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!’ said Grizel Beaton (Younger) of Buccleuch, with a squeal of delight. ‘Will Scott! Are we having our first married set-to?’
    They had come to the quiet wing of the house, and the suite where their chamber lay. ‘Aye we are,’ said her husband, a large hand closing round her arm, as he felt for the latch with the other.
    ‘I enjoyed it. And what next?’ she asked, doucely.
    ‘We get reconciled,’ said her husband, steering her through the bedroom door smartly and allowing it to close fast behind them. The tapers fluttered and straightened, bright in Grizel Beaton’s wide, critical eyes. ‘Are ye reconciled?’ he inquired.
    ‘I’ve been reconciled for eighteen hours, Will Scott,’ said his aunt. ‘And if ye don’t win me ower soon, I’ll be past it.’

II

H ough I sa
    ( Crailing, May 1549 )
    I N the spring of next year, when the Culter family were beginning to find their younger son’s presence a little wearing, the Chevalier de Villegagnon, Knight of the Order of St John, came back to Scotland for four months, and not unexpectedly found his way to Mid-culter castle.
    The war with England was then dwindling. Two Scottish strongholds had been recovered by their owners, and the occupying garrisons thrown out. In the remaining fortresses, the English and their mercenary troops passed a formidable winter, deserting where possible. Besides the bad food and the pneumonia and the boredom, they had begun to suffer pinching from London, where the Protector Somerset, with a political crisis on his hands, issued curt orders to his captains in Scotland to lie as if dead.
    Boredom was the great enemy among the French troops as well. Depleted by the departure of Piero Strozzi and the rest recalled to France, they were kept alive and fighting through the first part of the winter by the Queen Mother’s surgeons and the sale of her jewellery. Then reinforcements and money arrived at last; and the problem changed into one of directing the quarrelsome instincts of fifteen hundred belligerent French towards the enemy and not to the Scots. The country, ruled by Governor Arran in good Scots, and by the Queen Dowager, the French Ambassador and General d’Essé in their native French, became not bilingual but speechless, and to hire a boat from Leith upriver at night, an interpreter was essential.
    In all this time, Crawford of Lymond devoted himself to refining his professional skills to undue limits, to the affairs of his family, and to keeping out of Sir William Scott’s way, judging rightly that the marriage so informally begun would best succeed if left to itself, since a Scott, having got his bride pregnant, was apt to file her as completed business for eight months at a time.
    Then in the spring, when the Chevalier de Villegagnon arrived, whose expert seamanship had taken the small Queen to France theprevious year, Thomas Erskine took him to see Francis Crawford at his brother’s home of Midculter.
    Instead, they saw the Dowager his mother. Sybilla, small, white-haired and timelessly chic, trailed thoughtfully into the great hall at Midculter where the two men were waiting and said, ‘Dear Tom. How kind of you, M. de Villegagnon, to come and see Francis and how disappointed he will be, for you see both my sons are away. Richard is at Falkland with the Queen Mother and Francis.…’
    Here the Dowager Lady Culter broke off and, rubbing her neck absently with a slender palm, said, ‘But you must be seated instantly. Such an advantage of height must be very useful, M. de Villegagnon. And how is Margaret, Tom? And her mother in France? I’m afraid Francis is with Will Scott, dear, and likely to be gone all day,’ finished Sybilla, her blue eyes owlishly on Master Tom.
    Thomas Erskine at that time was a short, unremarkable man, whose chubby features concealed, as his neighbour well knew, one of the shrewdest negotiating brains in the hierarchy. Common sense was Tom Erskine’s forte, and in his many diplomatic trips