His face pale, the fire of appeal in his blue eyes, Graham Malett turned to the Dowager. ‘Forgive me,’ he said again. ‘But you do not know what you are destroying. Will you not let us have this final chance? The King of France will receive a weapon for which he will be in your debt all his life. And I myself will stand surety for Mr Crawford until the expedition leaves.’
‘You are eloquent.’ The Queen Dowager was abrupt. ‘The force you have seen fit to mention may not set sail until autumn.’
‘Then will you not trust us, on my personal bond, until then?’
‘My God,’ said Lymond then, and the sheer incredulity of the tone betrayed, at last, the violence of his true feelings. ‘May I speak, do you think? I don’t recall having begged anyone to trust me, or to give me a last chance, or even to stand selfless bond to me. Nor do I negotiate at second hand.’
As suddenly as his temper flared, he had it controlled. ‘It is even possible,’ said Lymond thoughtfully, ‘that the Queen Dowager might have been about to put forward this proposal herself?’
There was a little pause. ‘Does this matter?’ said the Queen Dowager at length. Within each eyebrow was a sharp line of displeasure. She had not wished, Margaret guessed, for the matter of the French expedition to be raised yet in public. Sir Graham would earn a reprimand, whatever his rank, for that.
‘You are fortunate,’ said Mary of Guise to Lymond, ‘in having a friend so staunch, despite your discourtesy towards him. I put this to you at first hand therefore. Would you and your army join such an expedition, placing yourselves under my chosen leader’—(‘Cassillis,’ said Gabriel, quickly, in Lymond’s ear)—‘and undertake both to refrain from all fighting in the weeks before such an army would leave, and to accept as final my eventual decision as to whether you and your company should return?’
To Margaret’s amazement, Lymond appeared to be giving it thought. ‘If during this interval we were attacked, might we defend ourselves?’ he inquired.
‘If you could prove that you fought in self-defence. Understand her Grace,’ said le Seigneur d’Oisel et de Villeparisis forcefully. ‘There is to be no trouble while you wait at St Mary’s. You may help, yes. You may protect, yes. You may train as you wish, and prepare your arms. But no bloodshed. No hostile or criminal action. Or I shall be forced to muster my garrisons against you and, as her Grace has said, your men would be dispersed and you yourself taken into custody. As for the Scottish expedition, I can offer noble prosspects and no small fees. Details I cannot yet give, but I can assure you that the King’s Majesty’s wars will be renowned, and full of honour to be won.’
‘I am subjugated,’ said Lymond drily.
‘You would agree to those terms?’
‘I should hate to disband Randy Bell,’ said Lymond. ‘The Flowers of the Forest would be Flowers no more.’
‘Do you agree?’
‘Yes,’ said Lymond cheerfully. ‘Provided that Sir Graham comes formally lawburrows that neither the Queen Dowager nor yourself will suffer for it. He’s standing surety, remember; not I.’
Soon after that, it was over. Adam Blacklock, informed by Gabriel of the outcome, packed his bags and took his leave to meet Lymond, as instructed, at the livery stables. Lymond, having brought his baggage from Creich that morning, was already there, leavetaking behind him. He had spoken warmly to Robert Beaton and Margaret Erskine, and fleetingly to Gabriel himself. Graham Malett was to stay at Falkland for some days yet. Then, as he mentioned with a kind of anxious deprecation, he was to return to St Mary’s to help Lymond maintain the Queen’s peace. He did not say, and Lymond did not discover, that early that morning he had had a guarded exchange with the departing Cormac O’Connor; nor did he mention the name of Oonagh O’Dwyer that day.
When Adam Blacklock got to the stables, a hundred questions stuttering to his tongue, Lymond was standing inside, next to his horse, reading a letter with one arm on the pommel. Beside him was a lad Adam knew well from the group of messengers at St Mary’s. ‘News?’ Blacklock said. And then, taking a closer look at Lymond’s face, ‘Trouble?’
For a moment more, Lymond read on, saying nothing. Then, quickly, he pushed the pages into his doublet, checked his girths, swung into the saddle, and throwing a silver coin to the boy said, ‘Well done. Home tomorrow, when you’ve had a night’s rest. Leave the girls alone—they’ve sorrows enough. Adam!’
‘Yes?’ He had led out his horse, and was busy saddling her. Silently Salablanca, slipping from Lymond’s side, took the task from him and began methodically strapping on Adam’s bags, his own mule and the spare saddle-horse waiting patiently, while Blacklock crossed to where Lymond sat.
‘Trouble,’ said Lymond, confirming. ‘I’ve paid the reckoning for us both. Quietly through the town, and then ride for your life. For in this country be many white elephants without number, and of unicorns and of lions of many manners.’
‘White elephants such as what?’ said Blacklock, his voice insouciant, his hand suddenly unsteady.
‘Such as Jock Thompson, pirate,’ said Lymond. ‘And Jim Logan, of the same brethren, who ran the Irish customars out to the Magdalena, off the Head of Howth. And half the officers of St Mary’s, who might be in Dublin jail this moment accused of smuggling gunpowder to the Irish rebels, except that they sank the customs boat, burst up Logan’s ship, killed six of Logan’s best men, and sailed the Magdalena rejoicing back to Dumbarton with all Logan’s cargo, including his contraband.’
Adam Blacklock’s grey eyes were bright and steady on Lymond’s. ‘Sir Graham said that if there were any more incidents the Dowager had threatened to break you.’
‘Yes. Well. This isn’t an incident, it’s a cataclysm,’ said Lymond. ‘It’s more than that. It’s the end of a nightmare. One way or the other. Come, Adam. You must be in time to draw the death mask of St Mary’s.’
‘How long will it take the news to reach the palace?’ Adam asked. All three pacing soberly through the little town, spoke in murmurs.
‘If the garrison at Dumbarton get to hear of it … say another day only. If Thompson is discreet, and I think he will be, it will go from Dublin to London, and thence here. Two weeks, then. If the expeditionary force goes in September—a month from now say—the Queen Dowager has two further weeks in which to—what’s the phrase?—break us. If she wants to. And catch me. If she can.’
There was a short silence, during which they reached the open country, and then a long interval, filled breathlessly by some very fast riding indeed. At the first pause for rest, ‘It really is exceedingly neat,’ said Lymond, apparently in the belief that he was continuing the conversation, but without explaining in the least. His tone was one of deepest admiration. He said, walking round and round Adam as the artist lay, arms outflung in the deep grass, a bannock half-eaten on his chest, ‘And Joleta.’
It was the last name Blacklock expected to hear. He raised a hand, removed the bannock slowly from his jerkin, and took a bite. ‘Yes?’
‘Oh, come on, Adam,’ said Lymond with derision, standing over him. ‘You’re an artist. You saw her at Dumbarton. Sixteen, convent-bred and the light of Gabriel’s life. Family pride kept my brother from breaking the awful news to Graham Malett, but you have no reason to hold back. Yet you haven’t told him of my night with his sister, have you? Why?’
Some crumbs from the scone had got into his windpipe. When he had finished choking Adam sat up, scarlet, with tears in his eyes. ‘It was none of my f-f … none of my business,’ he said.
‘Because you saw what I did,’ said Lymond gently. ‘What did you see, Adam?’
‘All right,’ said Blacklock suddenly and angrily. He got to his knees, brushing crumbs from the leather, and then rose face to face with Lymond. Neither man gave way.
‘All right,’ Adam repeated grimly. ‘When I saw Joleta in Dumbarton that night she was pregnant, and it wasn’t her first pregnancy at that.’
‘Adam!’ Lymond said; then stopped, and said in a more moderate tone, ‘
The eye of the master. You may have, from my personal storehouse, pens, ink, paper, colours, oils and pregnant women to sketch in unlimited supply from now until your dotage. She was not a virgin, and she had had a baby. She was also pregnant. Which makes her about five months gone with the baby she is going to foist on me.… No wonder Sybilla noticed.’
Adam sat down, confused. ‘How do you know she’s going to foist it on you?’
‘Because she has done everything in her power, since I came, first to attract me, and then when that failed, to compromise me, willy-nilly.’ He smiled faintly. ‘That night at Dumbarton was a classic of its kind. She had hopes still, I think, of enslaving me despite myself with her charms. And I probably thought the same. We both found we were mistaken. It had its moments; but she has the mind and morals of a jungle cat. She didn’t enjoy meeting … another of the same.’
‘So she wants to take her revenge?’
‘She has threatened that, unless I marry her, to Gabriel’s fond applause, she will name me as her seducer. Grand climax to Gabriel’s loving comradeship with Crawford of Lymond.’
‘And to your control over St Mary’s,’ said Adam Blacklock slowly. ‘She and Gabriel are mystic symbols of fortune to at least half your men. One whisper of this, and they’ll leave you.’
‘It’ll be more than a whisper by mid-September,’ said Lymond, calculating. ‘Even if she wears tablecloths.… I wonder whose it is?’
‘It isn’t yours?’ asked Adam. But he knew already, from that cool ‘What are you doing here?’ heard that night in Dumbarton, that it was not.
‘No. And could be proved not to be, I suppose. But that doesn’t matter a damn in an emotional crisis of that kind. It’ll be too late when they turn out to be baby Berbers, or a litter of Moors. Poor bastards. Sybilla will do something for them.’
‘My advice,’ said Adam thoughtfully, ‘would be to get your mother to immure her in a convent for a very long time.’
‘The first thing Gabriel would do is visit her,’ Lymond said. From defiant jubilation he had become quiet. ‘It’s odd to think that in four weeks, five at the most, it will all be over. St Mary’s won’t exist. Or it will continue under my command, without Gabriel. Or under Gabriel, without me. How would you enjoy fighting under Graham Malett, Adam?’
Adam Blacklock looked as levelly as he knew how into Lymond’s bright blue eyes. ‘So it’s come, has it?’ he said slowly. ‘This is what you have been afraid of, all along? It has to be one or other of you; it can’t be both. Graham Malett never will have you at his side.’
‘Yes, it has come,’ said Lymond. He had moved away again, without attending to Blacklock, and his voice was curt. ‘The Queen Dowager has successfully brought it to a head, but the final choice won’t be hers. It will lie with St Mary’s, and the excellence or otherwise of our work there. If I have made men, they will act like men.’
‘You may be a man, and fear God still,’ said Adam steadily.
Lymond’s face, too, was wholly sober as he looked away, over the low hills of Fife. ‘I know But I, too, learned a lesson in Malta. Never mind their eyes.… Watch their hands! Adam, I have to go to Midculter to see Joleta. Then I am moving across to Boghall, where Margaret Erskine should be joining her mother shortly to wait for me. I have asked a number of other people to meet me there too. If you want to come with them, I should … welcome you. If you prefer to go straight to St Mary’s, I shall understand. All I ask is that you say nothing of the gathering at Boghall. In any case, our ways part now. I am going home alone.’
Adam Blacklock looked down at his hands. ‘Small, subversive gatherings in corners? Not St Mary’s as we knew it.’
Lymond’s answering gaze was disconcertingly sharp. ‘But St Mary’s never was an army,’ he said. ‘Only a battlefield. You must have realized that?’
XIII
The Axe Is Turned on Itself
(Midculter, Flaw Volleys, Boghall, September 1552)
IN the meantime, the unease which had settled on St Mary’s, Falkland and several points on the Irish seaboard had assumed, at Midculter, the proportions of plague. Swirling furiously among the stairs and corridors of her exquisite home like a small and angry white bat Sybilla, Dowager Lady Culter, was not above spitting at her unfortunate son when he chose to sit down in his own great hall to take his boots off.
‘If Madge Mumblecrust comes down those stairs once again for a morsel of fowl’s liver with ginger, or pressed meats with almond-milk, I shall retire to a little wicker house in the forest and cast spells which will sink Venice into the sea for ever, and Madame Donati with it. The Church,’ said Sybilla definitely, ‘should excommunicate girls who do not replace lids on sticky jars and wash their hair every day with the best towels.’
‘She’s getting on your nerves,’ said Richard perceptively. ‘Why doesn’t she come down and go out? It’s a month since she immured herself up there. She’ll make herself ill.’
Sybilla sat down. If her laughter was a shade hysterical, at least it was laughter. When she had recovered, she said, ‘Yes. Well. She doesn’t want to be seen, my dear.’
‘Why not?’ said Richard. He thought of Joleta as he had last seen her a month ago, when the child had first become noticeable, and Sybilla, grimly, had broken the news to him. Robed in white, her shining hair tumbling over her arms, by some magic the girl had kept intact that untouched, miraculous grace. In all those weeks she had said nothing that was not gentle about his brother Francis. And when Sybilla had questioned her, her own face stiff and pale, Joleta had answered simply, without recriminations. Only, when Lady Culter’s anger for a moment showed through, the girl’s eyes had filled with tears.
Then she had made them all promise to say nothing to Graham Malett until Francis had been told. But then Francis had been told, and had done nothing about it. So, ‘Why doesn’t she want to be seen?’ said Richard irritably. ‘In three months, everyone will know anyway.’ Then, at the expression on his mother’s face, he put down abruptly the boot he had just hauled off, and crossing the polished floor to her softly, knelt at her feet. ‘Look … It is just possible to understand it, even if you can’t forgive. She has a beauty that—that—Any man would want to do just what he did. The difference is that, being Francis and owning no rule and no master, he did it. And because she loves him, she gave him the chance.’
‘Owning no master. That’s the trouble, isn’t it?’ said Sybilla suddenly. In her lap, her hands, so like her younger son’s, were pressed together, white and hard. ‘He looked for one, I would guess, in Malta.’
‘He found one,’ said Richard quietly. ‘But he cannot acknowledge it.’ He smiled at her, and rising to his feet, put out his hands and drew her to hers. ‘If he walked in just now and asked Joleta to marry him, what would you do?’
‘Faint,’ said Sybilla succinctly.
*
Later, in the balm of the open air, Richard was watching his ploughing, the oxen straining in the broad fields under the clouds of seagulls, the glistening, fresh brown earth slow-surging from the coulter, when the low drum of hooves in the clear air told of two horsemen coming from the east. A moment later, someone in a distant field raised a shout of greeting, and he saw the felt and leather helms of his trenchers bob and turn. Someone they all knew, someone belonging to the castle.… Francis, his yellow head bare, and the big, silent Spanish Moor behind him. Lord Culter wondered, his muscles aching already in anticipation of the ordeal ahead, what gay solution Lymond would produce to this problem. Adoption … abortion … or marriage, perhaps? Waiting, hard-eyed, for him by the roadside, ‘You’re a little late?’ Richard said to his brother.
Lymond’s face, so like Sybilla’s, brightened into untrustworthy joy. ‘Glory be, she’s had a miscarriage!’ he said. At which Richard, following silently on foot up to the castle, knew that they were about to have a particularly disagreeable afternoon.
The hall, with its painted roof and elegant carvings and its sad, bovine picture of the second Lord Cult
er, Sybilla’s husband, was filled with sunshine when the Dowager entered at Richard’s call. Barely glancing at her younger son she merely said, ‘I think, Richard, that Joleta should be brought here before we attempt to discuss anything. Unless, Francis, you have any valid objections?’
Lymond looked astonished. ‘I wouldn’t dare,’ he said. ‘Here I am, lying about being amended in corners. It is my day for being humble.’
‘It is your day, as always, for being impertinent,’ said Sybilla sharply. ‘Bring her, Richard.’
In the end Madame Donati brought the child down and, formidable in padded black, held her as she faced them all. Alone all the long day in her bedchamber, Joleta had laced white ribbons in her silk-apricot hair, and ribbons glinted in the pure voile of her dress. She was big with child. But above the turgid, womanly mound, shawled but cruelly undisguised by the white, childish dress, Joleta’s face was blinding in its happiness. Setting aside her duenna’s hands, with gentle care, she walked slowly and heavily towards Francis Crawford.
And cool, slender, expensive, that young man stared not at her but at that pathetic, white-bellied distention. ‘My God, Mother,’ he said, lively interest contending with horror in his voice. ‘There’s more than one small mistake there. She’s setting a clutch.’
For their day and age, the Crawfords were a sophisticated family. But this was a callousness unknown in their halls. Joleta gave one short cry only, and then stopped it with her hands. Sybilla gasped as if he had winded her; and Richard Crawford, turning on his brother, brought his arm up in a gesture meant to drive some manners forcibly into his head.
Lymond who, after all, had more warning than anyone, ducked expertly and ran instead, with a stinging smack, into the flat of Evangelista Donati’s hand. ‘Whoremonger!’ said Joleta’s duenna in a voice rising to a scream. ‘Anti-Christ! Wolf! Do we wish to see you? Do we wish to speak to you? Go die in a cesspool, misbegot hog!’ And as Lymond, rocked by the unexpectedness of the blow, sat down with extreme suddenness in the chair just behind him and began maddeningly to laugh, Joleta ran, draggingly, to the door.