The Disorderly Knights (51 page)

His skin was raw with the cold. The melting snow continued to run sadly down his every garment; a two-days’ beard, like gold thread, glistened under his skin. He said painfully, ‘I have sacrificed your trust, and put your army’s well-being second to others. You have my heart’s apology. Now you also have my resignation.’ And releasing suddenly his supporting grip, Gabriel reeled and, stumbling, slipped to the ground.

Above the sharp voices of the men gathered anxiously to raise him, ‘Don’t despair,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘I feel there is pleasure and profit to be had out of this little exchange yet. Don’t take him away. Put him in the chair by the fire. He’ll recover, I’m sure, with a little heat and the universal plaudits of all.’

In the inimical silence that followed, Alec Guthrie’s grating voice said, ‘I don’t know your reasons for this, but the man is genuinely exhausted. His state is not assumed.’

Randy Bell who had been bending over Gabriel, now lying back in his chair, grunted and rose. ‘He needs to be in bed, or he’ll have trouble. You won’t mind, I’m sure.’

Lymond’s voice cut him exceedingly short. ‘I do. He has trouble now. If he found my sanction inadequate, he should have consulted me. If I wasn’t available, he should have consulted a council of his fellows. And, if he saw that either the cottagers or ourselves were to to be destitute, he should at least have attempted to obtain other supplies. With money, it is possible. Not all parts of the country have been so badly affected. It is one thing being a martyr,’ said Lymond crisply, his eyes on Gabriel’s pallid, closed face. ‘It is another thing being a fool of a martyr.’

Across the white face passed a shadowy smile; a moment later, the sick man opened heavy blue eyes. ‘I try not to be either,’ he said. ‘I came to tell you that I have the Queen Dowager’s promise to send us any fuel we need. We have only to ask.’

Lymond flung back his head and laughed: a cold amusement that struck a wincing recoil from Gabriel and a growl of suspicion from Jerott Blyth. ‘A tuppenny creel of peats for our independence?’ said Lymond. ‘You rate us low.’

‘You overvalue yourself,’ answered Gabriel, struggling suddenly upright, ‘if you put your independence higher than the living crofters of Yarrow.’

‘The lines of reasoning are getting a little blocked, are they not, by the excess of
Saint-Esprit
? I have no quarrel with your errand of mercy, but there is at least one other source of supply you might have tried with no strings attached. If you had approached Wat Scott at Branxholm, the fuel would have been here by now. He has plenty, and three thousand cousins who can supply him with more. Mr Bell can go and ask for it. He could do with some cold in his blood. Sir Graham, your resignation is refused.’

There was a sickening silence.

If Graham Malett left, as everyone was very aware, all the knights and a good many others would go with him. A good many others, but not perhaps all, for Lymond had used all his skill this past winter deliberately to bind his men to him, while Gabriel had been a great deal away. Neither leader, it seemed to Jerott, would be left with a workable force, and all the painful, invigorating, brilliant work of the winter would be undone.

Jerott Blyth wanted to be under Gabriel’s leadership, not Lymond’s. But he was also a professional fighting man, and he knew it would cost him something to walk out of St Mary’s now if Graham Malett insisted on going. And he would surely insist. To a man of Gabriel’s calibre, this cavalier treatment was nothing less than outrageous.

They all waited, their gaze fixed on Gabriel.

Malett’s white face had flushed, and for a moment genuine anger showed in the tired blue eyes. Then he said steadily, ‘Why? Why refuse to release me? Why this craving to dominate, to humiliate the Order? Look, I beg you, into your heart. You cannot dream of subjugating us to your ways. Is it jealousy because we obey a Master other than yourself? Or have you discovered the truth, that your army will not have physical unity without spiritual unity, and that it will not have spiritual unity without us and our Faith?’

The little fire had burned up. It flickered, hiding, revealing the intent faces of the men standing about it in the dim hall; it stencilled in long, rosy lines the person of Lymond, standing considering in front of it, and fell full on the strained face of Gabriel, sitting rigid in the big chair before him. And again, Lymond refused the challenge: refused as so often in Malta to show what lay under the armour. Instead he said, ‘We are being imprecise in our terms, are we not? We are in free association, you and I. I can neither release you nor hold you. The only condition I have made applies to all, and not to the knights only. I lead. You may argue gold into radishes over how, where and why I lead, but the final authority must be mine. Two masters we cannot have.’

The carrying voice of Alec Guthrie said unexpectedly, ‘But as Sir Graham has already pointed out, every practising Christian must serve two masters.’

‘My God … 
I know it
,’ said Lymond. ‘My nerves are on edge like a Dublin butcher over the conversation as it is. The situation is that Sir Graham’s other Master and I are in perfect accord; whereas, being human, I am not convinced that Sir Graham and I should necessarily be.’

It was Adam Blacklock who began to laugh, and against his will, Jerott followed. It was impudence.… It was blasphemous impudence, come to that. But you remembered that never, at any point, had Lymond challenged any personal practice or principle of those within his command. His difference with Gabriel had been over an issue of ill-advised planning, not over the Christian services he had performed.

Against his will, Jerott laughed, and Lymond, moving forward, touched Graham Malett lightly on his bowed shoulders. ‘Get some rest,’ he said. ‘Spiritual unity, you should know, can come from other things besides your precious religion. Don’t despair of us yet.’

*

Within three days, supplies of fuel were coming through from all Buccleuch’s vast territory, and St Mary’s was lit and warmed and all the cold houses in Yarrow supplied. Calling at Branxholm to thank
the old man in person, Lymond found that Sir Wat Scott and his wife Janet already knew of the confrontation between Graham Malett and himself.

‘Aye, ye’re an irreverent, loose-living man,’ said the old man with satisfaction, rolling one of his grandsons along the settle and sitting down, unnoticing, on a rattle belonging to one of his sons. ‘I hear ye stripped the Chevalier and put him into the stocks for overdoing his good works?’

‘It’s a damned lie,’ said Lymond cheerfully. There was a kind of desperate elation about Francis Crawford that day that neither Will Scott nor his stepmother remembered seeing before.

‘And called him God’s own madcap ox tae his face.’

‘Manners,’ said Lymond reprovingly. ‘Behind his back, maybe. Not to his face.’

‘Why did ye risk it?’ asked Buccleuch bluntly. ‘He might well hae left ye. He’s plenty of other pots on the boil. Jimmy Sandilands has sent him a few times to Council meetings since he was laid up with his quinsy throat, and he’s fairly thick with the Queen Dowager at Falkland. Janet’s brother Robbie says he’s the only disinterested man of God she’s got to advise her, and she knows it. She’ll take him from you, and his knights with him.’

‘No, she won’t,’ said Lymond amiably. ‘She’ll wait until she thinks she can get us all.’

‘And will she?’

‘Occasionally,’ said Lymond, and displacing a Scott son (or grandson) sat down himself. ‘When it suits me, and not when it suits the Queen Dowager or Gabriel.… How is Peter Cranston’s romance, Janet?’

‘There’s tact for ye, Janet,’ said Janet’s spouse with approval. ‘There she is, heaving like a burstit horse tae get her word in. It’s not about Peter Cranston—oh, he and the Donati woman are that thick it’s no decent—but Sybilla could do with a visit. Richard keeps on at her about you and Gabriel quarrelling, and Joleta’s pining, and Masterly ate something he shouldna and died.’

Masterly was Lady Culter’s beloved cat, and his end was recounted to a pattern of screams from the elder Lady of Buccleuch. ‘Wat Scott, ye big-mouthed auld thief. That was my news!’

Well, ye were too slow. Ye’ve a mouth like the West Bow. Use it!’ said her husband complacently.

Will Scott’s curious gaze hadn’t left Lymond. ‘It wasn’t news anyway,’ he said to his stepmother. ‘Francis has called at Midculter and seen Sybilla—isn’t that right?’

‘Two days ago. I presided over Masterly’s funeral and dodged the doting Joleta,’ said Lymond. ‘I gather they’ve sent for Philippa Somerville to entertain the child.’

Will Scott grinned. ‘Aye. I’ve to pick her up at Liddel Keep on May Day and escort her the rest of the way to Midculter, avoiding you like the glengore.’

The ominous sparkle suddenly became a flame. ‘Who says?’

‘Your madcap ox. Gabriel. He called at Kincurd once, about Christmas, when he was benighted, and Grizel took him in and gave him a meal like I’ve never had before or since,’ said Will Scott with resentment. ‘He still calls in whiles, and she feeds him as if he’s about to faint on the altar steps.’

‘It brings out the mother in her,’ offered Buccleuch senior unwisely.

‘Then bad cess to it. The mother gets brought out in Grizel Beaton already as if some folk were crazy,’ snapped Grizel’s sister Janet and glared as her menfolk went into peals of stupid laughter. ‘And why, pray, is Francis Crawford supposed to avoid Philippa?’

‘She’s out, I gather, to do him some damage. Flaw Valleys was a long time ago, Francis. You’d think she’d have come to her senses?’

‘Coming to your senses is no asset in dealing with the Crawfords,’ said Janet grimly. ‘What’s all this Will tells us of you visiting the Kerrs?’

‘The
Kerrs
?’ It was news, evidently, to Buccleuch. The shrewd eyes, hooded by the vast grey brows, stared at Lymond. ‘Visiting the ailing poor, are ye?’

‘Janet, you blessed fool,’ said her stepson uneasily. ‘I told you not to let the old man hear it.’

Janet stared back at him coldly. ‘I’ll hide any little murder you choose, but not commerce with the Kerrs. Your Da scents that out for himself like a rat after meat. You know that.’

From across the room, Buccleuch and Francis Crawford were staring at one another. Lymond said slowly, ‘I have been trying to persuade them, as I tried to induce you, to drop your family feud.’

Wat Scott of Buccleuch rose to his feet. Aged before his time by hard living and hard fighting and a lifetime of Court machinations, he could still draw himself up like a bear, beard jutting, command in every gnarled joint. ‘You presumed, ye brassy-necked jackanapes, to beg a truce of the Kerrs
on my behalf
?’

Francis Crawford stayed where he was. But he kept his gaze on Buccleuch, a cold, impersonal gaze that caused Janet to shiver suddenly and draw her youngest child close. ‘Beg, Wat?’ Lymond said. ‘An axe doesn’t need to beg. I have told him that the next Scott or Kerr to die in the cause of this feud will be avenged by St Mary’s, not by the injured family. The same applies to every house on the Borders terrified to ask legal justice. I mean to break this crazy hermetic chain of slaughter, and I will.’

There was a brief silence. Then Buccleuch laughed, although between the curling grey whiskers his skin was purple; a deep,
growling laugh with a grim note in it. ‘Meddle with me, laddie, and your axe’ll be blunt before summer,’ he said. ‘The Scott family fights its own wars.’

‘I know. It’s easier than fighting someone else’s,’ said Lymond curtly. ‘St Mary’s is still going to be the Warden’s warden, Wat. I tell you now so that you may change your mind about our fuel if you wish.’

‘You mean,’ said Janet, casting a vicious glance at her husband who was spitting on the floor, ‘that if Will here killed a Kerr, you’d see him hanged for it?’

‘He wouldn’t hang, if there had been provocation. If there wasn’t, then he’d get all he deserved. I should see that he was brought to justice, that’s all. Left to themselves, Cessford or Ferniehurst would take a revenge worse than any sentence a judge might impose.’

‘Of course they would, ye wandering fool. And if they saw Will locked up safe out of their reach by a lot of mim-faced judges, they’d never rest till they’d killed a dozen Scotts to his Kerr, and Will himself on release.’

‘They wouldn’t, you know,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘For I should stop them.’

‘With yon clecking of foreigners at St Mary’s?’ Buccleuch’s nose and mouth, vocally paired, defined his opinion.

‘You don’t know what he has at St Mary’s,’ said Will Scott abruptly. He got to his feet, his hot blue stare fixed on Lymond. ‘The training is finished?’

Francis Crawford inclined his head.

‘It’s military rule, then?’ said Buccleuch’s heir.

‘No. We act within the law only.’

Buccleuch, his old eyes narrowed, had lost all his antic derision. ‘This is a thrawn countryside, Crawford. There are folk who’ll never thole that. They’d sooner call in the English.’

‘They’d be too late,’ said Lymond drily. ‘The English have called me in first.’

*

Will Scott saw their guest off. Standing on the windy steps of Branxholm castle, looking over the wide fiefs of Buccleuch, with the slithering rush of the thaw in their ears, ‘Ye ken there’s no hope,’ said Buccleuch’s son to Lymond. ‘The auld yin’ll not change.’

‘I know. Nor will Kerr of Cessford or of Ferniehurst either. But you will; given a chance to live; and the Kerrs who follow.’ Lymond’s horse and escort were ready. He turned suddenly, his eyes searching the earnest, carrot-topped face. ‘You do understand what I’m doing?’

‘Aye,’ said Will Scott flatly. ‘Aye, and I ken that you’re right. It’s just that life’ll be awful dull without the antrin wee stint at making mince of the Kerrs.’ He said wistfully, ‘You’ll have the new hackbuts, I expect, and pistols maybe; and a standard of marksmanship that’s fair astronomical. I wish.…’

‘Don’t wish,’ said Lymond curtly. ‘Your work is here, guarding the name and the future of one of the nation’s great families. Thank God for the strength to do your job, and the gift of wife and children to sustain you in it.’ His voice cooled to its usual irony. ‘Though whether the mass murder of strangers for one’s principles ranks higher in virtue than attacking one’s neighbours for the hell of it is a point I’m glad I don’t have to settle.’