The Disorderly Knights

  *

  After that there were orders, a great many orders, with the Midculter man and two of Janet’s big Scotts brought in as messengers; and in the middle, Abernethy and Salablanca appeared and were told what to do.

  Then, moments later, it seemed, they burst apart on their various errands like a firlot of lentils, and Blyth and Lymond, with the two men behind them, were riding without respite or concealment straight into the net.

  XVII

  Gabriel’s Trump

  (Edinburgh, October 4th, 1552)

  THE Kerrs, left hands longingly fondling their swords, were very angry. Rankling in their minds, never forgotten, were all the old murders and recent insults: the rout at Ettrick, the killing of Nell of Cessford, the slaughter at Liddesdale, the farce of the children at Hadden Stank. And today, it seemed, the old thief Buccleuch would surpass himself. He had gone to Edinburgh, so rumour said, expressly to expose to official gaze the Kerrs’ unsavoury share in the scheme run by Jock Thompson, Cormac O’Connor and George Paris, whereby through insuring your cargoes and allowing the pirate to steal them, you got your insurance money and maybe even some of your cargo back for good measure.

  So the Kerrs were on their way, this fourth day of October, with their friends and allies for company, through the gentle country that lay between Cessford and Edinburgh, with the full harvest gilding the fields under the pink sky of sunset and the cottar smoke filling the hollows and misting the trees by the wayside, so that the silver-blue harness of winter seemed to lie on their breasts.

  When they reached Edinburgh, it was dark. Sir John Kerr of Ferniehurst and his brother Walter of Cessford were shrewd. A grim company, fully armed and in Kerr colours, would be stopped at the Bow. So they filtered through slowly, in couples, and the first to go through were those detailed to find out George Paris and kill him, and destroy all the papers they might find.

  So, through the West Bow and up the steep wynd to the Lawn-market, there walked eleven Kerrs, among them Cessford and his son Andrew; Ferniehurst and his brother and good-brother; and Dandy Kerr of the Hirsell, now owner of Littledean, and his son. There were some servants, a number of men related by marriage, Sir Peter Cranston and three members of the family Hume, also great on the Borders, which had no desire to fall out with the Kerrs.

  Robert Kerr with two others made their way to Buccleuch’s house. Ferniehurst, with Andrew Kerr of Primsideloch, George Kerr of Linton and Littledean and his son, made for George Paris’s rooms in the Lawnmarket. And Sir Walter Kerr of Cessford, the old man himself, with John Hume of Coldenknowes at his side, strolled down the main street of Edinburgh, the castle wall at his back and the towers of Holyrood beyond the Nether Bow Port part-way down, and kept well clear, for once, of the weak lanterns slung on each side, flushing the timber jowls of the high, chimney-like tenements, and the outside stairs, their narrow flights vanishing high in the gloom.

  On the square stones of the causeway, their soft deerskin boots made no sound; nor did they have a light borne before them, as was the custom. There were few people abroad. After eight o’clock, in October, a fresh little wind blew from the west, pleating the Nor’ Loch; and Frenchmen in taverns drank too well, and came looking for trouble. There was a woman or two in the street, and a light or two, and the noise of laughter, clapping silent and loud as a tavern door swung. An officer of the burgher watch passed, swinging his bowet, and observed them curiously.

  Behind them, no brawl had broken out in the Lawnmarket, dirling among the under-carved eaves: the work with Paris must have gone off well. Pacing without haste, Cessford and Hume passed from the wide market into the narrow channel of the Queen’s High Street of Edinburgh, choked by the straggling line of locked timber shops, the Booth Raw down its middle. There they took the foot-passage, narrow and dark, on the right of the Luckenbooths, where the tall bulk of the Tolbooth, prison and seat of justice and Parliament House at once, loomed dark in the night, two of its dim windows lit. And next to it, as they passed, a lamp hung in the Norman porch of the great church of St Giles, the queer masks carved in its nested archways yawning and leering, and the odour of incense preached at them from the big, stately fabric, with its high crown of groined stone, and its great bell, that had rung out the nation’s grief at the disaster of Flodden; and tonight and every night, at ten o’clock, would toll its forty strokes, in warning to the citizens of Edinburgh to keep off the streets. They had to do what had to be done, and leave the city by then.

  At nine o’clock precisely, Kerr and Coldenknowes had reached the east end of the Stinkand Style, past the booths and the church, and were in the open High Street, with the Mercat Cross on their left, and on their right the entrance to Conn’s Close, running down to the Cowgate, where George Hoppringle, with a boy, happened to-be having his horses shod in David Lindsay’s smith’s booth. Below that on their right was the Tron, and beside it the tall house with its corbelled oriels, the slatted flats rising crooked above their heads, where Buccleuch had his lodging.

  Then the lights went out. Until nine o’clock, the law said, lanterns must be exposed by each householder; and the householders, with the price of lamp oil in mind, made sure that the servant girl ran down the forestairs with not a moment to waste. At the same time, a patter of footsteps coming down-street the way they had come heralded a servant of Ferniehurst’s, who slowed when he saw them in the last extinguishing lights, and in a low voice gave them his master’s message.

  They had found George Paris’s lodging, and forced open the door. But they had been too late. Paris had gone, and his papers with him, in the custody of the law officers of Edinburgh under the Lord Provost himself, with Wat Scott of Buccleuch with him.

  The Kerrs’ complicity with Paris could no longer be hidden. But there was time for vengeance: all the time in the world.

  Neither Hume nor Cessford this time hesitated. Watched over by the pious mottoes and unseen, benevolent statues of the elderly land, they ran lightly upstairs to Buccleuch’s house, the servant following, and raised their fists to bang on the door.

  They were forestalled. Robert Kerr, Ferniehurst’s brother, moved out of the shadows, his friends silent behind him, and spoke in a low voice. Buccleuch was not there. But Robert Kerr and his friends were prepared to wait for him, and all night if need be. Leaving him there, Sir Walter Kerr of Cessford and his ally John Hume returned to the street, and retracing their steps, walked slowly up the High Street towards the Stinkand Raw again.

  Wat Scott ran into them just there, after leaving George Paris under guard in the Tolbooth, and crossing round the graveyard at the back of St Giles, which he rounded at Our Lady’s Steps on his way to walk down to his lodging.

  He was alone. Cessford and Hume saw him first as a stocky dark shadow trudging past the pale grey bulk of the church; then, as they came closer, the feeble light from the Virgin’s statue in its niche above the church’s north-east doorway showed the familiar, broad-bearded Warden, his brimmed bonnet flat on his head, his wide, short gown swinging as he strode, spurs clinking, over the causeway.

  He saw their faces quite clearly as they threw themselves on him, John Hume in the lead; and given a second longer, could have raised that stentorian voice in a bellow that might have saved his life. But Hume’s thick hand cramped over his bearded mouth, and Hume’s and Cessford’s combined weight heeled the old man like some recalcitrant cargo to the ground, kicking and stumbling, spinning among the booths and into the High Street and back among the booths again. Then John Hume drew his sword.

  Buccleuch was a strong old man. But his son’s death had told on the fabric of his body as well as the vigour of his mind. He rolled on the ground, kicked, half-throttled, voiceless, and probably saw the glint of Coldenknowes’s blade and the sudden movement as Kerr of Cessford, seized with caution, fell back, and Hume, his voice furious, called low-voiced, ‘Strike, traitor! Ane stroke for your father’s sake!’

  With one violent movement, Wat Scott of Buccleuch got to his knees just
as the sword came at him, and grasping the other man’s thighs with his knotted hands, tried to hold John Hume off.

  It was too late. As Cessford hesitated, Coldenknowes swore, and thrusting Buccleuch off with his left hand, drove the sword clean through Buccleuch’s body. It was a cruel wound: mortal, but lacking the mercy of an instant death. For a moment he floundered, there at their feet, among the stinking rubbish of the Luckenbooth trash; and then with a grunt he lay still, his blood ebbing fast with his life.

  Bending, his sword sheathed, John Hume fumbled for and found one stout booted leg, cursing as the spur slit his palm. Then, heaving with both hands, he slung Wat Scott’s inert body behind the broken-hinged door of a booth, with the reek of decayed food and animals thick in the darkness. ‘Lie there, with my malison,’ he said softly. ‘For I had liefer gang by thy grave nor thy door.’ And with Cessford silent behind him, he made his way swiftly and quietly out of the Style, and down Conn’s Close to the Cowgate, where the horses were ready.

  Half an hour later, tired of awaiting Buccleuch, Robert Kerr left his house next to the Tron and with three men, Kirkton, Ainslie and Pakok, who was a man of Hume’s household, began to quarter the High Street looking for him. At the same time a boy, well bribed in advance, left the Cowgate Port on the heels of Cessford and Hume and riding round to the south-east came across the night encampment, just outside the walls, of the French Lieutenant-General, M. d’Oisel with his French troops, escorting the whole company of St Mary’s. The message he brought to the pavilion where the Seigneur d’Oisel and Sir Graham Malett were sitting at supper, was that Buccleuch had been murdered. Five minutes later, Sir Graham at his own request by his side, d’Oisel was riding fast through St Mary’s Port and up to the High Street, half his band of French light horse at his tail.

  Lymond missed them by perhaps five minutes, because he took the direct route to the West Bow, to bring him quickly into the Lawn-market where George Paris was lodged. By that time the great bell of St Giles had rung its forty brisk peals and all the many gates of Edinburgh were locked to the casual; but Francis Crawford had brought his own entrée: the robed and gout-stricken person of Sir James Sandilands of Calder, Grand Prior in Scotland of the Order of St John, roused from his comforts at Torphichen by all the urgency Jerott could muster. And Jerott, too, wore over his cuirass the black robes of the Order, packed flat in his box ever since he left Malta, with the Eight-Pointed Star glimmering faintly on his left shoulder.

  The three men, the Grand Prior’s train of twelve men-at-arms riding behind them, swept up to and through the Bow gates, and cantering up the steep slopes to Castle Hill, deployed down the street. Paris, they found in their turn, had departed. Leaving Sandilands to rouse the Tolbooth, puzzled, angry and a little afraid, Lymond, followed by Jerott, set off down the wide Lawnmarket to call on Buccleuch.

  They passed the Luckenbooths as Robert Kerr entered them, with the three men at his back, searching for Wat Scott of Buccleuch; searching and hearing presently the sound of growling distress; the low whining breath that might be a dog’s, but which proved to be the high heart of Buccleuch, stirring in his blood, whispering for help and for vengeance. Then, as Lymond’s hoofbeats grew fainter, with Jerott’s, down the long hill, Robert Kerr drew his sword and entered the booth.

  With sword and dagger the three men with Kerr finished the work begun by John Hume, three and four times over, plying blade over blade until the mess of clothed flesh in the stall was indistinguishable from the filth round about. Then pulling from the hacked body the bloody remnants of cloth, with its familiar jewelled clasps, chipped and dulled over with use, the grey chopped hair pressed in the folds, they too made for Conn’s Close in the dark, running.

  Few people in Edinburgh in that hour and year would have cared to stop a party of men hastening past the Mercat Cross in the dark, one bearing a bundle of rags. Adam Maccullo, Bute Herald, on his way from Holyrood to Castle Hill was the exception. As the light from his bearer’s lantern fell first on two horsemen riding swiftly downhill, and then on the men who, emerging from the Booth Raw, slipped quickly downstreet to Conn’s Close, he called out at once, ‘What’s the matter?’

  Only John Pakok, Coldenknowes’s man, had the hardihood to reply. ‘There’s a lad fallen,’ he remarked, and walked on, whistling, after the others down the sharp descent to the Cowgate.

  But already Maccullo’s lantern and the sound of the voices had brought Lymond back, in a wide arc, from the Tron by Buccleuch’s deserted house. Jerott, following, found Lymond dismounted and running, with Maccullo at his side, towards the dark, jostling booths, their paint blistered, their dirty ribbons fingering the air under the jerking light of the lamp. Swinging in turn off his horse, Jerott tied both loosely to the stone pillars of the nearest arcade and was moving quickly after the two men when Maccullo cried out.

  Now, cautiously, lights glimmered in the high lands above the booths and the church; shutters creaked back, and candlelight on first one high balcony, then another, glinted on the brass rail and the peering flesh of the owners, craning above. Then Maccullo’s boy, without the lantern, came running out of the Booth Raw and turned up towards the Tolbooth as if all the ghosts in the graveyard were after him, and Jerott, arriving at last, nearly fell over the herald, standing mute at the broken door of a booth where, the lantern light rimming his hair, Lymond silently knelt. Beside him, in the dirt, lay the disjointed carcass, wet, warm, grossly squandered like soft fruit, which for the better part of seventy years had answered the heroic spirit of Walter Scott of Buccleuch.

  Jerott saw that Maccullo had recognized Lymond: was staring at him as he knelt, his hand uncertainly on his sword-belt. Lymond himself paid no attention, and although the line between his eyes was drawn black in the stark light, his voice was quiet when he spoke. ‘He is barely two minutes dead. He was alive when we passed him.’ He looked up, his eyes blazing. ‘There is a blood-feud for you, Jerott,’ he said. ‘They would dispatch a stirk cleanly, but a living offence to their pride, never. What old man in the world would merit such hatred?’

  ‘There he is. Take him,’ said Gabriel’s voice, ringing, hoarse with emotion, out of the darkness. ‘Take him, in Christ’s name, with his hands red yet again in another man’s blood.’ And suddenly, with a hiss of drawn steel, the trampling feet of an army seemed to converge on Lymond; and the High Street, the booths, the Stinkand Raw and the dark graveyard leading down to the Cowgate were all peopled with soldiers.

  Jerott waited just long enough to see Lymond jump to his feet, white and lithe, his sword out, and to be glad that he himself was not in the party which was to arrest Francis Crawford here and now. Instead, Jerott turned, and facing the doorway, his black eyes alight, he struck with his sword the first blade that fell into the lamplight while at his back Lymond crossed Buccleuch’s body with a bound and, striking through the rotten back of the booth with blade and shoulder, burst through into the jostling darkness beyond.

  Jerott held them at bay for a matter of seconds. Then he was thrust aside as Maccullo was, his cry unnoticed, as d’Oisel’s Frenchmen poured after, shouting. His cloak half-pulled from his shoulders, the young knight straddled Buccleuch’s helpless body, buffeted on all sides, and strained to see, through the milling bodies, whether Lymond was through, while using the flat of his blade viciously to keep the trampling feet clear and to protect himself from rough hands.

  He saw Bute Herald, caught in the swirling tide, suddenly reach a decision and, fighting his way through to where Jerott had left the horses, untie one and set off down Conn’s Close, with two or three men at his stirrups. The boy must have come back from the Tolbooth with a sergeant and some men. The Kerrs, if the Kerrs had been responsible, would not get far. Then Jerott himself turned to follow Lymond and the French to where the shouting was loudest; and there came the sound of snapping timber as the booths crashed; and smashed glass as men reeled back into the little windows of the lower lands. So the Chevalier Blyth came face to face with a m
assive shadow standing silent in the gaping back of the stall: the shadow of a tall man whose white plume stirred in the night air and whose cuirass glinted bright, like his own, under the long black robe, starred on the shoulder, of a Grand Cross of the Order of St John.

  ‘My poor lad,’ said Sir Graham Reid Malett gently. ‘You wear your robes, who have broken every vow of chivalry the Order requires. You have chosen to follow that headstrong and lonely young man, and no prayers can save you now.… Are you listening?’ For behind them, swirling up the Lawnmarket where every window was crowded and every stair laden with people, the noise of night-blinded pursuit had reached a screaming crescendo. ‘I doubt,’ said Graham Malett gravely, ‘if he will reach the Tolbooth prison alive.’

  Then for the first time, Jerott truly believed all that he had learned of Graham Malett: would have believed it even had he not seen, a spark in Gabriel’s hand, the dagger he had brought to use. Afterwards he knew he owed his life to the burgher watch and the law men from the Tolbooth, who stumbling just then into the wrecked Luckenbooth, shone their lanterns on the old man who lay at their feet, and then summoned the monks from the Maison Dieu at the head of Bell’s Wynd to carry the heavy, disfigured body into their quiet chapel.

  But by then Jerott had gone, fighting through the throng to reach its wild and disputing centre, aware all the time of the tall magnificent man moving smiling behind in his wake. How many of Gabriel’s men lay ahead? Of course, Gabriel would make it his business to see that Lymond did not reach the Tolbooth alive. But Francis Crawford had the night on his side. He knew every wynd and vennel in Edinburgh, and provided in those first seconds he had obtained the lead he required, he had at least a chance of escape.

  Escape to what? To Gabriel’s assassins, les enfants de la Mate, as Lymond ironically called them? ‘Other courtesy than death thou shalt not have,’ Graham Malett had once said. Here, in the emotion of the chase and Buccleuch’s slaughter by a hand still unknown, Gabriel had his most effective chance of encompassing what he wished.