Lord Morton leaned back in his chair and raked his beard with the pen’s end. The quip struck his fancy as a pleasant one.
‘I take your meaning,’ he said. ‘I had thought of it myself. But, to say nothing of his place by her side, I doubt he wears a steel shirt.’
Archie said shortly: ‘He does not. The King felt him last night as he sat at the cards. And Ruthven felt him well on Bothwell’s marriage night.’
‘The King! He did that!’
‘He did just that.’
Morton gazed at him for a minute. ‘Why,’ he marvelled, ‘why, then he stands in wi’ the rest? Archie, are ye very sure?’
Archie the wise snapped his fingers at such elementary knowledge. ‘A month gone, come Friday, he began to open to Ruthven about it.’
The Earl rapped the table smartly with his fingers. ‘And I am the last to know it! I thank you, cousin, for your good conceit of me. By the mass, man, you treat me like a boy.’
‘It’s no doing of mine,’ says Archie. ‘I was for making you privy to it a week syne; but Ruthven, he said, “No.” You were still Chancellor, d’ye see? And, says Ruthven, your lordship was a tappit hen, that would sit till they took the last egg from under ye.’