‘But on the other hand,’ said Guthrie coolly, ‘he’ll be in no condition to put his madness into effect. I’m sure Mr Blyth is right. To add remorse to Mr Blyth’s present burdens would, I am sure, be intolerable. Let’s keep it simple. Get out.’
For a moment more, Jerott Blyth hesitated. Then, his face grim, he rose to his feet, retrieved his weapon, and went.
Shrewd, competent, hard-headed professionals that they were, neither Guthrie nor Archie Abernethy had anticipated anything like the storm that broke upon them when Lymond came to his senses at last to find Blyth had gone. Swaying with weakness, Francis Crawford described to the two silent men exactly what they had done. And even Guthrie, sustaining those flaming blue eyes, recognized the time had come to be silent, listening, and to hope merely not to be dismissed.
But in the end they were of course dismissed, totally and finally, to go, in More’s bitter words, to kill up the clergy and sell priests’ heads as cheap as sheeps’ heads, three for a penny, buy who would. It was Abernethy who spoke as the tirade ended and Lymond turned aside to the wall, shaking with foolish exhaustion.
‘Oh, ye’ve a temper,’ said Archie consideringly. ‘And ye had a rare old time losing it, and ye were like enough justified at that. But take a thought, too. Are ye to accuse Graham Malett in the law courts from the flat o’ a bier-claith, or on two sticks like a wife wi’ Arthretica? If ye’re tae walk upright like the fine, testy gentleman ye are, ye’ll need some nursing, I’d say. So I fear Guthrie and I had best bide.’
He was prepared, philosophically, for a savage response. In fact, dropped from abrupt necessity among the tumbled rugs of his pallet, Francis Crawford sat with rock-like obstinacy and shivered, while from above, Alec Guthrie’s harsh voice went on gently, ‘Archie’s right. My dear lad, you need all the help you can get; don’t cast it off. We were wrong to let Blyth go. I admit it. But he knows now what he risks. I think he’ll come back to you. I think they’ll all come back to you. But you and Gabriel stand opposed in all this sorry battle. Not one of us can take your place.’
Lymond turned. His eyes were brilliant with fever. He was smiling. ‘Why should they come back? They’re not all simple-minded. If I could let Joleta die, what fool is still going to trust me? Who is going to separate cowardice from moral expediency when even I, looking back, can’t now be sure …? That is what has driven Blyth away. Nothing but that.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ said Guthrie sharply. ‘There was no possible guarantee that the case against Gabriel would be complete on your death. It was far more likely to lose all its impetus. If you had never run up those steps, Joleta would have died at Gabriel’s hands just the same. It was opportunism—pure, brilliant opportunism to force you to do what you did, and undermine all the doubts the Somerville lassie had sown. Nobody would have been more stunned or more contemptuous than Gabriel if you had stood firm.…’
The grating voice hesitated. Guthrie said kindly, ‘As you said … we are not all simple-minded. What you have to face now is something a good deal more difficult than accepting Gabriel’s sword-thrust at the top of those steps. What you chose was not the easy way out.’
‘No. The thicket of thorns,’ said Lymond, with the flatness of utter fatigue. ‘Some day, I must take my own prolific advice and contrive to drop dead.’
Then Guthrie’s eyes met those of Archie Abernethy, moving forward with a cup in his hand. And very soon after that, doctored by something more drastic than Archie had ever had occasion to administer to him before, Francis Crawford was profoundly asleep.
*
Then the net drawing Gabriel and Lymond together began at last to close tight.
For two weeks, with men and mastiffs, the law officers of Scotland, aided by the Seigneur d’Oisel and his Frenchmen, hunted Francis Crawford and his friends among the small hills, green and soft with deep mists, long-shadowed with apricot sunshine, where the corn crowded fat in the sheaf, as it had not stood for nine warring years, and two since. It was a strange, plodding game, in which French curses and Scots rose intermingled to the mild skies, and only the chief actors were dumb.
For Lymond, it was a time to recover, despite the almost daily moves expediency demanded. And evidence continued to come in. Adam Blacklock, back triumphant from Liddesdale, brought with him an insalubrious Turnbull who could identify a steward of Gabriel’s as having paid them to kill the Kerr cattle. And, stuttering, Adam produced something else: the sworn statement of the big tinker who had attacked Cheese-wame Henderson, and whom he had found, logically enough, lying sick in one of the Turnbulls’ appalling mud cabins.
It was Fergie Hoddim on duty that day. When Blacklock had finished his recital, Fergie took him up sharply, ‘As to evidence, now. Unless ye brought the said steward to Liddesdale to be identified, how could yon auld thief tell it was him? Did ye pay him siller to swear it?’
For answer Adam slipped from under his arm and laid on the floor the leather case he was holding. From it, he drew several sheets of thick paper, each bearing, delicately done in red chalk, the drawing of a man’s face. That on the first was, recognizably, the steward they were discussing. ‘It comes in useful … sometimes,’ he said, and met Lymond’s eyes, smiling.
Fergie’s face also had cleared. ‘Aye. That’s better. It’s a clear case o’ deadly enmity and feud. A clear case. So we need all the independent proof we can gather—evidence without fear or favour, if ye take me.’ He gazed thoughtfully at Francis Crawford’s unimpressed face. ‘Ye could even get bloodwite off him for yon beating. Nae mair nor fifty pounds, of course; but it’s not to be sneezed at. Aye. I’d advise on bloodwite; you’d be perfectly safe there.’
There was a moment’s pause and then Lymond, to Adam’s relief, began quite genuinely to laugh. ‘Well done, Fergie,’ he said. ‘Yes, of course. Whatever happens, ad lucrandum vel perdendum, let’s make sure of our bloodwite. It’ll do to buy a bloody memorial with.’
For no one was the waiting easy. Philippa, resolutely ensconced at Midculter despite Sybilla’s gentle pressure to return home, busied herself silently with helping Mariotta and the baby and merely appeared, a grim and bony changeling, when Adam Blacklock came, as he often did, with a fragment of news from his leader.
Kate had been told, as soon as Lady Culter could send off a horseman, of her daughter’s safety and of all that had happened; and being Kate, she had stayed, gnawing her nails, where she was, and had left Philippa to do her growing-up without interference.
Sybilla lost her nerve only once, as Adam was leaving one day.
She began mildly enough. ‘It hasn’t occurred to Francis, I take it, that there is nothing now to prevent him from awaiting the full indictment against Graham Malett from the relative comfort of prison?’
Adam Blacklock glanced at Philippa and away again. ‘He wants Gabriel arrested first,’ he said. ‘And he won’t allow that until the evidence is complete. He’s an extremely clever man, Graham Malett. Mr C-Crawford won’t risk any loophole being left. That’s why we are waiting now for Jock Thompson’s report. The official complaint from England about the arms-running into Ireland must have come now, and we may be faced with a major charge of civic disobedience as it is. At least if we can show Gabriel’s complicity, the Queen Dowager won’t give him her trust and the leadership of St Mary’s at once.’
With one long, slender finger, the Dowager traced the ferny pattern of her gown. Without looking up she said, ‘And, of course, if you or Mr Guthrie or Mr Hoddim or my other son were to come forward now with your evidence, your lives would be exposed to attack by Sir Graham. While you are in hiding, you are safe too.’
‘He has that in mind. Lady Culter,’ said Adam Blacklock, his brown eyes direct. ‘If we believed it would serve any purpose, my friends and I would have accused Sir Graham long since.’
Sybilla flashed him an abstracted smile. ‘What an obstinate band of young men you are,’ she said. ‘The leadership of St Mary’s! What does it matter? For leading an unruly asse
mbly, for disobedience, for causing trouble in Ireland, what can they do to him? Fine him, perhaps; keep him in prison until his temper cools. Even if the worst happens and Gabriel goes free, Francis is most unlikely to be asked by law to forfeit his life. So that all this endeavour and all this danger is endured for one reason: the leadership of one excellent small force, which Francis cannot bear to see fall into the wrong hands. Does it matter?’ Turning, she confronted the artist, her neatly capped white head cocked, her brows straight. ‘Or is Francis merely bewitched by his own little creation?’
It was Richard Crawford, standing solid and quiet just inside the door, listening, who answered. ‘Francis knows very well what he has done. He has bred a terror in a small nation such as this which could jeopardize the balance of nations and overthrow kings. And he has placed this power in the hands of Graham Malett. Should Gabriel learn what is being plotted against him and fly, he would still be able to take this force with him, virtually intact. This axe may be poised yet to the glory of Gabriel over more defenceless heads than we dream.’
‘It won’t happen,’ said Adam Blacklock abruptly; and bending, he kissed Sybilla’s idle hand, pressed it, and left. And as the throat-constricting silence after that threatened to continue. ‘Don’t think about it,’ said Philippa quickly. ‘Look, here’s Kevin.’ And diving for the door, she lifted from the surprised hands of his passing nurse the vibrating red bolster which was Kevin Crawford, Master of Culter, and sat him on his grandmother’s lap.
‘Mother always says,’ said Philippa, ‘that when the worst is happening and your knees are rattling like Swiss drummers, there’s nothing like a baby to give you a sense of proportion.’
She did not know then why it misfired. She only knew that at her side, Lord Culter stood dumbly staring at his son, and that Sybilla, her arms embracing that small rotundity, with the red cheeks and black feathery curls and deep, blue-black Irish eyes of Mariotta his mother, bent her head on his dark one and cried.
*
At Boghall and at Branxholm, they also waited. Jenny Fleming, chained by her history to Boghall castle, far from Court, paced her room and visited her royal bastard in his nursery, and wrote long, placating letters to the Constable of France. Her daughter Margaret, waiting in silence for news from the arsenal which was St Mary’s, knew that her mother was obsessed with the need to return to France, to love and power, and gaiety and admiration. Anything, even the courtly respect with which M. d’Oisel had treated her, was fuel to her determination.
As the wife of the French King’s Lieutenant in Scotland, she could return with him to France and to a place in society which would surely include the attentions, however discreet, of the King. Diane was old. The Queen was becoming stouter and plainer. Or if Francis Crawford had been a less fickle child of fortune.… He was wealthy. He had a comté….
‘Don’t fret, child,’ said Jenny Fleming kindly to her daughter Margaret as for the third time that day she found her staring unavailingly out of the window towards the rooftops of Midculter. ‘Once Sir Graham is put down, the Queen Dowager will ask Francis to take his company to France. He will make his name, I’m sure of it.’
Margaret Erskine’s sigh was noiseless. She turned round. ‘You weren’t thinking, by any chance, of going with him?’ she said.
Lovely still, Lady Fleming’s vivid face sparkled. ‘Why, dull child? Do you think he’d object?’
It was a long-standing conspiracy. ‘I know he won’t,’ said her daughter briskly. ‘I’ve discussed it for you, in fact. He said he wouldn’t mind, provided you put your rates up. Villeconnin’s mother, he said, got two hundred thousand crowns in the bank from the last King of France for a son.’
She knew her mother too well to fear any damage to her amour propre. Jenny Fleming merely looked exasperated. ‘That young man,’ she said, ‘ought to be plucked out of his pride and impaled on a thornbush. He introduced me to someone as the Controller of the King’s Beam, last time we met.’
Which at least had the merit of making her daughter laugh, if a little wildly.
*
At Branxholm, Janet Beaton had the whole matter strictly in hand.
Bit by bit, her husband had been allowed to learn of Gabriel’s iniquity, and of Joleta’s shortcomings. Of his share in Will’s death Janet said nothing. Lymond had said only, ‘Put him on his guard. Tell him a little. But nothing, for God’s sake, that will send him frothing off to St Mary’s with a noose in his hand. We don’t want Buccleuch dead or Gabriel vanished.’
It was a matter for nice judgement, but Janet knew her Buccleuch. The first time she raised it, he called her a havering ninny, and advised her that the dust was standing in bings under the draw-bed, and she should mind her own feckless business before kilting up other folks’ tails for them.
But he thought about it, and though he poured scorn on the idea at the next airing too, she knew he would surely come round. And soon enough, brows jutting, he was saying bluntly, ‘Yon fellow Crawford’s made a right hotch-potch and mingle mangle o’ it, then. And Sandilands is as bad, by God, letting the de’il stroll in.’
‘Jimmy Sandilands is a creishy wee fox,’ said Dame Janet with emphasis. ‘He’d like fine to line his pockets with the Order’s revenues, and he thinks he sees a way of getting someone else to take the blame for it. Francis had a fair shot at hinting the way things might go, on the way home from Falkland, but the fool whined over his gouty foot and quoted the Scriptures until you would think he was mad. Francis couldna shift the Kerrs, either.’
‘I should hope not,’ said her husband indignantly, allowing a grandchild to drop off his knees. ‘A good-going feud like yon isna put out like a spit on a match. It was going fine long before Graham Malett got his hands on it.’
‘Oh, we all ken that,’ said Janet angrily. ‘Flype a Scott and you find a wee man thumbing his nose at a Kerr. But he pointed out, all power to him, that the lot of ye were no more than playing into the hands of anyone that wanted real power for the asking next to the throne, and no awkward questions from the gentrice. Cessford said,’ she added absently, ‘that as the Scotts werena gentrice, it would make no difference when the Kerrs loused down their points and ran them greetin’ out o’ the land.’
It was next day before she was able to touch on the subject again, and Buccleuch’s feelings were still uncommonly ruffled, but he did agree, growling at last, to take care in all his dealings with the family Kerr. And also, with greater reluctance, to lend an ear, when the time came, to the discourse of Crawford of Lymond.
‘Thank God,’ remarked Janet at this stage, fanning herself with an infantile garment. ‘Ye’re a dogged au’d besom, Buccleuch. But you’re namely for sense, in the end.’
‘Sense! With the blood of me rotted with nagging! Can ye no envisage a decent reticence, woman, but you’ve to knock and chop hourly like the chapel-held clock? Sense!’ bellowed Buccleuch. ‘A purseful of auld sousis for all the sense that ye’d ever spy in this house!’
But Janet was satisfied.
*
And so the time drew to a close, and at St Mary’s Gabriel received and dispatched messengers, and played chess smiling with M. d’Oisel, and watched, with the French Ambassador, while the cream of his men, confident in training and skill, outpaced their French custodians in every exercise of the jousting ground and the butts. For M. d’Oisel was being allowed to discover what kind of weapon Sir Graham had sheathed at the asking, and how smoothly it fitted his hand.
And all the time Jerott Blyth stood at Gabriel’s side. Resisting the easy course, Jerott had come back to justify at last all the Order had given him, when he had nothing to give in return but a past to be buried. He had told Lymond what he intended to do. He meant to save Graham Malett: to give Gabriel the chance no one had given his sister. And yet, to keep his implicit promise to Lymond, he must do it without betraying what he knew, or how close the hounds were at Gabriel’s heels.
It was not possible. It could never have been possible,
although Jerott kept his word and in their prayers together, in the long discussions he forced on all the great issues of religion and ethics, he gave no sign that Graham Malett’s own spiritual welfare was his concern.
But by the same token, nothing he could do carried weight. Looking at Gabriel’s unclouded face, that could so easily darken with pain at mention of Joleta or of Lymond, Jerott found it incredible that any man could maintain such a pretence; could kneel, his arm round Jerott’s shoulders in chapel, and pray for Francis Crawford’s black soul. And that such a man, asked to countermand the order to track Lymond by bloodhound, could say quietly, ‘Jerott … have you not learned that the flesh and its ills are less than nothing? His crimes against my sister, the bitter effects of a shameless ambition … these mean disorders of the soul far more desperate than any harm his body might suffer. He is sick’ said Graham Malett gently, and pressed Jerott’s shoulder. ‘Don’t deny him the healing he needs.’
Then, gazing up into those candid eyes, He is sick, thought Jerott Blyth grimly. And I have denied him the healing he needs. But in body only, Sir Graham. There is nothing wrong with Francis Crawford’s sense of the major moralities, and a good deal that is admirable. Whereas.…
Whereas in Gabriel, he recognized, sickeningly at last, a power for evil, effortlessly sustained, which could come only from a mind totally warped.
Against this, no living Knight of the Order could hope to succeed. To plead, to reveal what he knew, would merely allow Malett to flee and would place the fate of all Malett’s future victims at his, Jerott’s door. He had been wrong, and Lymond right. The task of returning Graham Malett to the light of grace was the dream of a fool.
Jerott did not go back to Lymond. Only, after two or three days of brutal self-examination, he found out Nicolas de Nicolay who had returned to St Mary’s, secure in his famous name and led by his native, long-whiskered curiosity to watch the duel end. And Nicolas de Nicolay, spry on a keg in a corner of the brewery, watching the big vats toil and ream, turned and said with satisfaction on his gnome-like face, ‘Ah: the cow turned back into Io again. You have come to ask me, I hope, about Malta. I have much about Malta to tell you. And of Tripoli. Come. Let us walk.’