The Disorderly Knights (79 page)

‘Ah, would you hear him,’ said a mellow Irish voice from the background. Across the strewn table on the dais, Cormac O’Connor leaned forward, his hirsute hands clasped, his brown, fleshy face eager. ‘Give him the great occasion, and he will put a thread of Latin round it. Was it a case of
volenti non fit injuria
, would you say, when he wiled away me wife Oonagh O’Dwyer?’

Lymond’s head slowly lifted, until his gaze met and crossed the big Irishman’s. ‘You have no wife, O’Connor.’

‘You have the right of it. Not since you killed her,’ said O’Connor agreeably. ‘Left her to sink in the waters of Tripoli Bay, while you saved yourself in a Turkish boat. Full of kindness and sympathy the Turks, I’m told, and saw that none laid an uncivil finger on ye. But then, that great old fellow Dragut and yourself were slaves together, they tell me. The King of France paid a smart sum, they tell me too, for the likes of you to warn the Knights of St John that the Turk was coming. And in spite of all a noble prince like yourself could do, Gozo was slaughtered and Tripoli fell … the great warrior that you were!’

‘A traitor … a traitor in the convent. Is that why you tried to stop me climbing the wall at Mdina? Is that why you tried to join the Turks at Gozo? Is that why you gave all your time to the Calabrians at Tripoli—pretended to save the fort to safeguard your name, knowing all the time it would fall?’ Lifting his dazed, magnificent head from his sister’s rose-gold hair, Graham Malett’s voice rang out, and deepened and hardened until it was clothed, at last, in the timbre they all knew from the quiet chapel at St Mary’s, where he led them in praise.

‘Of course. Thompson was your associate, but the Turks didn’t touch him, did they? Oonagh O’Dwyer knew what you were, so she had to die. Did Nicholas Upton recognize you, too, for a damned soul?’ And all the serenity gone from his eyes, Graham Malett laughed shortly.

‘What a fool I was, harnessed only in my Faith, believing you fought, with me, to repair the flaws in the Order. I offered you here my heart and the work of my hands, and when you seized the one and laughed at the other I thought, this is young arrogance and youthful cruelty; both will pass. And so I trusted you with Joleta …’ His tone changed.

‘Oh, be quiet!’ added Gabriel abruptly, swinging round, and the men he and Lymond had both led, who, surging from bench and table, roused and threatening, now filled all the space around and behind them, saw his strained face and the two shining tracks made by the tears on his face. ‘Be quiet! Is this a matter for drunken soldiers or for any of the common laws of society?’

‘It is a matter, I think, for the “fine instrument we call St Mary’s”,’ said Lymond’s undisturbed voice. ‘Leaving all our disillusionments
aside, you cannot change leaders in a drunken brawl in the middle of the night and still hope to remain a company—what was it?—“worthy of renown throughout Christendom.” I shall not escape you. I have, I think, an answer to most of the accusations that trouble you, and it is very much to my own advantage to stay. Then you may hear the case on both sides in the cold light of sobriety and justice.’ His observant eyes swept them all, resting finally on the men who silently had approached his sides and stood now, breathing heavily, at his shoulder. One of them stepped back.

‘I am no more than one man,’ said Lymond mildly. ‘Whatever your decision, I shall honour it. And it will give you an opportunity to persuade Sir Graham, if you wish, to stay as your commander. At the moment, as you see, his only desire is to leave.’

With a hiss of steel, a second unsheathed sword joined Jerott’s before Lymond’s eyes. ‘No,’ said Randy Bell brutally. ‘
You
will be the one to leave.’ And knotting tighter and tighter, the circle about them moved inwards. Standing behind and between Jerott and Bell, a hand on each shoulder, ‘You should have married me,’ said Joleta in a low voice.

‘Regrets, Joleta?’ said Lymond. Dressed for rough riding, in his white shirt and sleeveless leather jack, the soft deerskin boots pulled high over his hose, empty-handed and bareheaded, he looked, beside their dishevelled turbulence, patiently authoritative. No one yet had laid hands on him. His blue gaze, diamond-hard, rested on the girl’s breathtaking face. ‘Why not tell Sir Graham the truth? It won’t be pleasant if he finds out when you are together and alone. Here, you have three hundred protectors.’

‘What truth?’ said Graham Malett slowly, and turning his own head, he studied his sister’s thin face. And still in the same slow, almost caressing voice, ‘Why did you not call for help, Joleta?’

Nicolas de Nicolay, arrived unnoticed behind them all, took a breath just in time to save himself from suffocation.
Diable de diable de diable de diable
 … the boy was going to do it. My only hope, he had said, is to drive a wedge between Joleta and her brother. But how to do it, without revealing that he knew all? Launch into half-proved excuses for his behaviour here and on Malta, and they would lose patience and attack. He must have time, for his witnesses and his evidence to be brought in unmolested. So … if only this powerful Gabriel might be led to think that he could not trust his sister … if only his sister might be brought to realize that once alone, her brother might turn against her, she might—she just might—desert Sir Graham for a safe and winning side.…

‘You see,’ Lymond had said, towards the end of that meeting at Boghall, ‘she was meant to expose me at Dumbarton. Blacklock didn’t silence her. She should have called out.’

‘Then why didn’t she?’ Lady Jenny had asked with tremendous decorum. ‘Did she have reason to hope, perhaps, that she might … tame you yet?’

‘It is probably what she told Sir Graham,’ Lymond had replied thoughtfully, his wide eyes on Jenny’s small, handsome face. ‘Myself … I doubt it.’

Youthful arrogance, Gabriel had said. There was something in it. Francis Crawford knew his own powers very well. And yet he had never, from the beginning, underestimated Gabriel. He was afraid; he had spoken cold-bloodedly at Boghall of his fear of Graham Malett. Not of injury, not even of death, except that if he died, Gabriel would have won. In the duel now reaching its unavoidable climax here, only Lymond, fighting with all the arts he possessed, knew what depended on the outcome. To Gabriel, contemptuous, loftily confident as he must be, this must seem no more than the final brushing aside of the pawn he had selected and toyed with, and which had proved a little more troublesome than he had anticipated. So, ‘Why did you not call for help, Joleta?’ asked Sir Graham; and Lymond, his gaze still locked in the girl’s, said gently, ‘Because she didn’t dare. Adam Blacklock, when he comes, will tell you. I’m sorry, Sir Graham. I was not the first. And I shall not be the last. The child is not mine.’

Nicolas de Nicolay swallowed and, for a moment, he himself felt a twinge of unaccustomed coldness. Lymond knew that this was not the reason, and that both Gabriel and his sister were aware that it was not. Yet he put it forward, deliberately, as he might be expected in his ignorance to do, thus rubbing, rubbing on the one small spot of friction between Gabriel and his sister. Had she, somewhere among the wildness and the cruelty, found an affinity with Lymond? Would she betray her brother? So Gabriel must be thinking.

And then, at once, the big, golden knight showed his mastery: showed that Lymond had been right to be afraid. He drew Joleta towards him, and holding her close to his shabby doublet, her silken hair pressed to his breast, he said huskily, ‘They are trying to drive me from you. It isn’t true. I will never believe it. And I will prove it on his body.’ And, looking straight at Lymond above Joleta’s still, downcast profile, he said, ‘Give him his sword.’

And that could have only one result. The vociferous, calling voices around him rose in raucous dissent and Jerott, a rock in the struggling tide, said, raising his own voice, ‘You can’t lead St Mary’s dead or outlawed. We should present this man to justice for justice to deal with.’

‘Provided,’ said de Seurre’s thin, cutting voice at his side, shoulder to shoulder with Plummer, with Tait, with even a white-faced des Roches, holding back with their broad shoulders the impatient,
violent surge from behind, ‘Provided that St Mary’s is allowed to execute its own justice first.’

Only Jerott Blyth hesitated. He did not see de Nicolay begin, burrowing like a desperate mole, to fight his way, sword in hand, to Lymond’s side, knowing that it was too late; Lymond must have known that nothing he might say would be listened to now. Jerott hesitated, and in that second caught a half-smile, incredibly, as Lymond’s blue eyes rested on him for a moment, and a fractional shrug of the shoulders as if he accepted, with resignation, the foolishness of man. Lifting his sword, on equal impulse Jerott reversed it, and slammed it home in the scabbard. Then, turning, he thrust his way back through the crowd until he reached the dais, and leaped up on it.

‘Dear Jerott,’ said Lymond. De Nicolay, stopped not far away, saw that he was rather white, but that his eyes, brilliantly blue, were as calm as his voice. ‘He’s going to tell everyone, for the sake of their souls, to put their little hatchets away and use their good, honest Christian fists instead. There he goes. St Mary’s mustn’t murder their commander. An excellent point. I seem to remember making it myself. Nor could they leave the offence unpunished. Pity. The influence of friend Gabriel and his awful, golden face. So.… Oh, Jerott,’ said Lymond, talking half to himself and half to the unfriendly faces straining behind his officers’ linked arms. ‘I thought of it myself, but I hoped you would have an imagination a little less trite.
Not
the whipping-post!’

‘But yes,’ said the Chevalier de Seurre; and releasing Randy Bell’s hand, he stepped aside, followed at once by his fellow-officers, to let the men who had obeyed Lymond for a year pour through to where he stood.

Or had stood. For suddenly he was up on the table behind him, a candlestick in one hand and a heavy pot in the other, swinging them experimentally, the flame of battle and a kind of wild laughter filling his face. ‘Convicted,’ said Lymond, ‘of using unreverent language to the bailies again, the prisoner resisted arrest, bestowing three bloody noses and a sprained pinky.… Come along, children. You have to get me from here to the whipping-post—oh, Jerott! How conventional !—without killing me on the way. A bagatelle.
Vive la bagatelle!
’

But by that time, they were on him. He did more damage than his officers, watching, would have thought possible in the few seconds available. Then they all, Gabriel, white-faced, with Joleta close in his arm, followed the struggling, drunken mob slowly out of the hall and downstairs to the great doors, as they dragged their talkative commander feet first, bumping and rolling, down to the cool darkness outside.

The post, a massive, manacled cross of oak, stood severe as a schoolmistress in the wide shining reaches of the yard. The rain had
stopped. The cressets brought by the provident burned twice, clear and bright, in the still air and on the dark, river-like paving underfoot. The din, so ringingly loud in the hall, became thin and bodiless, interlaced with its own echoes in space, and more frantic as the fresh air began to work on the sherry-sack.

Twice Jerott and once Lancelot Plummer had interfered when the assault on Lymond had taken a savage fervour that offered small hope for the bagatelle. Jerott thought of that mocking phrase as he beat his men off, cursing. He had looked, as he uttered it, like a man who had won a contest, not lost it. There was about him, in all his viciousness, his waywardness, his insolence, an aspect of sheer, blistering courage that caught Jerott by the throat. It recalled other times to him—he
had
risked his life in that underground hell in Tripoli, risked it ten times over—and, you could tell by the numbers who now, their passion lessened, dropped from the crowd and hesitated, as he did, on the fringe—you could tell that others were reminded, too, of other occasions here at St Mary’s. But at the core were those whose bitter resentment on Gabriel’s behalf still carried them forward; who had suffered from Lymond’s merciless tongue; who had themselves paid at this post. And those, like Bell and Plummer and Tait and the Knights of the Order, who seeing the finer implications of all he had done, could never condone it.

Through it all, Francis Crawford himself was quite conscious. They were keen, in any case, to revive him if ever his handling proved more than he could bear. He had half lost consciousness a few times but continued, automatically with a highly specialized form of resistance that taught them a few things, embarrassingly, that even at St Mary’s they had yet to learn. Then they got him to the post and kicked him to keep him quiet while they chained him, and he did call out then, once, and choked, strapped inescapably in their view, with the nausea of the blow.

‘So you receive your wages,’ said Graham Malett’s low, beautiful voice. The crowd by the post parted, their work done, and stepped back a little as Graham Malett came forward, a fire-stick in his hand, and relinquishing his sister to Jerott’s arm, walked round to face the man he had befriended.

Spreadeagled on his own post, his breathing tumultuous, his face livid under its bloodstreaked and battered skin, his jack gone and his fine shirt in shreds, Lymond stared back below his long lashes, choking still from the last blow. ‘… And the world is witness of your lightness, loveless friend that you have been,’ finished Gabriel sombrely.

‘Do you wonder,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay’s accented voice quietly at Jerott’s elbow, ‘do you wonder, perhaps, why M. Crawford chose to come back at all?’

‘Wait,’ said Jerott, without listening. Gabriel’s voice, it seemed to him, had gone unaccountably flat, and the big man, his guinea-gold hair bright in the torchlight, was looking, not at Lymond’s face pressed to the wood but below: below the long throat, starkly lit by the torches, the collarbones outlined in gold and smudged black, the chest exposed where the shirt had been torn back to the shoulders, above the strong, leaved rib-cage and the hollow diaphragm, black and brilliant by turn as his disarranged breathing for the moment defied control.