooked felicities, bred to luxury and heir to a fortune, rode off