This time there was a long pause. Lymond’s face, again without expression, was turned to the long windows, where the cooling lacquers of dusk had overlaid the bright colours. ‘Turn away this great, militant monk, famous throughout Christendom? Yes, I might have done that. I would have lost most of my best men, and all the Knights of St John, and the others would have every reason to believe me afraid of his stature. But remember—or try to imagine—that I knew him, incredibly, as a man of evil intent: clever, powerful and basking in his gift for inspiring and handling his fellow-mortals.
‘Perhaps, once, he was all he appears to be. Perhaps he plumbed too early the false places of religion and of violence, perhaps he grew bored with his great skills; perhaps, as he once confessed to me, the sheer love of power corrupted what was never very difficult to corrupt.… Perhaps he is insane. But he is not what he seems. He is a great and dangerous man; and if I had turned him from St Mary’s do you think he would have accepted that for a moment? He had no fear, even on the dramatic night of the fuel crisis, that I would allow him to go. On the other hand, if I hadn’t taken a firm hold of the command on that night, I should have lost it to Malett. From then on, he was bound to try to get rid of me. He has refused an offer by the Queen Dowager to depose me, but only because he will be surer of the support of all St Mary’s when I have gone. His prize after all is to be Scotland, so ludicrously vulnerable during the Regency, so strategic in position, so potentially powerful. Failing St Mary’s, he would have found his army elsewhere, and fashioned it out of men less expendable than I am, or less intelligent than you.
‘I had,’ said Lymond, his eyes still remote on the glass, ‘really only two alternatives. I could have killed Graham Malett, or fought him. I should perhaps have killed him; but it would have been without proof and without reason, and I don’t, I suppose, any more than the next man desire to trespass out of this uncertain world through a noose in New Bigging Street. And it would have been the end of St Mary’s and I had—I have—great hopes of St Mary’s. So—I elected to fight. I have probably lost.’
The faces round the table now were ghosts in the dusk, only shapes: long and short-haired, bald, snooded, above shoulders padded, buckled, sheathed in worn leather. No one spoke, though Thompson shifted explosively in his chair and pressing one hand on the table, looked round. ‘No principles and no philosophy,’ said Sybilla, Dowager Lady Culter suddenly, her voice soft and derisive as she quoted his own account of the aims of St Mary’s. ‘And for money alone.’
‘Dragut Rais knew, did he not?’ said Nicolay. ‘You have not asked me what I know of Malta and Tripoli.’
‘Later, if you will,’ said Lymond, his voice flat. Speaking, suddenly, was an obvious effort, but his manner was still, like Sybilla’s, uncompromisingly cold. ‘Dragut Rais knew, yes. After all, Malett was working for him. But only Jerott, perhaps, would fully understand. The case here must stand or fall by what we can prove in Scotland. The case for the Government is a different matter. But I cannot move without proof, and I have come, at last, to the point where I cannot get proof without help. It is too near the end for me.’
‘I see.’ It was Guthrie’s quiet voice. ‘Naturally. If what you say is true, he can’t afford to let you live, can he? Your death would be persuasive, of course, but a pity.’
Lymond’s half-smile could be felt in the dusk. ‘I must confess, it would be more … convenient if I could convince you now. If not, there is one thing at least you can do. Richard.… If anything happens to me, Lymond will be your property. Do what the Queen Mother has threatened to do. Blow it up. Dismantle the cabins and all the encampment, disperse the stock, destroy the weapons. It was created with my money; it is not Graham Malett’s or the Queen Dowager’s, it is mine. I would forgive no one, least of all a man of my own blood, if something I had created became a knife at the throat of my own country. And if you are then convinced, pursue Gabriel; pursue him to the ends of the earth, for wherever he is, there will be nothing but waste.’
‘No,’ said Lord Culter, and stood up.
The emotionless voice beside Adam Blacklock stopped, and he felt, in the gloom, Lymond give some movement, at once controlled. It was odd, Adam thought, that Lymond’s harshest opponent should be his brother, and that each man had such power to hurt the other.
A sound at the door made him look round again. It was Margaret again, with the three men, each bearing a taper. Light ran round the room from bracket to bracket, garlanding the tapestried walls, turning the table into a ruddy pool round which the bright, fleshy faces calyxed in linen and gauze and fancy Swiss bobbin-lace looked with surmise and relief, each to the other. ‘How would the other verdicts run?’ thought Adam. Margaret Erskine, pale and big-eyed, was already biased against Gabriel, and was a loyal adherent of Lymond’s, Adam knew, for many years now. Sybilla, for all her sharp, unsentimental brain, was a kindred soul with her younger son, and Lady Jenny from jealousy alone would support any man who maligned Joleta. Add Janet Beaton and a natural wish to find someone—anyone—who would exorcise the misery of her stepson’s death, and you could say that the women were on Francis Crawford’s side.
One might have expected as much, and in the counsels of the Dowager and the power they could bring him in men—the Flemings, the Grahams, the Scotts—this was not a trifle. But Adam knew, and Lymond knew, that unless he had convinced these men—Fergie Hoddim, Alec Guthrie, Thompson who had no principles you could appeal to, his own brother Culter and, Adam supposed, he himself whom Lymond had trusted some of the way at least, and whose self-respect he had rescued by trusting him.… Unless he had induced these men by logic, by half-proofs, by the compressed, powerful current of the prosecution thus coldly concluded to believe that what he said was correct, he was beaten at last.
And on Lymond’s face, clearly seen for the first time since Richard had made his disclaimer, you could tell that he had braced himself to meet the first proof of his failure. Elbows on the table, chin propped on his two thumbs, he sat quietly, his lashes lowered, his lips pressed against his interlaced fingers. He did not move again when Richard repeated more clearly, ‘No. There will be no call to pursue Graham Malett then or any time in the future. We must cut him down now.’
The heavy lids lifted. After a long moment, Lymond lowered his hands with great care from his face to the table, and said, ‘Why?’ Beside him, Adam noticed, Sybilla’s blue eyes were running with tears.
There was mild impatience on Lord Culter’s pleasant, undistinguished face. ‘Because you have done all that skill could devise to present a detached case, and failed. Because you are asking for help, and you hate asking for help. Because of our mother’s evidence, and Blacklock’s evidence, and Margaret’s evidence, and the fact that you asked Guthrie and Hoddim and the fact that they came. This may be,’ said Richard with unexpected wry humour, ‘a crusade conducted by the Culter family solo in a band of dissentients, but I am with you.’
‘Reasonably well put,’ said Fergie Hoddim, ‘You could add that the arguments were extremely cogent; and that we have the further testimony, not yet put forward, of a most estimable witness in M. de Nicolay. There is a basis for further examination; there is no doubt of that. Even a case for forethocht felony, forthwith.’
‘Blacklock?’ Richard said.
‘I have known for some time,’ Adam said. It seemed as if he had known it for ever; and that with trust had gone all that he had ever believed.
‘And Guthrie?’
Alec Guthrie, whose profession was arms and whose first loves were honesty and justice and human rights, said, ‘I have weighed these two men also, long before today. What we all must remember, and keep remembering, is that this is not the Church against the rebellious intellect, just as it is not a struggle of Christian values perverted against a great faith.’ Alec Guthrie paused and, his eyes on Lymond’s still face, grinned.
‘The argument got a bit specious to my mind at times: if there’s a man in the district with a soul white as a burde
claith, it’s not Francis Crawford. But in Graham Reid Malett goes a monk who is false as a diamond of Canada. I’ll join your verloren hoop.’
‘And I!’ said Thompson, and crashed his knotted fist on the board so that the empty cups rattled. And as Richard sat down, satisfaction on his face, and the women nodded agreement, Lymond spoke calmly.
‘We are, then, unanimous. We are high-handed together; and if we do the Church wrong, then we cough together in hell. There are questions you will wish to ask of myself and de Nicolay, and tasks I have to burden you with. These will do later. There is food coming, I am told. Let us forget Graham Malett, briefly, till after that.’
It was over. Stretching painfully, Adam wondered if his aching back were his alone, or shared by them all. The tension had been at times as much as he could stand; the summing-up, now he came to think of it, deliberately brief.
At his side, Lymond rose. They were all getting up, stamping their feet, smiling, a little subdued because of what they had learned and what they had undertaken. Thompson, heaving up from beside Sybilla, reached out a hairy wrist to thump her son’s back.
But Lymond had gone, moving unnoticed between chair and table and the disordered, discoursing company in the flickering light. The door clicked and Adam, shouldering swiftly towards it passed Archie Abernethy, thoughtfully chewing a chicken bone. The former Keeper removed it, revealing the gap-toothed cavity of his mouth, and said, ‘In a moment, sir. He hasn’t gone far.’ Adam opened the door.
It was true. A little below him, where the stair widened to accommodate a window embrasure, Lymond had stopped to look through the panes, one hand gripping the woodwork.
The fingers of that hand were white with pressure. Adam Blacklock stepped back quickly from his vantage point, and silently closing the big doors, walked round the table to find Sybilla, and salute her.
XIV
The Axe Falls
(St Mary’s, September 1552)
CHEESE-WAME HENDERSON was a big man, despite the pot-belly that gave him his name. He was not the first of his family to serve the Somervilles; he had grown up with the kind severities of Gideon and worshipped his widow Kate. But most of all, he was marshmallow in the hands of Philippa, whom he had taught to look after her ponies and pets, and who had taught him in return the family brand of acid and affectionate humour.
When Philippa had first demanded his help in eluding Kate and travelling to St Mary’s, he had indignantly refused. He was there now because he had discovered, to his astonishment, that she was desperate, and perfectly capable of going without him. Why she had got it into her young head she must see this man Crawford, Cheese-wame didn’t know. But after pointing out bitterly that (a) he would lose his job; (b) the rogues in the Debatable would kill them, (c) that she would catch her death of cold and (d) that Kate would never speak to either of them again, he went, his belt filled with knives and her belongings as well as his own in the two saddlebags behind his powerful thighs, while Philippa rode sedately beside him on her smaller horse, green with excitement, with her father’s pistol tied to her waist like a ship’s log and banging against her thin knees.
They had a long way to go. For September, it was a mild night, and the reeking warmth of her horse and the steady trot pioneered by Cheese-wame, who had no desire to be caught by his fellow-servants before the lass had got whatever it was she wanted, kept Philippa warm. Riding beside the waters of the North Tyne, the fallen leaves sodden below her mare’s busy hooves and Henderson’s comforting bulk beside her, and his big hand ready to steady hers on the reins, Philippa felt her stomach turn, again, at what she had decided to do.
After mature reflection; on information received; from the wisdom of her encroaching years, she had reached the conclusion that she had made a false judgement.
Once, long ago, Francis Crawford had reduced her to terror and, the episode over, she had suffered to find that for Kate, apparently, no reason suggested itself against making that same Francis Crawford her friend.
He was not Philippa’s friend. She had made that clear, and, to be fair, he had respected it. He had even, when you thought of it, curtailed his visits to Kate, although Kate’s studied lack of comment on this served only to make Philippa angrier.
He had been nasty at Boghall. He had hit her at Liddel Keep. He had stopped her going anywhere for weeks.
He had saved her life.
That was indisputable.
He had been effective over poor Trotty Luckup, while she had been pretty rude, and he hadn’t forced himself on her; and he had made her warm with his cloak.
He had gone to Liddel Keep expressly to warn her, and when she had been pig-headed about leaving (Kate was right) he had done the only thing possible to make her.
And then he had come to Flaw Valleys for nothing but to make sure of her safety, and he had been so tired that Kate had cried after he had gone. And then it had suddenly struck her, firmly and deeply in her shamefully flat chest, so that her heart thumped and her eyes filled with tears, that maybe she was wrong. Put together everything you knew of Francis Crawford. Put together what you had heard at Boghall and at Midculter, what you had seen at Flaw Valleys, and it all added up to one enormous, soul-crushing entity.
She had been wrong. She did not understand him; she had never met anyone like him; she was only beginning to glimpse what Kate, poor maligned Kate, must have seen all these years under the talk. But the fact remained that he had gone out of his way to protect her, and she had put his life in jeopardy in return.
A year ago this month, on his deathbed, Sir Thomas Erskine had given her a message for Lymond. It was his right to have it. And whatever his anger at the delay, whatever danger they faced on the journey, she was firmly resolved to deliver it. Lion-hearted; her tremors braced with virtue, Philippa trotted on.
At Tarset they stopped for some bread and cheese that Henderson had prudently packed in his saddlebag, and drank burn water although Cheese-wame had, she noticed, been providential in this respect also and provided himself with a serviceable corked bladder from which he drank by the little flickering fire he had made, his Adam’s apple moving up and down. But for the gentle sound of beasts cropping in the commonlands they had passed, it was totally quiet, now their ears were free of the noisy river, bubbling and shearing high in its banks. Picking their way back to it after their rest, Cheese-wame halted once, his hand on her arm, and they both listened, but the sound, whatever it was, had stopped, and soon they remounted and went on their way.
They were to ride all night, Cheese-wame said; and by dawn they might be past the Cheviot Hills and into Scotland itself, where they could look for a small inn in Liddesdale to rest. If Mistress Somerville sent after them, she would never think of looking so far. Then tomorrow afternoon, not to tire the little mistress, they would ride to Hawick and stop at Buccleuch’s house of Branxholm, where she would be welcomed and not made to go home. Then, after a night’s rest, they would take her to St Mary’s.
It seemed to Philippa a good programme, apart from the allowance of rest for the little mistress, which was excessive, she felt. But long before her mare, now slowed to a walk, had begun to climb the long, grey reaches of the Border, she found creeping into her mind a little, gem-like fantasy of herself, in her thickest white nightie, and even her bedsocks, and even a hot brick as well, curled up on her mattress filled with Bass Rock feathers, under her striped woollen blankets and her silky cotton-stuffed quilt, with the curtains run all round the rods and a candle beside the bed, and a book, and nothing else except her own warm, breathed-out air. ‘I’ve got a blister on my bottom,’ said Philippa. ‘Let’s sing a long song. A rude one would be nice.’ And because Cheese-wame Henderson was a simple man, as well as a nice one, they sang.
The big tinker had a hill pony, unshod, with feet like a baby’s. On the soft ground the little, slippered beat could hardly be heard, and he had wrapped the bit and stirrups with fragments of rag. He travelled light; all his worldly possessions buried caref
ully in a marked spot by Tyneside, and carried only a bit of sacking with some food in it, and a long knife, and a blackthorn club, tied to the saddle.
He took his time. He wanted to think about Cheese-wame Henderson, to begin with; and he liked privacy for his violence, well away from the commerce of Northumberland, where sheltering nature did half the job for you. So he followed carefully, and drew back at Tilsit where, not far away, the cottagers were too nosy; and then, dropping back as the river thinned and quietened, he pattered gently behind Philippa and Cheese-wame, waiting his moment.
*
At Boghall the meeting was over very quickly, once they had eaten. Lymond had left first, to go straight to St Mary’s, and Nicolas de Nicolay was to follow shortly. Janet, with Tosh in attendance, had wanted to return to Branxholm, and Lady Jenny, knowing her anxiety about Wat, let her go. Alec Guthrie had gone with her. And Thompson, Hoddim and Blacklock had dispersed also, with business to do.
Riding home with her older son silent beside her, Sybilla showed despite herself the strain of the past hours. She had been bitterly concerned about Francis returning to St Mary’s now. Collect your evidence by all means, she had argued; and when you have it complete, take it to the Queen Dowager and let her act. But why go back yourself, when you know that the trap is about to close? Gabriel is about to make his definitive bid for leadership with the help of Joleta. The Queen Dowager, when she hears about the Magdalena, will be forced for the sake of peace with England to support him. Why risk your life?