The Disorderly Knights (40 page)

 III:
The Conscience of Philippa
(London, October/November 1551)

  IV:
The Axe Is Fashioned
(St Mary’s, Autumn 1551)

   V:
The Hand of Gabriel
(St Mary’s and Djerba, 1551/2)

  VI:
The Hand on the Axe
(St Mary’s, 1551/2)

 VII:
The Lusty May
(Dumbarton, April/May 1552)

VIII:
The Hot Trodd
(The Scottish Border, May 1552)

  IX:
Terzetto, Played Without Rests
(Flaw Valleys, June 1552)

   X:
The Hadden Stank
(March Meeting, June/July 1552: Algiers, August 1552)

  XI:
The Crown and the Anchor
(Falkland Palace and the Kyles of Bute, August 1552)

 XII:
The Crown and the Anchorite
(Falkland Palace, August 1552)

XIII:
The Axe Is Turned on Itself
(Midculter, Flaw Valleys, Boghall, September 1552)

 XIV:
The Axe Falls
(St Mary’s, September 1552)

  XV:
Death of an Illuision
(St Mary’s, September 1552)

 XVI:
Jerott Chooses His Cross
(The Scottish Lowlands, September/October 1552)

XVII:
Gabriel’s Trump
(Edinburgh, October 4th, 1552)

I
N
ettles in
W
inter

(
Boghall Castle, October 1551
)

O
N
the day Will Scott married, Lymond took, unwittingly, his first step towards the Knights of St John.

By the same subtle irony, three years later, Francis Crawford of Lymond returned to the suspicious bosom of his homeland on the day Tom Erskine died.

He died at Boghall Castle, where he was brought when the sweating sickness struck him on the road from Stirling south. He did not live to see his wife, Margaret Fleming, come home from France with the Scottish Queen Dowager. Instead he spent his last hours shivering in her mother’s overdressed castle at Biggar with Lady Jenny herself, dressed in something pure and flowing, absently patting his brow with a cloth.

By then, although plied with every potion the Flemings could muster, he knew the end must be near. Fifty thousand people had died in England that year from this ailment. He had seen enough of it, as he rode back and forth to Norham as Ambassador framing the peace. The war he had helped to end had preserved his land from the scourge. The peace, it seemed, was to kill him.

Because of the peace, Philippa Somerville was at Boghall. A single-minded Somerville from the north of England, staunch allies of Lord Grey, would have crossed the Border eighteen months ago with an army, or not at all. Philippa, who at thirteen had every cell charged, like her mother’s, with stark common sense, was in Scotland because she liked Lady Jenny, and her legitimate children, and her five-months-old bastard by King Henri of France.

It was Philippa who had sent for the surgeon-apothecary when Jenny’s son-in-law was carried in. Jenny herself was far too busy ensuring the safety of her fully ratified prince. He was whisked with her legitimate children three miles away to Midculter, for the Crawfords to care for. Two counties heard him go (he was teething); and Tom Erskine, listening, squeezed an amused smile from somewhere for Philippa. Then Jenny, agelessly endearing in musty white linen, arrived to fondle his hand.

He was grateful, because she was Margaret’s mother and he had no illusions about her, and he talked to her reassuringly while he could. The rigor had gone by then; only, dressed in one of Jamie Fleming’s nightgowns, he felt the growing pressure in aching head and knotted stomach, and with it, the fire of fever. His affairs were in order; his indiscretions paid for; his father’s estates and charges perfectly bestowed. All this he had arranged when Lord Erskine had gone to France with the child Queen Mary. Of his own marriage, so short and gentle, there were no children and never would be now. Margaret’s son by her first marriage would be cared for at his father’s home.

He had not seen his wife since the spring when he had gone to France on the Queen’s business. To Margaret he could have said, ‘I am not afraid of death. I am afraid to leave a pilotless ship. England and the Emperor Charles are exhausted by war and discontent; France is freshly belligerent; Turkey is aggressive and rich. All the old wars have stopped and new ones are beginning with new partnerships and new enemies: who will guide us through the maze in the long regency ahead? Under the Sultan, all Turkey is united. France obeys the divine will of the King; the English nobles will cleave to the Regent with wealth and power to share.’

And in Scotland, what was there? A divided leadership. The French Dowager fighting the Earl of Arran for the Governorship during Queen Mary’s childhood and wittingly or not, with every French coin she borrowed, ensuring Scotland’s future as a province of France. And since England dared not have another France over her border, England was ready to seduce any Scottish noble, from Arran downwards, who did not care for the Queen Dowager, or France, or the old Catholicism. A divided nation; a divided God; a land of ancient, self-seeking families who broke and mended alliances daily as suited their convenience, and for whom the concept of nationhood was sterile frivolity … what could weld them in time, and turn them from their self-seeking and their pitiable, perpetual feuds?

A common danger might do such a thing, except that the nation was too weak to resist one. A great leader might achieve unity—but he must be followed by his equal or fail. A corporate religion might do it, but where did one exist which some foreign power had not seized and championed already?

There was another remedy. A decade of peace for quiet husbandry, so that every cottar should have his kale and his corn without stealing from the next; so that peaceful trade should offer rewards as rich as war, and rebuilt castles employ their hundreds without fear of burned harvests, or having to put foot in stirrup at sowing time, or finding their year’s work of wool or leather or herring sunk by
reprisal for Scots fisherfolk themselves driven to piracy. ‘How would you set about that? How would you even stop a Kerr killing a Buccleuch, come to that?’ Tom said aloud, and saw from Jenny Fleming’s wondering face that she had been saying something quite different, for probably quite a long time.

Then she left, and he knew that instead of his nurses, soon he would have round him the embarrassed audience of the dying. He did not much care, for now the fire had reached every part of his body, and there washed from him in salty sickening jets the diseased sweat which would kill him.

There was nothing to be done. Water ran through the sheet and into the ticking. Dry sheet and dry mattress were drenched afresh, and again; then they left him as he was. When they brought icy packings soaked in well water he watched the white steam around him twist to the painted ceiling and was only mildly shocked when a clawed brown arm knocked them away and a shawled head, vaguely familiar, bent over him and hissed, ‘Kill ye, wid they, afore the Lord has appointed?’ And as he stared up at the seamed face of Trotty Luckup it relaxed its glare as she smiled and said, ‘I’ll win a little comfort for ye still, my dear, afore they lay ye cauld, cauld i’ the mools.’

He drank what she gave him to drink and let her do with him what she wanted, and perhaps it helped. He listened too, to what she had to say and it came to him that Francis Crawford could make use of that gossip, except that he was dying, and Francis was abroad.

It was Philippa who found him alone in his room, without the cold bags, and learned, rushing out to flare at the women, that they had been forbidden under threat of the evil eye to replace them after Trotty had gone. Jailbird or not, the old woman was wise, and Philippa knew that Tom had always dealt with her gently. So she did not interfere, but went back slowly into the sickroom and sat by the dying man’s side.

To Tom, stupefied with fever, she looked much like her mother, sitting straight in the uncomfortable chair, her combed brown hair clinging over the uncompromising front of her dress. There was no need for her to have come. Her mother had sat just like this at the deathbed of the girl he was once to have married, long before Margaret.

Since then, he had been often to Flaw Valleys, and Lymond sometimes too, until Philippa’s hostility had driven him away. That, or the death of Philippa’s father. And Philippa or Kate, or both, had often enough defied the rules of war and slipped over the Border to stay with him at Stirling or Boghall.…

Lymond, they said, had been fighting in Barbary and was due home soon.… Would Philippa stay so implacable? For a bemused second
Erskine wondered if, sanctified by near-dissolution, he could play the peacemaker … but no. Hatred shackled by promises to the dead was the vilest of all.

Time passed. The room was dark and his feet were famished with cold. His feet were cold, and it was too late for a death-bed peroration. Not that he had much of value to say. Or had he?

With great difficulty, on a breath that scarcely lifted his chest, Tom Erskine said ‘Philippa?’ and her voice answered him, steadily, from where she sat framed by the dull glow of the fire. He took a long, shallow breath and two others, and began and finished with them his message to Margaret. And then, while he could, he added the other message, for Lymond.

The gist of what Trotty Luckup had said was not hard to convey. He only wished, with the hovering desolation which all this day he had fought to ignore, that it had been Margaret whose quiet, sober mind should accept this unsavoury truth, and not young Pippa. He had the presence of mind, and just enough voice, to send her away after that.

As Jenny and the clacking herd of nurses and servants came to Philippa’s call, the child herself fled. Downstairs, loyal to the family but huddled in whispering knots under the shadow of sickness and death, the kitchen folk answered her questions. Yes, Trotty Luckup had been here, and had a good sup by the fire, and gone out at dusk … on the Culter road, she had said.

In Philippa Somerville’s mousy head that night was one thought: to catch up with that erratic old gossip, and hear more of what Tom Erskine had told her.

Trotty wouldn’t move fast. With all the ale she would have drunk, she could probably hardly walk straight. Philippa didn’t wait for her pony to be saddled; she found it rope-bridled in the big stables and cantered it out at the gates, a dogged stable boy, who knew what his job was worth, following on a hack, with a stick under one arm and a stable cresset in his free hand. Then they both set off headlong down the causeway through the dark bog.

They found Trotty where the soggy road lifted out of the marsh to cross the small rise before Midculter. She lay at the side of the ditch, and there was more fustian than flesh to her, as if a pedlar had spilled his pack in the gutter. She was dead.

It was not the first dead face Philippa had seen—this loose-jawed engraving in stark black and white, the old hooded eyes wavering in the torch-flare. ‘Nae doot,’ the boy said scathingly, ‘she’s skited inty the stank and bashed her auld pan on a rock.’

‘No doubt,’ said Philippa, her hands cold. The old woman reeked of beer. Her hands, that had gentled the birth-caul from unnumbered children, were crossed at her chest in a semblance of protection. The
girl bent suddenly over the harsh autumn grass, latticed with shadow, and came up holding something: an iron bar. ‘And this was the
rock
.’

The boy himself was only fifteen. He stared at the weapon, saying nothing; and from the brightening of his neck-muscles in the flame, Philippa knew that he had heard, too, the sound that had caught at her heart: the far-off drumming of horse-hooves coming west. Not, she knew, an anxious pursuit from Boghall, else they would be calling. But not, surely, the murderers of Trotty Luckup, who should be far away by now? Unless they had remembered leaving that blood-sticky iron bar.…

There were a great many horses. ‘Put out the torch,’ ordered Philippa sharply, making up her mind; and they stood in the windy darkness beside the corpse in the ditch and waited for the horsemen to come.

There were about twenty men, you could guess from the jingle of harness and the clatter of hooves on the stony road, riding in a thick band, torchless, by the glimmer of the afterlight on the path. If there were any commands, the trotting feet drowned them. They came at an even pace round the far bend and rode towards where she stood with the boy in the thick dark of ditch and hedgerow; drew abreast and passed by.

Half passed. Ten paces beyond her, the vanguard of the little troop, in uncanny unison, halted dead. The rear half, which had yet to pass her, halted as suddenly. And out of the darkness in front, a voice nauseating with underplayed authority said, ‘There. Strike a light and bring them both forward.’

To struggle was useless. As she went forward with the boy, prompted by a broad hand on her spine, Philippa saw in the new torchlight that all these men wore good half-armour and helms, and she took renewed courage. Not, then, outlaws or robbers.

Outwith the torchlight their commander sat waiting, still mounted. He had not spoken again. Philippa turned to address him, the yellow flame bright on her thirteen-year-old face, and his horse stirred a bit, and was quiet. Then, before she could even speak, he said mildly, ‘Why, the heir of the Somervilles, with attendant. You have a problem, I see. May we help you? Is that your old lady, or someone else’s?’