The Disorderly Knights (55 page)

It was in Gabriel’s hands. If he thought it politic to delay, no doubt he would. Then for the first time in several hours, Adam Blacklock thought of Gabriel’s young sister, as he had last seen her, white-faced, half-stripped, in the room next to Lymond’s at Dumbarton, and recalled Lymond’s bland voice: ‘I am going to bed.’

Lymond hadn’t come in an hour. Fully aware that two of the most explosive tribes on the Borders were ranging the land looking for trouble, Francis Crawford had stayed at Dumbarton while Gabriel took the sword in his place. Stayed, rather drunk, with Gabriel’s sister Joleta.

Then at that point in his thoughts, the big doctor said, ‘Adam? What’s amiss?’ and he tried to shake off the headache which had dogged him all day and smile. The moon was up, and very bright, and over the next ridge lay Turnbull land.

There were two Turnbull boys on outpost duty, but these were found and felled almost at once. Then as lights sprang and wavered in the mud-daubed sheds and turf-roofed cabins, the Scotts roared down like the fall of a beech.

The thieves hadn’t expected it. Leaving behind the women and the old and the babies, they took to their horses in the brilliant moonlight and made for the hills.

They had no chance at all. Deaf to the shouts of Blacklock and Bell, Will Scott led his men after them, and where they could not capture, they killed. Adam saw old man Turnbull himself, built like a tree, back up his horse in the end shouting desperately to himself and the doctor, the only men among the attackers who were not Scotts. Randy Bell, nearer to him, did manage to fight to his side, but when Blacklock got there, the old man too was dead, and Randy Bell sitting on the young heather cursing Scotts; all Scotts and any Scotts of the name.

Then with the few prisoners they did take, the whole tribe cantered back to the settlement. The bulk of their own sheep and cattle they found where they had already noted them, in a big fold on the side of the hill. Furrowed tracks here and there showed where an opportunist granddad had made off with a heifer or two: a detachment of Scotts scouring the darkness soon rounded up all these.

The living remnants of the clan Turnbull, far from mourning their
dead, seemed as ever practically inclined. There were calves in the woodpile and tupps under the bed, lambs in the chimneys and a milch-cow lashed to somebody’s roof and thatched over. It was tricky work, but at length the Scott property, from Kincurd and Branxholm and all the long vale of Yarrow, marked with the Scott mark, was rounded up, and the owners were ready to go. It was then that Will Scott, flushed and exhilarated, ill-temper long since gone, clapped a big hand to his brow and yelled, ‘
Christ!
Philippa Somerville!’

He had been intended to meet her, it appeared, at Liddel Keep, not five miles away, and he should have been there this morning. ‘I’ll go,’ offered Randy Bell. ‘Take her to Midculter in the morning?’

Certainly, the sooner the Scotts left the district the better. Gabriel and the Kerrs had not yet arrived, but they might do so at any time. All the same, Adam Blacklock’s gaze met Will Scott’s, and Will said hastily, ‘Thank you, but no. Kate would flay me alive if I didn’t see to Philippa myself. She knows me, you see. I’ll call for her now. I thought you said Francis Crawford was coming?’

‘He may have gone to Graham Malett and the main company instead,’ said Blacklock quickly. It was possible. He hoped it was true. Between them, Lymond and Gabriel could keep Dante’s devils under control, never mind the left-handed chosen of Benjamin. It occurred to him that he had not yet seen any Kerr animals, although the scout who had first located the herd had reported that they were Scott and Kerr property mixed. Will Scott had been scrupulous, he had seen, in checking the burns.

They must be further away from the settlement. Satisfied, the Scott owners would have left the outlying valleys alone. Will Scott said now quickly, ‘Well, I’m away. I’ve no itch, I can tell you, to see Francis Crawford, and get dog’s abuse for not warning you all. Tell him he can come another time and hold my wee warm mailed fist.’

‘You tell him,’ said Adam Blacklock, and gave a cursory wave as the big young man, grinning, mounted and left. Randy Bell rode off with him. Adam, with half a dozen Scotts endowed him for safety, had elected to wait for the men of St Mary’s and the Kerrs.

*

By the time Francis Crawford reached St Mary’s from Dumbarton, riding alone, it was the afternoon of the 1st May, and he had been without sleep for the better part of two nights, and had covered something like two hundred and fifty miles since before dawn the previous day. He stopped at his own home for a meal and a flask of the strongest spirits he could find, to keep himself in the saddle
and for no other reason, and after taking both, walking about the castle and talking to the few men who remained, set off immediately for Liddesdale.

He was, or had been at the outset, faultlessly hardened for this very purpose. He also knew exactly how much longer he could expect his mind to remain clear and his muscles respond without rest. It was probably long enough to trounce Will Scott for not having reported his loss to St Mary’s, and maybe to view the winding up of the exercise. It seemed unlikely, with the whole company from St Mary’s with the Kerrs, that anything undesirable could happen.

That, however, he knew at the back of his mind, was a rationalization. Had it not been for Joleta, he would have been there now.

As it was, he did not attempt to pick up Gabriel in the darkness, but rode instead straight to the Debatable Land where the Turnbulls had their base. There, instead of Will Scott, he found Adam Blacklock, comfortably installed in an empty shack with six Scotts before a big fire, awaiting the arrival of Gabriel, Jerott Blyth and the Kerrs.

Any constraint Adam might have felt before Lymond vanished when the other man strolled into the hut, hard, slender and hellish inquisitive. Adam talked, and Lymond listened until he came to the bit about the absent Kerr cattle. Then he said, ‘Wait. When old Turnbull shouted, what did he say?’

‘Nothing about Kerrs,’ said Adam positively.

‘What, then? Can you remember even a word?’

If the Kerrs had to ride all round the Border to find their benighted beasts, Adam couldn’t see that it mattered. The Scott animals were away, with their owners, and the theft, God knew, had been fully avenged. He said nevertheless, ‘He was frightened, that’s all. He was trying to promise something, I think. Maybe restitution, of a kind. Whatever it was, we couldn’t save him.’

‘Randy couldn’t save him. You didn’t try. Who are left here?’

‘About a dozen women,’ said Blacklock stiffly. ‘Two bedridden men and a cripple, and a few children. That’s all. The Scotts took their prisoners with them.’

When Lymond spoke this time, it was face to face, and the smell of liquor was quite unmistakable, although his words were explicit enough. ‘Find me a mother and child. For preference, a woman who has only one son.’ And as Adam hesitated, ‘I want to find those cattle, Blacklock. The wives must know where they are.’

‘Do it yourself,’ Adam said.

For a long moment, his eyes bright with cold temper, Lymond stared at the other man; then he turned on his heel and went out.

Adam counted only five minutes before he was back, leading two fresh horses from the Turnbulls’ pastures. He flung the reins of one at Blacklock saying ‘Come!’ and as he mounted, shouted ‘Follow!’
to the Scotts. Then the artist found himself riding hell for leather through the night at Lymond’s heels.

It was a short ride. Blacklock never caught up with Lymond and so had no idea what he had learned. He only knew that swerving up a low hill and down the opposite side, he had to close his thighs sharply to avoid the man, who had suddenly reined, and then half-jump his mare sideways to avoid a large obstacle looming black on the slope. Next he saw that what he had taken for gorse bushes in the dark were other inanimate articles littering the whole valley before him. Then he heard, thinly and weakly through the spring air, the rumour of spent beasts in pain, and even then did not at once guess.

Dismounting, Lymond, Blacklock and the six men walked in silence from end to end of the valley, past every dead or dying animal that had once been the Kerrs’. Slashed, hamstrung, broken, stabbed or beheaded, every beast had been slaughtered or else uselessly maimed, with no regard for their agony or their value. Meat which would have kept Cessford and Ferniehurst all summer, and fed half of Edinburgh as well, lay butchered here on the grass. Near the beginning, Lymond struck a light from some tinder to look for the brand. They found it, marking each beast as a Kerr’s. It was then that they saw for the first time the triumphant S which overlaid every mark, crudely cut in each flank by the butchers. And in these parts, S stood only for ‘Scott’.

Shielding the flame in his hands, Lymond straightened and met Adam’s taut gaze. ‘You were with the Scotts before, during and after their attack on the camp?’

‘Yes. They didn’t do this. There wasn’t time. They were only concerned about punishing Turnbulls and getting their own cattle back.’

‘But you said that they came through Liddesdale once before, on their own.’

‘Yes. But that was yesterday. This was done today. These beasts are still warm.’ Adam added harshly, ‘In any case, if the Scotts had done it, wouldn’t they have taken home their own herd at the time? Why come back for it? Especially after signing their work?’

Lymond was staring at him. ‘Well done,’ he said. ‘That takes care of all the arguments. Now tell me how we’re going to prevent the Kerrs from going berserk when they ride over those hills and find this.’

At that, even the raised voices of the six men beside them were promptly cut off. Then Adam said slowly, ‘We can’t. But at least the Scotts will be well on the way home. That is—’ Through the cloudy wastes of his headache, there came to him the thing he’d forgotten.

He went on, ‘That is, they’d a call to make first. The Somerville
youngster is at Liddel Keep, and Scott was going that way to escort the girl north.’

After a moment Lymond said, flatly, ‘When did they leave?’

‘Not ten minutes before you arrived.’

‘With the animals?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then they won’t be there yet. And when they get there, they’ll stay overnight. It’ll let the Kerrs get away, they would think, and rest the cattle and the men.’

Blacklock said irritably, ‘What’s so desperate? Gabriel may not bring them at all tonight. He knows by now that the Turnbulls are the culprits, but he may not tell the Kerrs until he’s sure Scott is away. And even if they come, they may well miss this field until morning. You didn’t notice it until you were told. And even if they find it, it’ll be morning until they can trace the Scotts by the cattle marks. And even apart from all those things,’ said Adam Blacklock with leaden patience, ‘what hope have one undisciplined Border family, however wild, in fighting the whole of St Mary’s?’

The light had gone out. Standing still at his side, Lymond said, ‘Do you want an answer? Whoever slaughtered these animals will make sure the Kerrs know about it by now. That’s why it was done. The actual killing, incidentally, was done by the Turnbulls themselves, for a fee. The man who gave them the money insisted on watching the slaughter, and, they assumed, was a Scott. So when the Kerrs come they will certainly kill all those Turnbulls still left. They will then by means of their torches follow Will Scott to Liddel Keep.…
It’s too late
,’ said Francis Crawford on a note that made Adam’s skin crawl. ‘It’s too late. If I’d been even two hours before.… But we can try.… Adam, you must ride and try to warn Gabriel. He may guess where Scott is.… Christ, even I knew, if I had had the wit to remember. But if he knows what’s likely to happen, he may be able to stop it. If not, and these wily old devils get the news first, they’ll trick him if they can.’

‘And you?’ said Blacklock. ‘You will ride and warn Scott?’

‘One of his own men will do that,’ said Lymond, and mounting, gathered the reins. ‘For my bloody sins, I’ve got twelve women, a cripple, two bedridden men and eight children to hide first.’

*

Adam Blacklock had been right. After learning that the stolen herds were in Liddesdale, and that the Scotts were riding to find them, Gabriel delayed quite some time before imparting the news, with his congratulations, to the Kerrs. The two old men, Jerott noted, treated him with reserve. Walter Kerr and John Kerr, with
justice, were suspicious of all the right-handed world; which was why they had reached the ripe years they had.

The younger Kerrs Jerott liked. Since joining Gabriel and his friends, the smell of Dumbarton had gone. He had enjoyed riding out among all the fierce, leather-jacketed young of Cessford and Ferniehurst, brash and vigorous and rough-cut as they were, hunting a herd which had been taken up into Heaven, it seemed.

Then, when Gabriel quietly told them the news, the first uneasy shadow appeared. Lymond had not yet arrived. When questioned, Jerott told the exact truth. Lymond had not been ready to leave the inn at Dumbarton, and had claimed to be following them in an hour. Further questioned, he added that Mr Crawford had been drinking, and presumably had other pleasures already engaged for the night. In any case, clearly, he had not followed. Without him, it was decided to defer disclosing the whereabouts of their herd to the Kerrs.

Then, as Lymond did not come, the Kerrs were told. Then and increasingly it became clear that Graham Malett was troubled, both by Lymond’s absence and by his own assumption of command. The lesson of the rationed fuel had sunk, it seemed, bitterly deep. At every stage Jerott found himself, with de Seurre and Hoddim and Plummer and Tait and Guthrie, in round table conference over the next move. At St Mary’s it would have worked. In the field, with several hundred robust Kerrs to be handled, it was uneasily wrong. Everything that Gabriel did or suggested was obviously and precisely right. But he would act on nothing before placing it, as Lymond had so caustically demanded, before his fellows. And always, they were looking for Lymond himself.