1. Mishap to a Queening Pawn ON SUNDAY, the day after the affair at Lake of Menteith, Lord Culter was also taking aquatic exercise of a kind which all but turned his epithalamics into elegies. Mariotta, it is certain, was not alone in finding her husband baffling. Whatever his thoughts about being separated from his wife after three weeks of marriage, Richard kept them to himself and applied his undeniable ability to work. Under his remote, laconic leadership, the Culter men spent an enlivening week, racing through the night after Wharton, harrying his outposts and nibbling his tail as he recoiled on Carlisle. Then, changing with equal aplomb to the politician’s bonnet, Lord Culter set about taping and testing the mood of the southwestern districts which had been the theatre of Wharton’s operations, and still lay open to foray and seduction from the south. The English had left garrisons at Castlemilk and Langholm. These, with his small force, he could not touch; neither could he do a great deal at Dumfries or Lochmaben, or with those unlucky citizens—“assured Scots”—who lived nearest the shadow of Carlisle and had in sheer self-preservation to buy immunity with promises, and even carry them out sometimes.
