There was total silence, which the Baron d’Aramon at length broke in his quiet French. ‘This is the Grand Master’s doing? What else does he say?’
Gabriel, cap in hand, bent his cropped head. ‘That you obtained the Grand Master’s confidence by pretending an interest in preserving Tripoli. That by exaggerating the weakness of the town and the strength of Sinan Pasha’s forces you discouraged the men and led the Marshal to enter into dishonourable negotiation. That your presence in the Turkish camp was no less than a tacit sanction of Turkish conduct, as proved by the triumphal banquet, and by the vast treasures which passed from your hands to theirs. That your whole purpose in Tripoli was to end the siege quickly and so release the Turkish troops the French King needed to help him in his present war against Charles V. They have questioned every man aboard my brigantine about this,’ said Graham Malett, his straight gaze on d’Aramon. ‘They accuse you even of inciting the Turk to plunder the knights’ bodies once they had meekly surrendered.’
‘How widespread is this story?’ asked d’Aramon in the same quiet voice.
‘It has been carried of purpose through the whole of Birgu. It will be in Mdina tonight. Already feeling is high against you.’
‘I should not have believed it possible, even of the Order as it is today,’ said d’Aramon. He glanced at de Vallier, who in a kind of stupor gazed back. Behind them voices, singly then in helpless counterpoint, chord, chorus, began to stir into affrighted life. D’Aramon said, ‘For all our sakes, this must not be heard outside Malta. I shall ask to appear before the Grand Council and give a full answer to these lies.’
‘You may,’ said Gabriel. ‘And be sure you will not be unsupported. De Villegagnon and la Valette have risked their lives to defend you. But it is too ‘late. Three of the Order’s galleys left this afternoon for Sicily, Naples and Bône with the Grand Master’s version of Tripoli’s loss, and bearing letters of corroboration written by the Spanish knights to his dictation to all the Order’s commanderies in Europe. The Emperor is being well served. Also …’ he hesitated.
‘My God, is there more?’ said d’Aramon bitterly, and dropping into a chair, leaned one elbow on the littered table and pressed his fingertips to his closed eyes.
‘He will not pay for your hostages,’ said Graham Malett, low-voiced.
But by this time the French Ambassador had jettisoned delicacy. He dropped his hand, and jerking it round the taut, incredulous throng about him said, ‘And are we to send these men back to the slave market? I, their so-called enemy, humbled and impoverished myself to have them raised manacled from the sand and set free, and their own Order will do nothing to redeem their lives?’
‘What hostages? What payment?’ Jerott Blyth’s shriek carried above the rest.
Graham Malett turned. ‘When you and the Spanish knights lay unreleased, M. d’Aramon sued for your lives. He obtained them by paying all he had from his own private purse, together with a promise that the Order would in exchange release thirty well-born Turkish prisoners now in Malta. This the Grand Master has now refused to do, so that M. d’Aramon, who has to return to Constantinople to work, is being forced to dishonour his word.’
‘He shall not be allowed to suffer.’ It was the Marshal de Vallier’s elderly voice at last. ‘I and my brethren in Christ will refute this libel in person. Had the castle been garrisoned and fortified as it should … had they sent us experienced knights, disciplined soldiers in place of these unfortunate peasants.…’
‘If you enter Birgu, Marshal,’ said Gabriel, ‘it will mean prison. It may mean torture. It may bring degradation. It may even bring death. I do not consider that His Eminence will use impartial witnesses.’
Graham Malett renouncing all hope of justice and all prospect of the triumph of good was as close to ultimate horror as Jerott expected to reach. He said, ‘Have you told them? Anyone in their senses will know you at least to be impartial. What about de Villegagnon? He won’t support the Grand Master in downright falsehood. What about la Valette? Romegas? Isn’t anyone fighting?’
‘De Villegagnon knows everything I know. He will fight to the death,’ said Gabriel. ‘So will all the others you mention and their following. It makes no difference, as you should know. They are outnumbered. As for my being considered impartial.…’ He smiled, a little bleakly. ‘M. d’Aramon’s mythical sins, I am told, are mine also. For sharing his sly duplicity from the safety of the Turkish camp, I have been warned that I return to Malta at my peril. You and I, Marshal, will be martyred together.’
‘No!’ The exclamation was instant and final, from both the Ambassador and de Vallier. The Ambassador added curtly, ‘Martyrdom will not help the Order. I shall appear before this Council. Whether the Marshal does so or not is his affair. Be sure for my part I shall fully vindicate you. But your duty is amply done in stating our case and in bringing us this warning. To place yourself in the Order’s power while the Order is crazed with fear, obsessed with this feverish need to excuse to the Emperor the fall of his city … desperate possibly to conceal misappropriation of funds which must be the Grand Master’s blame alone … this is self-destruction. Leave de Villegagnon; leave Parisot who cannot at least be made scapegoats for Tripoli to fight what must be a long battle in the Order itself. I suggest to you your duty is quite other.’
‘What is that?’
‘Go with de Seurre here, who is also a knight. Take my letters to France informing the King what has happened. Remedy this spreading poison of falsehood. Tell the truth throughout Europe so that things are shown as they are.…’
‘Betray the rot within the Order?’ said Gabriel.
‘Expose it, Hospitaller, so that it may be cut out,’ said d’Aramon steadily.
‘It is my life,’ said Gabriel blankly, and it was Jerott, striding forward, black, furious, dynamic, who seized his arm and shook it. ‘You must not go back. It was my life, too. But if you will leave it, I shall go with you.’
Graham Malett shook his head, a dazed king; a man who had taken so many blows that even feeling had gone dead. ‘If the Marshal and my brothers go, of course I must return. I know what efforts M. d’Aramon made in the Turkish camp.…’
‘You have already testified to that: you told us. And the Grand Master, however much he may wish it, cannot harm me within Malta,’ said d’Aramon. ‘It is outside that I need your witness.’
‘I cannot speak against the Order,’ Gabriel repeated. He looked distraught. ‘I cannot subject the Order to question in France. And where else can I go?’
‘There is another ship in the harbour,’ said Jerott; and Graham Malett turned his eyes over the craning heads, broken already into hissing, arguing groups, to where a dark brigantine, lamps ablaze, lay idly on the black water.
For a long time he stared at it, while the tide of dispute and anxiety closed around him; the voices of d’Aramon, the Marshal, de Herrera, de Poissieu echoing and re-echoing meaninglessly as Jerott pushed to his side. Then he saw that Gabriel’s eyes were closed, his lips stirring, and realized that in anguish the other man had turned for his answer to prayer. So, he waited.
*
‘There’s something,’ said Thompson, and jerked his unkempt head across the dark water.
For half an hour he and Lymond had been leaning idly on the brigantine rail, digesting an excellent dinner and exchanging small talk, while across Grand Harbour, the Lilies of France stirred at the masthead of the little cluster of boats which had sailed in at dusk and the round moon, slipping through her black arc, shone on the silver chain stretched hard across Galley Creek: the Order’s whipping post for her fallen.
‘Three rowers,’ said the pirate, gazing. ‘And gey low in the water. That’ll be the gear.’
‘How many passengers?’ said Lymond, and Thompson, who knew better than to believe the sweet insouciance in the query, grinned in the dark, ‘I canna see, just, no bein’ a hoolet. Bide, son; bide.’
Behind them, the boat rustled with movement. Her crew from Tr
ipoli, long since landed, had been replaced by Thompson’s own men, awaiting him on arrival. She had been stocked for her long voyage without question all that day and was now fully laden: the Grand Master was not concerned with what credence the world would give a pirate. And Lymond, for excellent reasons of his own, had not made his presence known.
‘Twa heads,’ said Thompson suddenly.
‘Colour?’
‘Look for yourself.’
High on its prow, the approaching skiff bore a lamp. The swaying glow, low on the sea, shifted over two ghost-like faces, strained, silent, severely withdrawn; and over two heads, one black; one brightest gold.
‘Malett and Blyth, ye unnatural bastard,’ said the pirate Thompson without rancour, and feeling for his purse, threw it into Lymond’s long waiting palm. Lymond caught it without looking. ‘Of course. It’s all been a chastening experience.’
There was a pause, while they both watched the nearing boat. ‘Mind I’m still sailing tomorrow,’ said Thompson at length.
‘That’s all right,’ said Lymond. ‘We’ll all go.’
Thompson was frowning. ‘It’s a bonny mess for a monk to walk out of. If they’re so damned handy wi’ their whingers, you’d think they’d hae the auld devil out o’ the head chair in a wink.’
‘It’s a matter of conscience,’ said Lymond. ‘They can’t kill Grand Masters; only Turks. And if he’s going to be found dead in his bed, I don’t want to be there. Which is one reason, if you must know, why I personally am walking out also.’
‘They’d accuse you?’
‘I don’t know and I don’t want to find out. Remember, these fellows have sworn to obey the Grand Master. It takes a bit of nerve to break that oath and not fly to the other extreme.’
‘So they fly home to mother instead.’
‘If you like,’ Lymond said. ‘Blyth is cleaving to Gabriel and Gabriel is cleaving to.…’
‘You?’ said Thompson, and laughed crudely, having a joyfully crude mind.
‘I was going to say, God,’ was Lymond’s equable answer.
‘And what now,’ said the pirate, a wicked gleam in his sharp eyes. ‘What’s taking the likes of you back to Scotland?’
‘Reports,’ Lymond said. He waved, vigorously, at the silent boat now resting below. ‘Delicious, intriguing reports. Letters from home, and all points north and west.’
‘A girl?’ Thompson was taken.
‘A girl. A girl,’ said Lymond, exquisitely tender, ‘called Joleta Reid Malett.’
Part Three
THE DOUBLE CROSS
I: Nettles in Winter (Boghall Castle, October 1551)
II: The Widdershins Wooing (Midculter Castle, the Same Day)
III: The Conscience of Philippa (London, October/November 1551)
IV: The Axe Is Fashioned (St Mary’s, Autumn 1551)
V: The Hand of Gabriel (St Mary’s and Djerba, 1551/2)
VI: The Hand on the Axe (St Mary’s, 1551/2)
VII: The Lusty May (Dumbarton, April/May 1552)
VIII: The Hot Trodd (The Scottish Border, May 1552)
IX: Terzetto, Played Without Rests (Flaw Valleys, June 1552)
X: The Hadden Stank (March Meeting, June/July 1552: Algiers, August 1552)
XI: The Crown and the Anchor (Falkland Palace and the Kyles of Bute, August 1552)
XII: The Crown and the Anchorite (Falkland Palace, August 1552)
XIII: The Axe Is Turned on Itself (Midculter, Flaw Valleys, Boghall, September 1552)
XIV: The Axe Falls (St Mary’s, September 1552)
XV: Death of an Illuision (St Mary’s, September 1552)
XVI: Jerott Chooses His Cross (The Scottish Lowlands, September/October 1552)
XVII: Gabriel’s Trump (Edinburgh, October 4th, 1552)
I
Nettles in Winter
(Boghall Castle, October 1551)
ON the day Will Scott married, Lymond took, unwittingly, his first step towards the Knights of St John.
By the same subtle irony, three years later, Francis Crawford of Lymond returned to the suspicious bosom of his homeland on the day Tom Erskine died.
He died at Boghall Castle, where he was brought when the sweating sickness struck him on the road from Stirling south. He did not live to see his wife, Margaret Fleming, come home from France with the Scottish Queen Dowager. Instead he spent his last hours shivering in her mother’s overdressed castle at Biggar with Lady Jenny herself, dressed in something pure and flowing, absently patting his brow with a cloth.
By then, although plied with every potion the Flemings could muster, he knew the end must be near. Fifty thousand people had died in England that year from this ailment. He had seen enough of it, as he rode back and forth to Norham as Ambassador framing the peace. The war he had helped to end had preserved his land from the scourge. The peace, it seemed, was to kill him.
Because of the peace, Philippa Somerville was at Boghall. A single-minded Somerville from the north of England, staunch allies of Lord Grey, would have crossed the Border eighteen months ago with an army, or not at all. Philippa, who at thirteen had every cell charged, like her mother’s, with stark common sense, was in Scotland because she liked Lady Jenny, and her legitimate children, and her five-months-old bastard by King Henri of France.
It was Philippa who had sent for the surgeon-apothecary when Jenny’s son-in-law was carried in. Jenny herself was far too busy ensuring the safety of her fully ratified prince. He was whisked with her legitimate children three miles away to Midculter, for the Crawfords to care for. Two counties heard him go (he was teething); and Tom Erskine, listening, squeezed an amused smile from somewhere for Philippa. Then Jenny, agelessly endearing in musty white linen, arrived to fondle his hand.
He was grateful, because she was Margaret’s mother and he had no illusions about her, and he talked to her reassuringly while he could. The rigor had gone by then; only, dressed in one of Jamie Fleming’s nightgowns, he felt the growing pressure in aching head and knotted stomach, and with it, the fire of fever. His affairs were in order; his indiscretions paid for; his father’s estates and charges perfectly bestowed. All this he had arranged when Lord Erskine had gone to France with the child Queen Mary. Of his own marriage, so short and gentle, there were no children and never would be now. Margaret’s son by her first marriage would be cared for at his father’s home.
He had not seen his wife since the spring when he had gone to France on the Queen’s business. To Margaret he could have said, ‘I am not afraid of death. I am afraid to leave a pilotless ship. England and the Emperor Charles are exhausted by war and discontent; France is freshly belligerent; Turkey is aggressive and rich. All the old wars have stopped and new ones are beginning with new partnerships and new enemies: who will guide us through the maze in the long regency ahead? Under the Sultan, all Turkey is united. France obeys the divine will of the King; the English nobles will cleave to the Regent with wealth and power to share.’
And in Scotland, what was there? A divided leadership. The French Dowager fighting the Earl of Arran for the Governorship during Queen Mary’s childhood and wittingly or not, with every French coin she borrowed, ensuring Scotland’s future as a province of France. And since England dared not have another France over her border, England was ready to seduce any Scottish noble, from Arran downwards, who did not care for the Queen Dowager, or France, or the old Catholicism. A divided nation; a divided God; a land of ancient, self-seeking families who broke and mended alliances daily as suited their convenience, and for whom the concept of nationhood was sterile frivolity … what could weld them in time, and turn them from their self-seeking and their pitiable, perpetual feuds?
A common danger might do such a thing, except that the nation was too weak to resist one. A great leader might achieve unity—but he must be followed by his equal or fail. A corporate religion might do it, but where did one exist which some foreign power had not seized and championed already?
There was another remedy. A dec
ade of peace for quiet husbandry, so that every cottar should have his kale and his corn without stealing from the next; so that peaceful trade should offer rewards as rich as war, and rebuilt castles employ their hundreds without fear of burned harvests, or having to put foot in stirrup at sowing time, or finding their year’s work of wool or leather or herring sunk by reprisal for Scots fisherfolk themselves driven to piracy. ‘How would you set about that? How would you even stop a Kerr killing a Buccleuch, come to that?’ Tom said aloud, and saw from Jenny Fleming’s wondering face that she had been saying something quite different, for probably quite a long time.
Then she left, and he knew that instead of his nurses, soon he would have round him the embarrassed audience of the dying. He did not much care, for now the fire had reached every part of his body, and there washed from him in salty sickening jets the diseased sweat which would kill him.
There was nothing to be done. Water ran through the sheet and into the ticking. Dry sheet and dry mattress were drenched afresh, and again; then they left him as he was. When they brought icy packings soaked in well water he watched the white steam around him twist to the painted ceiling and was only mildly shocked when a clawed brown arm knocked them away and a shawled head, vaguely familiar, bent over him and hissed, ‘Kill ye, wid they, afore the Lord has appointed?’ And as he stared up at the seamed face of Trotty Luckup it relaxed its glare as she smiled and said, ‘I’ll win a little comfort for ye still, my dear, afore they lay ye cauld, cauld i’ the mools.’
He drank what she gave him to drink and let her do with him what she wanted, and perhaps it helped. He listened too, to what she had to say and it came to him that Francis Crawford could make use of that gossip, except that he was dying, and Francis was abroad.