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

serenely to Midculter to break into his new sister-in-law's castle.

"Won't thou lie with me tonight?

Hoogh. quoth he."
* * *


In the Castle of Midculter, close to the River Clyde in the southwest lowlands
of Scotland, the Dowager Lady Culter had reared three children of whom the
youngest, Eloise, died at school in her teens. The two boys remaining were
brought up variously in France and in Scotland: she had them taught Latin,
French, philosophy and rhetoric, hunting, hawking, riding and archery, and the
art of killing neatly with the sword. When her husband died, violently, in the
field the elder boy Richard became third Baron Culter, and Francis his



brother received the heir's title of Master of Culter as well as taking name
from his own lands of Lymond.
Until Richard's marriage, Sybilla Lady Culter had lived alone at Midculter with
her older son. What she thought of Lymond's activities she did not say. She
welcomed Mariotta, Richard's new bride, with warm arms and dancing blue eyes,
and today, in the late summer of 1547, had dismissed her son to his eternal
local meetings and had invited the women of the neighbourhood to meet her
daughter-in-law. And thus, in Richard's absence, forty women clacked each to
each on plush chairs encased by the barrel vaulting, the tapestries and the
carving which made the Great Hall of Midculter famous.
Mariotta, black-haired and beautiful, walked on air decorated with compliment
and envy. Richard's mother Sybilla, small and splendid, with cornflower eyes and
fair skin, effaced herself as well as she could, controlled the household
machinery with half her mind and kept her own counsel about the other half.
"And how's Will?" she said rashiy to Janet, third and most formidable wife of
Wat Scott of Buccleuch, and Janet, big-boned and handsome and heartily florid,
thirty years younger than Buccleuch and the cleverest of a diabolically clever
family, fixed an unwinking eye on the ceiling and groaned.
In Sybilla's mind, Buccleuch's heir by his first wife was a pleasing, red-haired
child who, losing his mother at five, had been gently reared by Sir Wat's then
chaplain. Then Buccleuch had sent him to France, where he had attended Grand
College until this year. Nevertheless, Sybilla was able to put her own accurate
interpretation on Janet's groan. "Religion or women?" asked Lady Culter
expertly.
"Women!" It was a cry of despair. "Can you see Buccleuch turning a whisker about
women! Not a bit of it. Moral Philosophy, that's the trouble," said Janet with
gloomy relish. "They've taught poor Will moral philosophy and his father's fit
to boil."
"It is theology then," said Sybilla uneasily. "I suppose he might manage if he
sticks like Lindsay to the vulgarities in iambics; but if he's developing into a
Calvinist or a Lutheran or an Erasminn or an Anabaptist it isn't very healthy:
look at George Wishart and the Castillians."