The Disorderly Knights
Lymond and Gabriel came face to face on the roofwalk, where ropes dangled from the deep crenellations and Tait was steering the traffic up and down. The fire was quietly progressing but the noise was much less. Isolated fighting only was going on still in the upper rooms, and even that would soon clearly cease. The only other sounds were from the hurt and the dying. The game the Scotts and the Kerrs played was a mortal one.
Gabriel smiled. He was pale, but his eyes in the flame-shot darkness were lucid as ever. ‘So you got safely back,’ he said. ‘We were troubled for you.’ Then he added, his voice sharpened, ‘You’re hurt?’
Inside Lymond’s burst doublet, itself covered with dirt and smears from superficial cuts and burns, there was a line of dried blood on his shirt. Lymond stared at it as if he had never seen it before, and then said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and Adam Blacklock, coming up beside him, said without thinking, ‘No, you had that at Dumbarton,’ and then held his tongue.
Gabriel, naturally, looked surprised. Lymond did not even register it. He walked past them both, and took up his stance again where Gabriel had found him, in a corner of the stone-flagged alure. In the rosy glow from the fire, you could see there were several men there already, kneeling or prone. Blacklock’s eyes met Graham Malett’s, and they followed him.
Will Scott was prostrate on the sweating roofwalk, his blazing hair touched to flame by the light; his face grey-white, with the boisterous, wilful vigour all gone. In place of his right arm and side was a mass of blood-sodden wrappings. On one side, Randy Bell, kneeling, held one wrist, while on the other Archie Abernethy, with hands used to gentling his animals, finished binding what was useless to bind.
A great silence fell, stirred distantly by occasional voices. The fighting had stopped. Gabriel said quietly, ‘How did it happen?’
Lymond did not speak. Randy Bell said without looking up, ‘He took the brunt of the rush for the stairs. I was in the middle, and Crawford at the top when they burst in, and he pushed past us all. It was his fight, you see.’
‘On the stairs?’ said Blacklock. ‘But how could he lose his right …’
‘How could he lose his right arm on the stairs?’ said the big doctor, laying Will Scott’s wrist down gently and rising to his spurred feet. ‘You forget, Adam. You forget. The Kerrs are a left-handed race.’ His gaze went from Gabriel to Francis Crawford and back again. ‘Don’t be sorry for him, though. He won’t live to miss it. And he’ll have died fighting the Kerrs. Isn’t that their idea of glory?’
‘No,’ said Lymond suddenly and rudely. He added, ‘Are we staying here until the bloody peel falls?’ And then, ‘Archie? What about it?’
‘We’ll have to take him down the stairs,’ said Abernethy, gazing owlishly up from his task. ‘Ye canna dangle yon frae a rope.’
And so, while the rest of the Keep was cleared of men, Lymond bent and with infinite patience lifted Buccleuch’s oldest son. The sandy-fringed lids didn’t open as Will Scott was carried from his last battlefield, nor when, slack in a horse-litter, he was borne in their midst from the yard.
He did not know how many Kerrs had been killed in this one night of savagery which he, of all his family, had been dedicated to prevent. He did not know how many Scotts had died with him on the stairs. And alone of all that silent company that set off back with Lymond to St Mary’s, he did not look round at the last turn of the hill and see among its spilled wreckage, the tall brand of Liddel Keep, a cracked finger of fire in the empty black void of the night.
A little later, Gabriel collapsed, slipping wordlessly to the ground. The wound they found in his shoulder was not dangerous, but he had lost a great deal of blood. Lymond had him placed in a second litter, and with Jerott leading the company and Alec Guthrie in the rear, they resumed the long journey home.
With their cattle, their dead and their wounded, the other Scotts had soon left them for Branxholm. The Kerrs Lymond kept under guard until, two or three miles up the road, they came upon an old fort with a light at the window, and Lymond halted the troop to bring out all those of the family Turnbull that the Hot Trodd had spared.
Repeated to Cessford’s face, the tale of the cattle killing; of the bribe paid by a stranger was not wonderfully convincing, but it was enough to give them all pause. It might have been some ruse of their enemies. They had plenty, God knew. And, cold after battle, both Sir Walter Kerr of Cessford and Sir John Kerr of Ferniehurst knew this night’s work would exact its own price.
Shortly afterwards, Lymond freed the Kerr family as well.
It was high noon when they themselves reached St Mary’s, and through all the journey Lymond had ridden back and forwards, speaking to the few who were wounded; discoursing, chatting. Trying, thought Jerott Blyth, irritated in his fatigue by the restless murmur, to recover lost ground.
Of course, in this, their first minor action, the new company had disastrously failed. The robbers they were paid to deliver to justice had been found and killed first by the robbed. The two families they were dedicated to keeping apart had fought each other with a fruitless loss on both sides. And Will Scott, only grown heir to all the lands of Buccleuch, was dying.
But for Graham Malett, every Scott in Liddesdale Tower would have been dead. Far from helping, Lymond’s belated orders for the Scotts to stand siege had nearly sent them as a clan to their death. Better far to have let them meet the Kerrs in the open, man to man. Evenly matched, they might well have suffered less in the end.
So every man there would be thinking. Nor would these restive attentions erase what they had heard and had seen.… So Jerott Blyth thought until the dawn birdsong began, and with the first light he saw Lymond’s face.
Lymond was very well aware of the situation, but he was not trying to handle it. He was merely fidgeting, Jerott saw without sympathy, because he was tired.
Much later, they rode into the orderly courtyard at St Mary’s with the new, well-mannered buildings above them, flushed with spring sun; and Jerott checked, as he had noted Lymond checking again and again through the night, that Will Scott was unconscious but living, and that Gabriel was comfortable still.
Gabriel was not only rested, but awake, and a good deal recovered. As they slid from their horses he got himself out of his litter and, without help, walked stiffly to where Lymond sat, mounted still. Graham Malett laid a hand on his knee.
‘Francis. Before we disperse; before we give our attention to other things; before our recollection is blunted, might we discuss what went wrong last night?’ And as Lymond stared at him without speaking, Sir Graham added gently, ‘It wasn’t a notable success you know, in spite of all your fine work through the winter. We ought to know why. We are all tired. I know you are, too. But the future of the force may depend on it.’
‘You are possibly right,’ Lymond said. His voice was completely without timbre and his face, blank as a soapstone mask, was turned to the courtyard, where Salablanca should be.
Archie Abernethy came instead and said, ‘Scott’s alive yet, sir, although I’ve no great hopes,’ and in the bygoing, offered his shoulder. Gabriel said, ‘Francis?’ and Lymond turned his head. ‘Yes, I heard you,’ he said. ‘I agree. I have only to dismount, and be sick, and then I am, as ever, your man.’
A minute later and he had descended, one hand gripping Archie’s shoulder, and crossing the courtyard was at once sick, his hands against the high, handsome wall. For a moment he rested there, without turning, and Gabriel, his wounded arm stuffed awkwardly into his doublet, began to drag himself after until Abernethy charitably barred the way. ‘It’ll just be something he ate.’
‘Or drank,’ said Jerott Blyth.
‘Or the fact,’ said Adam Blacklock tartly, ‘that he has ridden three hundred miles and fought an action without any sleep?’
Gabriel said sharply, ‘What?’ And then, ‘Why was I not told of this? He must rest, of course, and at once. I shall take the meeting, if he will permit me.’
‘I’ll live to take it,’ sa
id Lymond quietly. He had returned as coolly as he had gone, scandalizing Lancelot Plummer, whom he caught out with a turn of the head. ‘A thick skin, and a certain misplaced sang-froid,’ he added helpfully, turning Plummer’s face scarlet. ‘My sang at the moment is quite marvellously froid. Come along, gentlemen.’ He smiled at them, with a shade of the old irony, and led the way in.
The analysis of their late action, or inaction as Gabriel ruefully put it, probably lasted less than an hour. During it, every aspect of their failure was thrashed out except one: the absence of leadership. Instead, Graham Malett took on himself all the blame for the central breakdown in the action: the decision to allow the Kerrs to search the neighbourhood of the Turnbull land for their cattle unguarded.
The others wouldn’t have it. ‘No.’ Alec Guthrie, small eyes swollen with sleeplessness, turned his grating voice on Lymond. ‘Sir Graham was against it. The rest of us persuaded him and he yielded to a majority judgement on your orders. There lay the essence of the mistake.’
Graham Malett’s own voice cut in quietly. ‘I disagree. As Mr Crawford once said, we are a council of experts, not a dictatorship. There is no room for a Grand Master here.’
‘Really?’ said Lymond’s cold voice. ‘What do you do on the galleys when a galleass with a thousand Turks aboard sticks her irons on you? Hold a conference first? In the field, one man leads, for good or for bad. In St Mary’s, we confer, as we are doing now. To confuse the two situations is lunacy.’
There was a brief silence. ‘Then I’m afraid neither of us distinguished himself yesterday,’ said Gabriel ruefully. ‘I’m going to abdicate in Jerott’s favour next time you are … away.’
‘It was a pity,’ said Lymond coolly, ‘that you didn’t find the Scotts quickly, and divide your force between them and the Kerrs. The other flaws in the action, it seems to me, were outwith our control. Someone made quite unexpected trouble by paying the Turnbulls to kill and brand all those animals. And the Kerrs had a most unexpected piece of luck in breaking into that ground floor room at the Keep.’
‘They’d batter the locks with hackbuts,’ said Jerott contemptuously. ‘Or the hinges were rusty. It’s an old tower.’
‘They didn’t, and they weren’t,’ said Lymond. ‘They used a key. Maybe the Nixons keep the key under the doormat. I shouldn’t know. But that was the third unfortunate occurrence, if you could call it that.’
‘What do you mean?’ It was Gabriel’s voice, soft but severe.
‘That someone doesn’t like the Scotts or the Kerrs. I have no idea who—the English, would you say? Or one of their rival families on the Borders? I mention it with diffidence,’ said Lymond, with no diffidence at all in his manner, ‘and at the risk, I am aware, of misunderstanding. But we failed as we did for quite extraordinary reasons, nothing to do with our capabilities. Given the information we had, we acted rightly. I, for one, do not regret anything I have personally done.’
‘Or not done?’ It was Jerott Blyth again, but in an undertone. It did not escape Francis Crawford, who turned his head and smiled. ‘I thought your objections were to my excesses, not my omissions,’ he said drily. ‘Sir Graham, if it seems to you that we have covered all the necessary ground, I don’t think there is much profit in talking longer. Your wound must be causing you pain.’
Sir Graham rose, his face pale under his golden thatch. ‘There are other things that pain me more,’ he said abruptly. ‘You are fortunate in having nothing of which to accuse yourself.’ For a moment he stood, his clear, world-weary gaze on Lymond’s impervious stare; then shut his lips tightly and left.
They all began to get up. ‘Whatever do you think he means?’ said Plummer, drifting past, to Lymond’s bent head. Lymond stood, so suddenly that Plummer took a step back. ‘That surveyors there be, that greedily gorge up their covetous guts,’ he said. ‘What was it that you and Tait were so concerned should not be wasted in Nixon’s chapel?’
Plummer’s elegant body became rigid, but although his eyes flickered to Hercules Tait’s and back, he did not flush. ‘Oh, that,’ he said. ‘There was a very fine little Byzantine plaque on the wall, with a fragment of cross and some angels. The poor man had obviously no idea of its beauty—well, you had only to look at the rubbish he put on his plaster elsewhere. Probably stuck it up to cover a hole. But to anyone who knew.… You must take my word for it,’ said Plummer, getting at last into his stride. ‘It would have been sacrilege to let it burn.’
‘I saw it. It was a silver-gilt Staurotheque,’ said Lymond. ‘About four hundred years old. With a figure of Christ enthroned in gold and enamels, and angels confronted. I travel too, sometimes, you know.… You were, I presume, going to present it to your own Church of St Giles?’
‘I—Of course,’ said Plummer slowly. His eyes, heavy with sleeplessness, took on an aggrieved glaze.
‘But it is, of course, the property of Master Nixon, whom we shall in any case have to recompense for having allowed the destruction of his home. Since therefore you feel that the Church would be a more appreciative owner than Master Nixon,’ said Lymond, his voice always pleasant, ‘it only remains for you to recompense Master Nixon with the full value of the Staurotheque. If you and Hercules Tait will give me a bill on your bankers tomorrow, I shall delight in arranging it. And Plummer!’ said Francis Crawford gently as the architect, pink-cheeked, turned away. ‘Remember, theft is theft, whether committed by old man Turnbull or not.’
He saw them shuffle in time from his room, tired men all, not talking much, and watched Salablanca draw back the stools to their places and put away the board and place a light robe, without being asked, in front of the fire. The sunlight, dappled with shadow, shone in through his big window and fell on the bed, a plain one with white linen sheets, aired and turned back, and a cover of fine, soft blue wool. Lymond got up.
The big, soft-footed Moor, dropping what he was doing, came and stood beside him. ‘¿Quiere Vd comer? ¿Está servido un poquito, poquito …?’
‘No,’ said Lymond. He said in Spanish, ‘Let me offer you some excellent advice. Never issue reproofs under stress. You say too much. On the other hand’—he turned a blank gaze on the Moor—‘I believe the general discussion passed off well enough. I suppose it did. I have very little recollection of it, but I hope it did … ¿Cómo está el Señor Scott?’ he said abruptly.
‘That does not change,’ said the Moor quietly. ‘The Señor will sleep?’
‘I will see him first,’ said Lymond and leaving, walked through to the sick quarters.
Will Scott lay in the big room alone but for Randy Bell, sunk deep in a bedside chair, and Abernethy, cross-legged on the floor. Lymond said at once, ‘Bell, you’re exhausted man, and you can’t do anything. Go and get some sleep,’ and as the doctor, after only a token demur, moved slowly off, Lymond sat himself carefully in his place.
The young laird of Buccleuch had not far now to go. The carroty hair, the orange eyebrows, the sandy lashes, the white stubble of ferocious young beard were all the colour there was on the pillow, and the vigorous frame, reared by the old man at Branxholm to carry on his great name; trained to just deeds and informed by a simple and generous spirit, lay already as still as the Eildons.
But he was breathing yet. Abernethy, his scarred, nut-like face impassive, said, ‘It may take long enough. But he willna wake now.’
‘He might,’ said Lymond. Once Scott had loathed him as some of his captains did still. No, that was an exaggeration. These were clever, experienced men. They appreciated what St Mary’s was, and he had made them laugh, but they didn’t trust him yet as they trusted Gabriel, for example.… ‘The very devil’s officers,’ said Lymond aloud, and from the shock to his nerves realized how near sleep he had been. He got up and walked slowly up and down the sunlit room.
Scott had more than trusted him, in the end. He had freed Lymond four years ago from his outlawry. And he had been ready to share any adventure, on his wedding-day even. Of his fourth wife, old Buccleuch had nothi
ng but toddlers. And Will’s sons were babies yet. But at least, of course, he had sons.…
Lymond stopped walking. There was a curious white haze in the room, and in his head an ululation, a singing of blood under pressure exactly like, he thought vaguely, a child’s bleak, coughing cry. But there were no infants at St Mary’s.
His sense of balance went quite suddenly then. He was conscious of the two violent blows, first on his shoulder and then on his knee, as his body struck the floor, and even that someone already there at his side had broken his fall. But after that, he knew nothing more.
*
Francis Crawford slept in his own bed until dusk. Put there by Salablanca and Archie, he was not conscious of it at the time, and would have lain longer still had he not been forcibly roused. His first impression indeed was of someone shaking him so violently that his exhausted body rebelled and launched him, half-conscious, into a fit of irrepressible coughing.
An outside agency stopped that for him, at once, with a jug of cold water slapped full in his face. Gasping for breath, Francis Crawford sat up, and with both hands cleared and opened his eyes.
It was night. He was in the loose robe that had been thrown in front of his fire: someone had undressed him. And the face before him, the grim, grey, rough-bearded face with every line a rut and every rut a channel of agony, was the face of Buccleuch.
Becoming very still, Lymond let his hands drop.
‘Asleep, were ye?’ said Will Scott’s father, and laid down the empty jug in his grasp. Placing his hands behind his broad back he continued to stand, surveying the splendid blue bed. ‘Well-drunken too, I see,’ he said after a moment. ‘At least ye fairly reek of a very nice make of liquor. Things going well, are they?’