The Disorderly Knights

  ‘You see,’ Lymond had said, towards the end of that meeting at Boghall, ‘she was meant to expose me at Dumbarton. Blacklock didn’t silence her. She should have called out.’

  ‘Then why didn’t she?’ Lady Jenny had asked with tremendous decorum. ‘Did she have reason to hope, perhaps, that she might … tame you yet?’

  ‘It is probably what she told Sir Graham,’ Lymond had replied thoughtfully, his wide eyes on Jenny’s small, handsome face. ‘Myself … I doubt it.’

  Youthful arrogance, Gabriel had said. There was something in it. Francis Crawford knew his own powers very well. And yet he had never, from the beginning, underestimated Gabriel. He was afraid; he had spoken cold-bloodedly at Boghall of his fear of Graham Malett. Not of injury, not even of death, except that if he died, Gabriel would have won. In the duel now reaching its unavoidable climax here, only Lymond, fighting with all the arts he possessed, knew what depended on the outcome. To Gabriel, contemptuous, loftily confident as he must be, this must seem no more than the final brushing aside of the pawn he had selected and toyed with, and which had proved a little more troublesome than he had anticipated. So, ‘Why did you not call for help, Joleta?’ asked Sir Graham; and Lymond, his gaze still locked in the girl’s, said gently, ‘Because she didn’t dare. Adam Blacklock, when he comes, will tell you. I’m sorry, Sir Graham. I was not the first. And I shall not be the last. The child is not mine.’

  Nicolas de Nicolay swallowed and, for a moment, he himself felt a twinge of unaccustomed coldness. Lymond knew that this was not the reason, and that both Gabriel and his sister were aware that it was not. Yet he put it forward, deliberately, as he might be expected in his ignorance to do, thus rubbing, rubbing on the one small spot of friction between Gabriel and his sister. Had she, somewhere among the wildness and the cruelty, found an affinity with Lymond? Would she betray her brother? So Gabriel must be thinking.

  And then, at once, the big, golden knight showed his mastery: showed that Lymond had been right to be afraid. He drew Joleta towards him, and holding her close to his shabby doublet, her silken hair pressed to his breast, he said huskily, ‘They are trying to drive me from you. It isn’t true. I will never believe it. And I will prove it on his body.’ And, looking straight at Lymond above Joleta’s still, downcast profile, he said, ‘Give him his sword.’

  And that could have only one result. The vociferous, calling voices around him rose in raucous dissent and Jerott, a rock in the struggling tide, said, raising his own voice, ‘You can’t lead St Mary’s dead or outlawed. We should present this man to justice for justice to deal with.’

  ‘Provided,’ said de Seurre’s thin, cutting voice at his side, shoulder to shoulder with Plummer, with Tait, with even a white-faced des Roches, holding back with their broad shoulders the impatient, violent surge from behind, ‘Provided that St Mary’s is allowed to execute its own justice first.’

  Only Jerott Blyth hesitated. He did not see de Nicolay begin, burrowing like a desperate mole, to fight his way, sword in hand, to Lymond’s side, knowing that it was too late; Lymond must have known that nothing he might say would be listened to now. Jerott hesitated, and in that second caught a half-smile, incredibly, as Lymond’s blue eyes rested on him for a moment, and a fractional shrug of the shoulders as if he accepted, with resignation, the foolishness of man. Lifting his sword, on equal impulse Jerott reversed it, and slammed it home in the scabbard. Then, turning, he thrust his way back through the crowd until he reached the dais, and leaped up on it.

  ‘Dear Jerott,’ said Lymond. De Nicolay, stopped not far away, saw that he was rather white, but that his eyes, brilliantly blue, were as calm as his voice. ‘He’s going to tell everyone, for the sake of their souls, to put their little hatchets away and use their good, honest Christian fists instead. There he goes. St Mary’s mustn’t murder their commander. An excellent point. I seem to remember making it myself. Nor could they leave the offence unpunished. Pity. The influence of friend Gabriel and his awful, golden face. So.… Oh, Jerott,’ said Lymond, talking half to himself and half to the unfriendly faces straining behind his officers’ linked arms. ‘I thought of it myself, but I hoped you would have an imagination a little less trite. Not the whipping-post!’

  ‘But yes,’ said the Chevalier de Seurre; and releasing Randy Bell’s hand, he stepped aside, followed at once by his fellow-officers, to let the men who had obeyed Lymond for a year pour through to where he stood.

  Or had stood. For suddenly he was up on the table behind him, a candlestick in one hand and a heavy pot in the other, swinging them experimentally, the flame of battle and a kind of wild laughter filling his face. ‘Convicted,’ said Lymond, ‘of using unreverent language to the bailies again, the prisoner resisted arrest, bestowing three bloody noses and a sprained pinky.… Come along, children. You have to get me from here to the whipping-post—oh, Jerott! How conventional !—without killing me on the way. A bagatelle. Vive la bagatelle!’

  But by that time, they were on him. He did more damage than his officers, watching, would have thought possible in the few seconds available. Then they all, Gabriel, white-faced, with Joleta close in his arm, followed the struggling, drunken mob slowly out of the hall and downstairs to the great doors, as they dragged their talkative commander feet first, bumping and rolling, down to the cool darkness outside.

  The post, a massive, manacled cross of oak, stood severe as a schoolmistress in the wide shining reaches of the yard. The rain had stopped. The cressets brought by the provident burned twice, clear and bright, in the still air and on the dark, river-like paving underfoot. The din, so ringingly loud in the hall, became thin and bodiless, interlaced with its own echoes in space, and more frantic as the fresh air began to work on the sherry-sack.

  Twice Jerott and once Lancelot Plummer had interfered when the assault on Lymond had taken a savage fervour that offered small hope for the bagatelle. Jerott thought of that mocking phrase as he beat his men off, cursing. He had looked, as he uttered it, like a man who had won a contest, not lost it. There was about him, in all his viciousness, his waywardness, his insolence, an aspect of sheer, blistering courage that caught Jerott by the throat. It recalled other times to him—he had risked his life in that underground hell in Tripoli, risked it ten times over—and, you could tell by the numbers who now, their passion lessened, dropped from the crowd and hesitated, as he did, on the fringe—you could tell that others were reminded, too, of other occasions here at St Mary’s. But at the core were those whose bitter resentment on Gabriel’s behalf still carried them forward; who had suffered from Lymond’s merciless tongue; who had themselves paid at this post. And those, like Bell and Plummer and Tait and the Knights of the Order, who seeing the finer implications of all he had done, could never condone it.

  Through it all, Francis Crawford himself was quite conscious. They were keen, in any case, to revive him if ever his handling proved more than he could bear. He had half lost consciousness a few times but continued, automatically with a highly specialized form of resistance that taught them a few things, embarrassingly, that even at St Mary’s they had yet to learn. Then they got him to the post and kicked him to keep him quiet while they chained him, and he did call out then, once, and choked, strapped inescapably in their view, with the nausea of the blow.

  ‘So you receive your wages,’ said Graham Malett’s low, beautiful voice. The crowd by the post parted, their work done, and stepped back a little as Graham Malett came forward, a fire-stick in his hand, and relinquishing his sister to Jerott’s arm, walked round to face the man he had befriended.

  Spreadeagled on his own post, his breathing tumultuous, his face livid under its bloodstreaked and battered skin, his jack gone and his fine shirt in shreds, Lymond stared back below his long lashes, choking still from the last blow. ‘… And the world is witness of your lightness, loveless friend that you have been,’ finished Gabriel sombrely.

  ‘Do you wonder,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay’s accented voice quietly at
Jerott’s elbow, ‘do you wonder, perhaps, why M. Crawford chose to come back at all?’

  ‘Wait,’ said Jerott, without listening. Gabriel’s voice, it seemed to him, had gone unaccountably flat, and the big man, his guinea-gold hair bright in the torchlight, was looking, not at Lymond’s face pressed to the wood but below: below the long throat, starkly lit by the torches, the collarbones outlined in gold and smudged black, the chest exposed where the shirt had been torn back to the shoulders, above the strong, leaved rib-cage and the hollow diaphragm, black and brilliant by turn as his disarranged breathing for the moment defied control.

  Cut into the fine skin of the breast, the new scar sharp and black in the light, was a crude attempt at an Eight-Sided Cross. Jerott did not know its history, although Adam Blacklock might have told him, and Lymond’s own family at Midculter certainly could. He only knew, as some of them did, that Lymond had borne the mark, whatever it was, since the day of the Hot Trodd and Will Scott’s death.

  It was perhaps the reminder of that occasion, and of Lymond’s drunken débâcle, that made Graham Malett’s gentle face change in the torch-light; made him draw himself up, as he seldom did, to his great height and stretching his hand, take himself from its hook the strong, knotted thong Lymond was accustomed to use, in time of need, on the backs of his men.

  ‘Pray,’ said Graham Malett to the man chained alone in the dark night before his own house, his own men in a shrinking, shuffling ring of bright faces around. ‘And repent. For we are here, a small sort of knights and squires, to bring you in your vilety to fear God and greet pain as His mentor. Let us taste,’ said Gabriel, his white teeth suddenly clenched, ‘this lewd elegance, this hauteur, this Olympian irony now.’

  And from his great height, his forearms ridged through his sleeves, he brought down the whip.

  XV

  Death of an Illusion

  (St Mary’s, September 1552)

  IT seemed almost certain that Cheese-wame Henderson was dead. He had not replied for a long time when Philippa spoke to him, and when she prodded him as he lay, doubled forward on her horse’s neck, he did not move any more. It would have been sensible to have shouldered him in a respectful way down to the ground and then mounted herself, for her shoes had fallen apart and she was walking among the papery bracken and wiry heather of these trackless Scottish hills in her bare feet. But if he proved not to be dead, Philippa didn’t think that, without his help, she could ever get him back on to the mare. And unless she got them both food and shelter soon, she felt she would probably die herself. And Kate would not approve of that.

  At the thought of it, a watery grin crossed Philippa’s white, swollen face and she stopped again, as she often did, to rest herself and the horse, but mainly to check a childish wandering in her thoughts, and to remind herself sternly of her plans and her duties.

  She had got herself lost on leaving Wauchope Forest: that she knew. Long before now she should have met some kind of cabin or keep: even the homes of thieves like the Turnbulls who infested the district. But she had met no one, and the sun had appeared briefly and gone early, leaving a grey noon that had deepened, with unbelievable ill luck, into fog. In the end she had simply sat down, and although Cheese-wame was very weak, she had got him dismounted and he had started a fire, and they had eaten the last of the food.

  They had stayed by the fire in the dank gloom until the heavy moisture that beaded her hair and sparkled in Cheese-wame’s brown beard turned imperceptibly to rain, and she got Cheese-wame somehow, with his help, on to the mare, which was fresher, and through the clearing mists to a belt of trees, dimly seen in the distance.

  She was walking then, because it was the only way she could hold him properly in the saddle, and it hardly mattered at the time when Henderson’s horse, with a freakish impulse of energy twisted his reins from their knot and vanished soundlessly through the grey web of trees.

  When the rain stopped, visibility was better, or else they were viewing the nameless, rolling land to the north from a different angle; for Henderson, full of constant, hoarse apology and harsh breathing which angered and frightened her both, thought he recognized the terrain. He pointed out a line of march, which was just as well, as he shortly ceased to take any interest and Philippa was left, doggedly marching, with her shoes falling to pieces.

  When night fell, she was still marching, steering by her own good sense and the stars. Tinkers or not, enemies or not, Philippa Somerville was going to stop the first stray cottager, the first stray pedlar, the first gypsy, the first human being on two legs she met, and beg them for help. It was her own deserved good luck, and by no means the incredible coincidence it seemed, that the first person she actually met that September night was Adam Blacklock.

  She met him because he was on his way from that heart-searching meeting with Lymond at Boghall straight to the last meeting-place of the Turnbulls, of whom he intended to ask some very cogent questions indeed. And he found her because he was trained at St Mary’s to read geography with his body at night like a bat, and heard but could not interpret the stumbling step of a tired and heavily loaded horse, accompanied by the shuffling, clattering tread of a walker also tired, and short of leg, and most lamentably shod.

  Adam Blacklock turned his horse from the causeway and rode gently, his hand on his sword, in the direction of the noise.

  It stopped. But the tableau he saw silhouetted against the pale rocks of the hill was that of a drooping horse with a man laid across it, and beside it a slight figure which must be a woman’s. He said, pitching his voice clearly and quietly across the small, wild sounds of the night, ‘Are you in trouble? Don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm. But if you are, perhaps I may help.’

  The tone was civilized, the voice kindly, the offer unimpeachable. Philippa Somerville, whom little daunted, laid her poor swollen face on the wet flanks of her mare and burst into uncontrollable tears.

  *

  After the whipping had gone on for quite some time, Joleta was sick, and Randy Bell, after a hesitant glance at her brother, took her to lie, exhausted, on his coat on the cold steps. At the same time Jerott Blyth, one hand on his arm, tried to make Gabriel stop.

  It was necessary. Doing his caravans in the Mediterranean, Jerott had seen men flogged to death. He knew the process, stage by stage, and remembered that Lymond, too, must know it; must often have seen men die, and must have suffered flogging himself, often enough, in his days at the oars.

  So, unlike most men, he must know exactly what he could bear. You had privacy, to begin with. Your back was to your chastiser. As long as you could hold your head up, pressed hard against the cold post, your agony was your own also. You braced yourself for each stroke, and in the end exorcised the pain with your voice.

  Francis Crawford did not move when Gabriel raised his arm for the first stroke; only his closed lids tightened, a fraction, as it fell. Before Jerott’s fascinated eyes, the thong rose and then, curling, fell again, and then for a third time with no more effect. Lymond must, surely, be experiencing the agony—the three livid weals across his back, slowly welling with blood, testified to that. But he had, it would seem, divorced himself by some effort of will from the context.

  Gabriel, perhaps, had reached some such conclusion too, but it did not suggest to him that his arm should falter. Divine as some punishing God, his fist rose and fell, and around him, released by his own violence from his own rules, the sherry-sack reappeared joyously, and sank from throat to throat, and the whole restored salon des singes, observed Nicolas de Nicolay, watching wanly himself, in some druidical frenzy, flung themselves capering and bawling and singing round the bright silent post, and roared at the sound of each blow.

  For how long, thought Nicolas de Nicolay, had Graham Malett longed to do just this thing? For twelve long months Lymond had held out against him. For a year he had resisted the mightiest blandishments known to man; returned all Gabriel’s advances with raillery; obstructed all Graham Malett’s confident plans and fin
ally, shown a courage and a stamina under constant, devious attack that must have maddened this great god of a man, so contemptuous of his fellows.

  And through it all until now, neither man had betrayed his true mind. Rather than spread this evil, Lymond had fought it himself, until he had the means to destroy it. And only now, secure in his triumph, borne on this wave of hatred, of drunken emotion so neatly pre-formed, with Lymond’s standing here at St Mary’s almost totally destroyed and the Queen Dowager’s wrath pending—only now was Sir Graham able, in public, to void some of his impotent anger in open chastisement.

  Contentedly, the whip whined and thudded until, at last, Graham Malett had what he wanted. The immunity broke, or could hold out no longer. When Gabriel’s next, careful blow fell Lymond moved, in spite of himself, his face suddenly taut, and Gabriel, his lips drawn back in the smile known throughout the Christian world, increased at once the speed of his blows.

  From then on, the progression was routine: were you a man of iron, you could not avoid it. The recoil, in silence, that could no longer be controlled; the shuddering intake of breath which was all one’s mechanism could contrive between each blind onslaught of pain … the nausea and the dizziness, coming more and more often, and cured, sharply and drowningly, by shrewdly applied pails of cold water, coursing down, meddling curiously with the exposed red sponge of one’s back.

  It was then that Joleta was ill, and Jerott, saying “That’s enough!’ seized Gabriel’s iron arm and got, for his pains, the thonged lash full over the face.

  Jerott fell back gasping, his hand over his cheek. He saw that the blow had been perfectly automatic, that Gabriel was hardly more conscious of it than if he had brushed off a gnat. And to a chorus of harrowing groans, some encouraging, some mellowly pained, Graham Malett, his fine face all suffused, turned back to the post, and raising his arm, with all his might brought down the thong, again and again, on his enemy’s back.