The Disorderly Knights (61 page)

‘Oh,’ said Kate. ‘Tomorrow? That means leaving when?’

‘Now,’ said Jerott politely. ‘I really must ask you to wake him.’

‘And if,’ said Kate desperately, ‘Mr Crawford is too ill to delegate the command, how will his deputy be chosen?’

Jerott stared. ‘There’s only one choice, Mistress Somerville. If Mr Crawford couldn’t lead, then it would fall to Sir Graham Reid Malett.’

‘You’d better go up,’ said Kate then ungraciously. ‘He isn’t ill—yet, but he’s suffering from severe overstrain, in my view; and of course, lack of sleep.’ Her sharp brown eyes sought and searched the brown face of this beautiful young man who had been kind to Philippa during that sickening episode of the old woman in the ditch, and who spoke so carelessly of his commander. ‘You haven’t known Mr Crawford long?’ she said.

‘We were boyhood … acquaintances,’ said Jerott. ‘And met again, last year, in Malta. I didn’t intend to appear unfeeling. I have, I need hardly say, an enormous respect for Mr Crawford’s ability.’

‘But not for his character?’ said Kate. ‘Mr Blyth, you should remember one thing. A celibate island life fighting Turks is no particular guarantee of early maturity. Take a little crone-like advice, and don’t rush your judgements.’

Jerott gazed at her with his splendid, cold stare. ‘You are quite probably right. Sir Graham Malett, for instance, both admires him and holds him in deep affection.’

This Christ-like naïveté of Sir Graham’s was, clearly, a matter for pain. Immune to the sarcasm, Kate suddenly pounced on the anomaly. ‘The feeling isn’t, I gather, reciprocal … Sir Graham isn’t bent, then, on usurping the leadership?’

‘
Usurping
it?’ Jerott laughed. ‘Mistress Somerville, Gabriel’s one object in coming to Scotland has been to draw Lymond from his own recondite pursuits into a life worthy of himself and his gifts.’

‘And the army?’ said Kate. ‘When Francis Crawford has taken his vows, what of the army?’

From the step above, impatient, Jerott Blyth looked down on her. ‘The army is his. He would lead it, as now. But as a holy weapon. For great purposes, not for mercenary gain. To bring peace to the brotherhood of man.’ He glanced upstairs and back, ironically, to Kate. ‘He’s flogged himself dizzy in a race that doesn’t exist.’

All the same, forcing Lymond awake amused nobody; he was too exhausted for any gentle methods to work. It was a long time before he moved in his sleep, protesting at last; but soon after that he rolled over, his head in his hands, and heard Jerott’s story. Then he got up and made ready to leave.

Kate had one last brief talk with Francis Crawford, after she had served a quick, generous meal to them all and had their horses made
ready. ‘… About Philippa,’ she said, as his pretence of a meal came to an end, and he waited for her to rise. Jerott and the rest were outside already.

‘Yes?’ said Lymond. ‘You would like me to see her and apologize? I shall, of course. But I don’t think.…’

‘No, no. What possible good would that do? But I should like,’ said Kate, ploughing on, against the clock and Lymond’s own silent opposition, ‘to hear the whole tale of the Hot Trodd. It might help to explain. What happened, for example, to the child you half-killed at the Turnbulls’?’

The blank cornflower gaze at her side came slowly to life. The fair brows rose to impossible heights. ‘
Kate!
’ said Lymond. ‘I know we luxuriate in every kind of melodrama, but I haven’t started making a meal of infants, even Turnbull infants, yet. Who put round that extraordinary story?’

Kate laughed. ‘Philippa picked it up from the big doctor—what’s his name? Bell? When he came by one day to see how she was doing. She swore he said you had gone to torment a child in order to get the woman to confess where the Kerr cattle were. And you know that’s Philippa’s.…’

‘
Bête noire
, I think, is the phrase,’ said Lymond. ‘She’s not far wrong, in a sense. I got the facts I wanted from the mother, all right, but I didn’t have to touch the child. Only told her that if she didn’t help me, I’d take the poor half-starved object to Edinburgh and have it brought up a douce, well-fed solid citizen. That put the fear of God into her all right.’ He shook his head. ‘Give up, Kate. Whatever you tell her, she’ll only believe now what she wants to believe.’

He pushed back his chair gently, and she rose. As he took her arm to walk out to the yard with her, she looked up and said, ‘Why is the March meeting so important? It
is
important, isn’t it?’

‘For three reasons,’ said Lymond. ‘First, because old Wat Scott of Buccleuch will be there, aching to provoke the bloodiest kind of battle with the Kerrs who, he thinks, murdered his son. Second, because the cream of the English northern command will be there, and for all our sakes we must impress them. And third, because someone thought it worth while to see that two separate messages, from the English Warden and from Tosh, my man watching Buccleuch, about this change of date didn’t reach us.’ Arrived at the doorway, he stopped and turned. ‘Kate Somerville, thank you. You did it against your will. But if you hadn’t let Jerott in to wake me.…’

‘Gabriel would have taken the command,’ said Kate gently. ‘Would that have been so terrible?’

‘Yes,’ said Lymond; and cold temper grated suddenly in his soft voice. ‘Yes, it would.’

*

That night at supper, Kate found her daughter poor company. And since, nerving herself for the reasoned exposition she was about to make, she had remarkably little appetite herself, the meal was funereal in the extreme, and she was quite thankful when Philippa said, out of the blue, ‘I didn’t stay in the kitchen.’

‘Oh?’ said Kate, running her mind rapidly over several snatches of dialogue.

‘No. I heard what that man said about the Hot Trodd.’

‘Oh,’ said Kate.

‘You
believed
him when he said he didn’t ill-treat that baby,’ said Philippa.

‘The gullible sort,’ agreed Kate.

There was a pause. Philippa’s small, sallow face with the ringed brown eyes was pale, and a strand of mud-coloured hair, unregarded, fell over her cheek. She said eventually, ‘He thanked you. You wakened him, and it was horrible; and he
thanked
you.’

Kate hadn’t known that Philippa was there during that little exercise in sadism. She said, ‘He had a duty to do, chick. It was more important than sleep.’

‘But he
came
here to sleep. Didn’t he?’ said Philippa.

‘No,’ said Kate, her stomach snail-like within her. ‘Come and sit in the garden before you crumb the whole table.’ And, sitting on the grass under the apple trees, with both their gowns becoming irremediably stained: ‘No,’ she repeated. ‘He didn’t come here to sleep. He came to make sure of your safety, and did without sleep to do it. He thinks someone is trying to harm you.’

‘
Harm
me!’ Philippa’s lashes flew open, and her mouth widened of a sudden in a charming, uninhibited grin. ‘But that’s stupid! He harms me himself.’

‘You heard why he did that,’ said Kate shortly. ‘He thought it too much of a coincidence that the Turnbulls’ settlement and Liddel Keep should be so close together. And he thought our fire here was much too mysterious. So he wanted you away from the Keep quickly. It was your own silly fault you didn’t do as you were told.… He was asking me,’ said Kate, picking her way among her responsibilities and the fragments of her conscience, ‘why anyone should want you out of the way. All I could think of was George Paris and his little secret.’

‘So you told him?’ said Philippa thoughtfully.

‘Yes. He knew already,’ said Kate defensively. ‘So I wasn’t exactly giving away the privy code book. But he didn’t know you knew.’

‘And does he think,’ said Philippa cheerfully, ‘that Mr Paris wants to murder
me
?’

‘I think he finds it a little hard to believe. But it’s not impossible. Anyway, until we know, I’ve promised to put you in irons, Philippa.
No more trips to the village without me. No visits at all away from home. And Charles or some other unfortunate sufferer has to keep an eye on you even in the garden. We’re not taking any chances.’

Her heart sinking, she saw her daughter seize unerringly on the one reprehensible element. Oh, Francis …!

‘But,’ said Philippa, ‘all Mr Crawford need do is denounce George Paris as a double agent, and the Queen Mother of Scotland would put him in prison, and I should be safe.’

It would be easy to say that, in belated patriotism, she had made Lymond promise otherwise. Kate instead baldly told the truth. ‘One of the people in league with Paris over a little piece of chicanery is a friend of Mr Crawford’s. He can’t expose Paris without involving his friend as well.’

‘Then why doesn’t Sir Graham Malett expose Paris? He wouldn’t care about Mr Crawford’s criminal friends,’ said Philippa.

‘He doesn’t know who Paris is,’ reminded Kate patiently. ‘Paris gave him a false name, remember? It was all very adult and tortuous.’

‘I don’t think it was very adult,’ said Philippa after a moment. ‘I … Oh, I see. Sarcasm again. All right. But then,’ said Kate’s daughter, pursuing it doggedly, ‘why didn’t
you
denounce Paris?’

‘Because,’ said Kate, getting up and shaking the cut grass and insects off her skirt, ‘I have some shreds of respect left for my nation, if none for the extraordinary creatures who are attempting to run it at present. If George Paris is exposed as a double agent, he can’t work for the English King any more.’

‘I must say,’ said Philippa getting up, ‘Mr Crawford doesn’t seem to be worried. He must think a lot more of his friends than he does of his country.’

‘Um,’ said Kate, eyeing her child in the mellow glow of late sunshine, prettily backlighting the apple leaves. Philippa looked terrible. She supposed she looked terrible too. She made up her mind to get a new dress and something that would contain her hair, and then changed it abruptly. Character was all. She said, ‘If you think Mr Crawford isn’t worried, you’re blind. He’s nearly out of his mind with worry.’

‘About himself,’ said Philippa. ‘The trouble about Mr Crawford is that he has no social conscience.’

‘The trouble about Mr Crawford,’ said Kate, ‘is that he puts up with his enemies and plays merry hell with his friends. Come on. Let’s go inside, before my mother-love slips and I give you a bruise on the other side of your jaw.’ And hugging her daughter rather desperately to her side, Kate Somerville went indoors.

X
T
he
H
adden
S
tank

(
March Meeting, June/July 1552: Algiers, August 1552
)

T
HE
Hadden Stank, a boggy meadow almost precisely on the Scottish–English Border and a few miles from the English castles of Carham and Wark, over the river, was not England’s most popular spot for a meeting of Wardens. This dated from some twelve years back, when an English army of three thousand gallant horsemen was severely trounced on the low ridge in whose shadow the Stank unrolled. It was not popular either with the Douglases, who were on the English side at the time.

It was therefore with a great deal of unconcealed pleasure that Wat Scott of Buccleuch, riding north from Branxholm to the March, encountered Jamie Douglas of Drumlanrig, the Baron of Hawick himself, and the most active member now of all that great house, riding morosely ahead of him to take his place as Scottish Warden and Justiciar of the Middle Marches. Until two months ago, the appointment had been held by Buccleuch. He had given it up, with other public duties, when his son Will had died. Watching him ride beside her now, grimly jovial, chaffing Sir James, his wife saw that Buccleuch didn’t regret renouncing this at least; a Wardenship counting near-sovereign power.

Her suspicions seethed. Over sixty, with a life of violence behind him, Buccleuch had been a broken man after the affair at Liddel Castle. More recently, however, the light of purpose had entered his eye, and, nimble as an elderly rectangular goblin, he had vanished and reappeared at Branxholm until they had all gone off their food.

Wat Scott of Buccleuch knew very well that to lay an unprovoked hand on the Kerrs would mean serious trouble for his house. The murderer of his son had never been found; and the law had ruled that the Kerrs, believing however incorrectly that the Scotts had killed all their cattle, were not to be blamed for retaliation. A heavy fine from Cessford and Ferniehurst had closed the incident.

Janet Beaton, Lady of Buccleuch, whose sister had married the dead boy, didn’t think, in spite of her alarming forecast to Lymond, that Wat would provoke either Walter or John Kerr in person. In
other respects she distrusted him to the uttermost, and her comely, uncompromising presence, planked sidesaddle on her mare between Buccleuch and Sir James Douglas and dividing a hard stare between both, at length drove Sir Wat into unwise speech. ‘We’re lamenting the price of auld stots. Will ye take your lang neb out o’ my shouther?’

‘I can hear ye. Ye’re not lamenting the price of auld fools, Wat Scott?’ said his wife instantly. ‘Ye could be at home this minute with your doublet off and your slippers on and a stoup of good wine in your fist. What for are ye interfering in Sir James Douglas’s business?’

‘Because I wrang-wisely thocht I’d chaipit the auld bag at hame!’ said Sir Walter furiously. ‘Ye’ll be the only female there, barring the hoors!’

Smiling, his wife nodded her handsome, positive head. ‘Dod, Wat! It’s every young lassie’s dream!’

‘Well, you’re nae young lassie!’ roared Sir Wat. ‘Thrice merrit and six times a mother! They’ll hae ye in and out o’ their tents like a row o’ fishermen gaffing a salmon, and ye needna look tae me for succour!’

‘Wat, Wat!’ said Lady Buccleuch with reproach. ‘You’re affronting Sir James. It’s a perjink, weel-conducted March meeting we’re off to attend, not a brothel.’