The Disorderly Knights

  Then Jerott took his one step and halted, for Crawford of Lymond had moved into the road twenty paces behind the girl’s back.

  They did not all at first see him, so the shouting died naturally. Only Archie and the girl at whose pistol-end he stood noticed nothing. Within the silken flame of her hair, Joleta’s milk-white face was rosy with anger, her eyes brightly thicketed with shadow. ‘So you say,’ she retorted. ‘Then why isn’t he here? Or doesn’t he care if his uncouth and uncontrolled following batter an old woman to death?’

  ‘It’s a lie. They’ve never battered an old woman to death in their lives,’ said Lymond’s cold, plaintive voice. During his long walk up the road to Joleta’s back, not a pebble had shifted. He had taken no visible precautions; hands tucked into his sword belt, he had given the appearance merely of strolling into the scene, and his horsemen, after a sporadic attack of bemused silence, had shouted dutifully on, though in a noticeably innocuous vein, until he halted at last, a dozen steps from the girl.

  ‘Young ones, now: that’s different.’

  It was a ruse so old that it was almost an insult. Archie Abernethy, by then aware of Lymond, should have been ready at the first sound of his voice to snatch Joleta’s pistol as the girl started round. It didn’t work because as Lymond moved into place, an eager torch-bearer closed up behind him to give him more light. Before he opened his mouth, Lymond’s shadow slid on before him, grey and revealing, up to Joleta and past her, and as he began to speak, Joleta whirled round and fired.

  A scream, inhuman in its pain, tore across the ungentlemanly little theatre and died sobbing in a shuddering void, while a curtain of smoke spread silver before every motionless man.

  It was impossible to see beyond it. Jerott, for one, did not want to see. She had fired, Christ preserve them, in a line dead behind. In a heavy silence he waited, rigid with the rest, and infinitesimally the veil spread, hovered, and began softly to melt.

  In the distance, from the direction of Midculter, he was conscious of hoofbeats. Lord Culter, doubtless, summoned to rescue Joleta.…

  From the lessening mists a voice spoke: the same voice as before, its tone vastly polite. ‘Mortia la bastia, morta, I hope, la rabbia o veneno …’ And through the clearing smoke they all deciphered the singularly unconcerned person of Lymond, talking pleasantly still. ‘That, Cuddie Hob, was your brown mare expiring. Give her a nice funeral. The torchbearer who moved, Archie, is to be flogged and turned off without pay. I should like to speak to you in my room when we get to Midculter. Ah, Richard. There you are. You’ve missed all the fun.’

  That was his brother arriving, summoned from Midculter by Joleta to waylay her murderers, with some twenty or thirty men at arms with him. Remembering the Richard, Lord Culter of nine years before, Jerott Blyth saw little changed in this thickset, mild-mannered man with the shapeless brown hair. But the quality of his greeting to his younger brother was new, as was Lymond’s response.

  Then, ‘Richard, introduce me,’ Lymond was saying, in the same undisturbed voice; and he turned at last to where, dumb now, the child Joleta still stood, the smoking pistol dragging her hand. ‘Attempted assassination counts as an unofficial introduction: I’m sure of it; but she might as well know who she’s shooting at, apart from Cuddie Hob’s horse.’

  ‘Allow me to present my most heartfelt apologies,’ said Joleta, and fainted straight off.

  ‘Francis!’

  ‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Lymond doucely.

  ‘How the devil was she fooled into firing in the first place? Don’t tell me that wasn’t your fault,’ said Lord Culter, a familiar wariness displacing the warmth of reunion.

  ‘All right, I won’t,’ said Lymond. ‘Jerott, did you get shot also? No. Then kindly muster the lady in your monkish arms and ride with her to the castle. Yours is the only reputation that will stand it. And don’t say I don’t endow you with princely rewards for sitting on your bloody arse doing precisely nothing.’

  Which was the manner of Lymond’s homecoming from Malta.

  *

  Stepping over the Midculter threshold with his treasured burden like a penguin changing the habitat of its only begotten egg, Jerott Blyth missed the true homecoming.

  Sybilla, Dowager Lady Culter, clucking over the unconscious Joleta, directing the disposal of Archie Abernethy and his twenty men, and dispatching her son Richard to entertain Will Scott in the castle’s elegant hall, was largely unconscious of all these things.

  Reality for her began when her absent son Francis, bright, sun-browned and vivid, stood deferentially at the door of her parlour and she was able to say, her voice sweet, ‘Well, mon cher? I hear, Heaven preserve the counted, that you are a Count …?’

  Then Lymond closed the door, and not even Richard would have intruded on them then.

  II

  The Widdershins Wooing

  (Midculter Castle, the Same Day)

  WHEN, under the direction of a stalwart Venetian madam to whom he took an instant dislike, Jerott placed his childish burden tenderly on her bed, Joleta was still unconscious. Her skin was so fine, he saw, that the veins ran like Sicilian marble over her temples and jaw. From her thinly framed nose to her invisible eyebrows, her sparely moulded pink mouth, her prodigious golden lashes, there was nothing coarse about her; and her hair, blown lightly on the lawn of her pillow, was insubstantial as new-loomed silk.

  Stumbling slightly, Jerott Blyth removed himself from the room and the old madam’s glare, and nearly walked into Archie Abernethy, marching along the corridor. From the colour of his neck it was clear that he, anyway, had had the promised interview with his lordship of Lymond. Then, tripping along the passage with her white hair and blue eyes and high-handed, small-boned elegance, came Francis Crawford’s mother.

  ‘Jerott!’ said Sybilla, and clutching with her two small hands as much of his worn leather chest as she could reach, hauled down his head for an embrace. She smelt marvellous. ‘All the most beautiful men become monks,’ she said. ‘It’s a oecumenical law or something. I can’t imagine how they keep up the breed. What’s wrong? Has Francis been rude? Then you must try to overlook it. I know you wouldn’t think so, but he is thoroughly upset by Tom Erskine’s death; and when Francis is troubled he doesn’t show it, he just goes and makes life wretched for somebody.’

  Smiling, she slipped her small, strong hand under his arm. ‘How splendid that you and he met again. Come and be introduced, and tell me your news. Is your mother still so well and so shamingly loaded with energy …?’

  It was neatly done, and Jerott didn’t try to resist. Setting aside his private reservations about a commander who, however disturbed, let fly at his lieutenant in public with no cause whatever, he followed the Dowager Lady Culter into her elegant hall.

  In the year of Lymond’s absence, Midculter had done rather well. The Crawfords, like his own family, had always been wealthy, of course; less from their skill in war, though that was considerable, than from sheer intelligence and a native ingenuity in the handling of characterful experts. Sybilla, who made them laugh, had always been her people’s idol. Richard, who risked his life for their sons on the battlefield, was respected and liked. Francis Crawford they must hardly know. He would possess, you could depend on it, a certain shoddy appeal for the womenfolk, which their men would not at all mind removed. If Lymond were to become the man Gabriel hoped, indeed, thought Jerott with satisfying logic, it must be removed.

  In the painted hall at Midculter when Jerott joined them now were the third Baron, his wife Mariotta, and Sir William, heir to Wat Scott of Buccleuch. Richard, talking amicably while he waited for his brother, was aware that Mariotta, stitching furiously behind him, was listening to every foot on the stairs in a concealed froth of emotion. She had never been impervious to Lymond’s doubtful attractions and would enjoy, he knew, having her feelings exercised once more, like puppies at gambol. Their marriage now was deep and firm enough to stand it.

  Will Scott, also, was listening,
his face flushed under his flaming red hair. Since his Kerr-infested marriage three years since to Grizel he had become the father of three and a man not to offend on the Borders. More and more as old Buccleuch, his father, grew wheezier, he had taken on himself the active duties of wardenship along the thief-ridden wasted frontier with England, dispensing international justice with one hand and with the other attempting to control the bloody bickering on his own side of the Border.

  In the three years four Kerrs had been injured, and three farms burned down belonging to friends of the Scotts. He didn’t always tell his father when it happened, because the old man’s face turned mottled blue over his doublet, and unless Will got in first, he would send a runner round all the estates, and the threshing would stop while grousing, reluctant men straggled back for their pikes and swords and mail shirts, taking a long time about it, waiting for Buccleuch the Younger to come up, furious on his sweating horse, and tell them curtly to get back to the fields.

  As the French grip on the Queen Mother and therefore on Scotland became tighter; as the danger grew that Arran, the Scottish Governor, would retaliate by siding with England, there blossomed among Will Scott’s simple convictions the warning spoken again and again in the past by Francis Crawford.

  If they thought their sovereignty worth keeping, the handful of lords who divided Scotland between them must unite. And unite before religious division caught and struck them apart for ever. For Lymond a year ago had maintained that, so far, the quarrel between the old and the new religion in Scotland was nothing but useful ammunition for men who disliked and distrusted each other for other reasons entirely. The danger was that the thing, so lightly seeded, might take needless, schismatic root of its own.

  All that, Lymond had said a year ago. Since then he had fought alongside Joleta’s brother, clever, courageous and devoted adherent of the Old Religion for whom Luther and Mohammed were infidels both. And if Gabriel hadn’t converted Francis Crawford, thought Will Scott gloomily, running a large hand through his blazing hair, the bloody girl certainly would.

  These three diverse people however in Sybilla’s fine hall greeted Jerott Blyth warmly enough, and made him welcome while Sybilla installed him in one of her vast fireside chairs. There was no sign of Lymond. While they chatted, Blyth inspected Lymond’s family. They were presentable, he thought, and intelligent; and they knew their world, he would grant them that. Whatever subject they opened, and they had a range like a cadger’s, Jerott was given a full share. They might almost, he would admit, have been meeting in France. Then the door opened and Joleta came in, followed by her duenna.

  She was fascinatingly pale, the flood of rose-gold hair and wide aquamarine eyes the only colour about her. She was dressed all in white.

  Jerott shot out of his seat. Richard, following more slowly, said placidly, ‘You’ve had a shock. Shouldn’t you stay in bed for a while?’

  ‘No,’ said Joleta flatly. She was not, as Sybilla had discovered, a person slow to make up her mind. ‘To faint was childish. And to shoot was inexcusable. I might have killed Mr Crawford. I came to apologize properly. I should not like him to think me a child.’

  ‘He won’t,’ said Richard gravely; and Jerott, with revived interest, shot him a look. ‘But he’d like to reassure himself that you are well, I’m sure. Come and join us. He won’t be long.’ And, smiling, the child walked forward and choosing a hooded chair by the fire sank into it, while Madame Donati, with a sigh, seated herself far too near Jerott for that knight’s absolute comfort.

  Then Lymond came in. Suavely toasted and slender; all masked blue eyes and buttermilk hair, he moved forward without seeing Joleta in her tall, wide-backed chair, exclaiming, ‘God, it’s Buccleuch the Younger. I hear you are proliferating like mice, and every one of you with a skull like a marmalade orange. Have you no thought for the sorry state of the nation?’ And went without hurry to hammer the big, grinning Scott’s shoulders and salute, on one picturesque knee, the hand and cheek of his Irish sister-in-law. ‘Mountebank,’ thought Jerott Blyth.

  Last of all, Lymond bowed low to Madame Donati, and if his Italian disarmed her, she gave no sign, but answered austerely his soft inquiries about her charge’s health. She had opened her mouth, presumably to direct his attention to Joleta’s presence, when Sybilla cut in. ‘And what did you think, Francis, of Sir Graham’s beautiful sister?’

  It was a risk that, knowing Lymond, Jerott would never have taken. He rather judged, from Will Scott’s dropped jaw, that Lady Culter had alarmed him as well. Lymond himself, his back squarely to the chair concealing Joleta, said, ‘She’s a peach. I told Jerott she’s a peach. He can have her. Some are clingstones. And some are freestones. But each dear little fuzzy fruit is packed full of poison.… Ah, there you are.’

  ‘You knew I was here!’ exclaimed Joleta. She hadn’t knocked over her chair, because it would have taken two strong men to incline it an inch, but she exploded round the oaken rim of it like a charioteer, her hair swinging, the colour pink in her cheeks. She halted. ‘I know all about you and your.…’

  ‘… Nicolaitan practices? And I know all about you and your sanctity. Poor horse. Poor October horse, sacrificed to the God Mars. The fine in cows due from the murderer of a thane’s son is sixty-three and two-thirds of a cow. The law of the Bretts and the Scotts. The fine for attempted murder,’ said Lymond, moving round to the furious girl and leading her gently back to her seat, ‘is not promulgated, but I imagine the odd two-thirds would meet it. The question is, which end of the cow?’

  ‘You’re talking nonsense, Francis,’ the Dowager said with equanimity. ‘And your manners are appalling. You’ll make the poor child regret her bad aim. Did you know she was here?’

  ‘I smelt the incense. So familiar with God, and such plenty of instructions from Heaven, she was a companion for angels. I trust she is. She’s certainly a blistering nuisance in the company of men.’

  Resisting, with remarkable strength, the thrust of his arm, Joleta was still standing. ‘I frightened you,’ she said, her little teeth sparkling before the great aquamarine eyes. ‘I’m sorry. And you have a certain reputation for romantic violence to keep up. To be kind and conventional would be too dull, wouldn’t it?’

  ‘It’s a lie,’ said Lymond, releasing her. ‘An unbridled liberty of lewd speech. I am kind and conventional. They pull their forelocks in the village cots, and call me the young master. How is Gabriel?’

  Joleta’s eyes sparkled. ‘Well,’ she said. ‘I thank you. He writes of you often.’

  ‘Does he, by God,’ said Jerott, startled out of his trance and into unsuitable language. The Dowager looked interested and Will Scott, oblivious to nuances, was much entertained. ‘What does he say? What can he say, missing out the swear-words?’

  ‘Only,’ said Joleta gravely, ‘that in Francis Crawford he found an armed neutral or even an enemy, so apprehensive was he of seduction by Mother Church.’ And as Richard’s eyes met those of his mother, ‘And that I am not to be concerned if he shows the self-same alarm on encountering me,’ said Joleta, ending, eyes downcast, in modest exposition.

  Rarely, outside their own family, had a delicate situation been stripped to the bone, in the Crawfords’ experience, by the supposedly oblivious victim. Never, in anyone’s experience, had the protagonist made to look foolish been Lymond.

  The reflex action was a foregone conclusion. Regardless of Sybilla’s cry, the duenna’s sudden, shocked protest, despite Richard’s ejaculation or Will Scott’s laughter or Jerott Blyth’s angry clenched fists, Lymond pulled the girl to him in one hard, capable movement. ‘But I,’ said Lymond, ‘am one of the new apostles, seeking nothing but voluptuousness and human pleasures, and abusing the world.…’

  Her eyes closed as he brought his mouth down on hers. Her lips, a little apart, showed her sparkling teeth; her lashes were amber, and the long, apricot hair, streaming back to the floor, was born at her temples in powderings of golden down.

  Francis Crawford dr
ew a little breath, just before his lips touched hers, his eyes on that ineffable, heart-stopping face; then straightening, he opened his hands.

  ‘No,’ he said. ‘No. I’m sorry. It’s like kissing a chapel. Less a mouth, you might say, than a hole for the bell-rope. Sir Graham is right. I forego my option.’ And, released from his hands and his attention in the same staggering moment, Joleta sat on the floor.

  ‘Francis!’ said Lord Culter hoarsely. Will Scott choked. And while Mariotta, her eyes round, looked from the dumbstruck governess to the flushed and furious Jerott and back, Sybilla Lady Culter, with erect hauteur, took the matter in hand.

  ‘Madame Donati, I apologize. Francis, I shall speak to you later. Joleta, you can hardly be surprised at what has happened. If you had asked me, I could have told you, without putting yourself to the trouble of experiment, that no one, saint or sinner, is likely to seduce Francis against his will. Unfortunately.’

  And as Madame Donati, monumental in anger, removed a white-faced and thoroughly shaken Joleta, Jerott Blyth, opening a grim conversation with Will Scott, found one satisfaction in the cheap little scene. Lymond, occupied in sitting staring at the floor, had an unpleasant appointment with the mistress of Midculter to match any he had made himself that day.

  The Crawfords on the other hand were hugging a different discovery, equally pleasing. The simple village maiden was not about to fall under the young master’s spell. ‘And vice versa,’ as Richard afterwards said. ‘Vice, incredibly, versa.’

  Later that night, having won his way, with some trouble, back into his family’s good graces, Lymond answered some of their questions about Malta. And having listened, ‘Well, they must be gey poor fighters, or ye were unco late with your warning,’ said Buccleuch the Younger argumentatively. ‘For they lost Gozo and Tripoli, whether it was the French knights’ fault as they say or not.’