The Game of Kings: Book One in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles - Softcover

Buch 1 von 6: The Lymond Chronicles

Dunnett, Dorothy

 
9780679777434: The Game of Kings: Book One in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0679777431 ISBN 13: 9780679777434
Verlag: Vintage, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

In this first book in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, Francis Crawford of Lymond, traitor, murderer, nobleman, returns to Scotland to redeem his reputation and save his home.

It is 1547 and Scotland has been humiliated by an English invasion and is threatened by machinations elsewhere beyond its borders, but it is still free. Paradoxically, her freedom may depend on a man who stands accused of treason. He is Francis Crawford of Lymond, a scapegrace nobleman of crooked felicities and murderous talents, posessed of a scholar's erudition and a tongue as wicked as a rapier. In The Game of Kings, this extraordinary antihero returns to the country that has outlawed him to redeem his reputations even at the risk of his life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy Dunnett was born in 1923 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. Her time at Gillespie's High School for Girls overlapped with that of the novelist Muriel Spark. From 1940-1955, she worked for the Civil Service as a press officer. In 1946, she married Alastair Dunnett, later editor of The Scotsman.

Dunnett started writing in the late 1950s. Her first novel, The Game of Kings, was published in the United States in 1961, and in the United Kingdom the year after. She published 22 books in total, including the six-part Lymond Chronicles and the eight-part Niccolo Series, and co-authored another volume with her husband. Also an accomplished professional portrait painter, Dunnett exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy on many occasions and had portraits commissioned by a number of prominent public figures in Scotland.

She also led a busy life in public service, as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, a Trustee of the Scottish National War Memorial, and Director of the Edinburgh Book Festival. She served on numerous cultural committees, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1992 she was awarded the Office of the British Empire for services to literature. She died on November 9, 2001, at the age of 78.

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Opening Gambit: Threat to a Castle

First of ye chekker sail be mecioune maid

And syne efter of ye proper moving

Of every man in ordour to his king

And as the chekker schawis us yis forne

Richt so it maye the kinrik and the crowne,

The warld and all that is therein suthlye,

The chekker may in figour signifye.

"Lymond is back."

It was. known soon after the Sea-Catte reached Scotland from Campvere with an illicit cargo and a man she should not have carried.

"Lymond is in Scotland."

It was said by busy men preparing for war against England, with contempt, with disgust; with a side-slipping look at one of their number. "I hear the Lord Culter's young brother is back." Only sometimes a woman's voice would say it with a different note, and then laugh a little.

Lymond's own men had known he was coming. Waiting for him in Edinburgh they wondered briefly, without concern, how he proposed to penetrate a walled city to reach them.

When the Sea-Catte came in, Mungo Tennant, citizen and smuggler of Edinburgh, knew nothing of these things or of its passenger. He made his regular private adjustment from douce gentility to illegal trading; and soon a boatload of taxless weapons, bales of velvet and Bordeaux wine was being rowed on a warm August night over the Nor' Loch which guarded the north flank of Edinburgh, and toward the double cellar beneath Mungo's house.

Among the reeds of the Nor' Loch, where the snipe and the woodcock lay close and the baillies' swans raised their grey necks, a man quietly stripped to silk shirt and hose and stood listening, before slidding softly into the water.

Across four hundred feet of black lake, friezelike on their ridge, towered the houses of Edinburgh. Tonight the Castle on its pinnacle was fully lit, laying constellations on the water; for within, the Governor of Scotland the Earl of Arran was listening to report after report of the gathering English army about to invade him.

Below the Castle, the house of the Queen Mother also showed lights. The late 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 fianc?e 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 renewal 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. ". . . 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, "I 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. "Shy," said Lymond with simplicity, "as 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 do with the water and Hob described in detail how he had ruined his spine raising the steward's undistinguished water from the well. Mungo, above, thumped on the floor to stop the racket and the steward, cursing, gave in. He led the way to the apartment beneath the stairs where lived Mungo's great sow, the badge of his house, the pet and idiotic pig's apple of his eye, and waited while Hob Hewat filled its water trough. He then sat down suddenly under an annihilating tap on the head.

Hob, who had done all he had been paid to do, disappeared.

The steward slipped to the floor, and stayed there.

The sow approached her water dish, sniffed it with increasing favour, and inserted both her nose and her front trotters therein.

Crawford of Lymond tied up the steward, left the stye, and climbed the stairs to Mungo Tennant's apartments.

In the gratified presence of their host, Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch and Tom Erskine were still hard at it. Buccleuch, beaked like a macaw, was a baroque and mighty Scots Lowlander with a tough mind, a voice like Saint Columba's, and one of the biggest estates on the Scottish Border. Erskine, much the younger, pink, stocky and vehement, was a son of Lord Erskine, who was head of one of the families nearest the throne, and captain of the Queen's fortress of Stirling.

"Just wait," Buccleuch was roaring. "Just wait, man. Protector Somerset will get his damned English rabble together and march into Scotland up the east coast. And he'll tell off his commander, Lord Wharton, to get his Cumberland English together and invade us at the same time up the west coast. And half the west coast landowners are pensioners of the English already and won't resist 'em. And all the rest of us'll be over here at Edinburgh fighting Ned Somerset-"

"Not all of us," said Erskine neatly.

Buccleuch's whiskers promenaded. "Who'll stay in the west that's worth a docken?"

"Andrew Hunter of Ballaggan?"

"Christ. Andrew's a nice, gentlemanly lad, but his estate's been bled dry; and as for the ill-armed crew he calls followers- Man, they'd lay on a battlefield like dandruff."

"The third Baron Culter?" suggested Tom Erskine, and Buccleuch got the derisive note and turned red at the wattle.

"I know fine the cheeky clack of the court," shouted Buccleuch. "They say Culter's not to be...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679777431
ISBN 13 
9780679777434
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
560
Kontakt zum Hersteller
EDITIONS GALLIMARD
ufficio.anagrafiche@meli.it

Via Verdi, 8.
Assago Milano
20090
Italien

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