The Disorderly Knights (57 page)

Will Scott drew back the cord and loosed, and an agile gentleman clambering up the ale-house’s low roof gave a squeal and crashed to the ground. ‘Batty Home of the Cowdenknowes,’ he said. ‘A
cousin of Tom Kerr. Don’t tell me you’re not enjoying this fine.’

‘Your blasted Nanny should have taught you what mine did,’ said Lymond. ‘The things you enjoy most aren’t good for you.
Mauldicte soit trestoute la lignye
. I’m going to inspect the junior ranks.’

A second later he was back, with no words to waste. ‘The impossible has happened. They’ve got in below. You’ll have to lose some men, Will. We need a crossfire nothing can live through, or they’ll set fire to the basement.’

They lost eight of their best men, shooting as fast as they knew how to prevent the stream of Kerrs dodging and rushing into the storeroom with all the wood they could get. The big doors, oak and iron, hung drunkenly open until, with two blows of an axe, someone under Cessford’s direction felled one to the ground and, dragged away, it became a shield for the ant-like traffic to and from the lower ground floor. Lymond called Randy Bell from the upper floor, where he had been in charge of guarding the rear. ‘You can say your prayers now. Unless Malett comes soon, all they’ve got to do is set fire to their double boiler below and we frizzle. Or more probably suffocate first. Will: what’s most inflammable of the stuff you put in yourself?’

‘There was a vat of pure spirit out there,’ said Buccleuch’s son helpfully. ‘I poured most of it into the well, but there’s some to the right of the door.’

‘Was there, by God?’ said Lymond. ‘That’ll do, then. They’ve got all the ladders out, and they seem to be busy piling everything high so that the fire will have a chance of cracking the vault. There’s a murdering-hole, isn’t there, down to them?’

There was, locked and barred. ‘Right,’ said Lymond. ‘If we surrender we’ll get our throats cut anyway. Let’s go out in a blaze of glory. Let’s start the fire first.’

It was worth it, Bell said, to see the expressions, reflected in the red glare, on Cessford’s and Ferniehurst’s faces. Under Lymond’s direction, the wooden floor over the basement was swilled with the last of their water. Then, when the noise below seemed at its height, the rusty bolts of the trapdoor were withdrawn. For a second, peering below, Scott watched while a dozen Kerrs in angry zest worked on their pyre. Then he lobbed down his torch. It fell full on the big jar of spirit, and the open door from the store to the courtyard was sealed off by a curtain of fire.

Will Scott didn’t linger to see if any of his besiegers escaped. Slamming down and rebarring the trap, he got to his feet and followed the rest up the twisting stairs to the highest point of the Keep. There, crowding into the open air of the roofwalks, they prepared stoically to wait.

Once lit, nothing could put out the fire underneath. Soon the flames would search through the old stone until the floor above
caught, and the smoke would press through to choke them. None of the Kerrs would attempt an assault on them now. They would simply stay outside and wait.

To surrender, to climb down one by one from that narrow door and these narrow windows, was death. Their lives now lay in Gabriel’s hands.

Five minutes later, the crackling far below in the Keep had become a muffled roar, and looking out, Scott and his men could see the yard flickering red, and the fiery armour and long moving shadows of the Kerrs, standing well back and watching. No one troubled to shoot.

Very soon the smoke reached them, telling that the first floor had caught. It was black and acrid and the men on the battlements, to Lymond’s discursive decree, gave way to an equal number of men from the upper floors. The allure of Liddel Keep could not carry them all. Throughout, Lymond himself, his voice husky with coughing, sustained a wildly impertinent exposition on the scene, breaking off only once to haul a choking youngster back from a sill. ‘You have a small chance here, and none at all down there. Come upstairs and help us throw things instead. It doesn’t do the Kerrs a bit of harm, but it’ll relieve the Nixons of a hellish lot of poor ornaments.’

They loved him. You could feel it, despite the mess they were in; and most of all because he had started the fire himself, just to capture some Kerrs. Only perhaps Will Scott and Randy realized that if he had not done so, they might like lemmings have begun to rush from the Keep to die in the open, fighting, and perhaps take a few Kerrs with them still. This way, they might all live. If Gabriel came.

The flames were halfway up the stone walls when they heard it, the rumour of many hooves beating fast through the night. The Kerrs heard it too. An army was coming, an army which would round up and shackle them, liberate and comfort the Scotts, divide them for ever from their chance of revenge for the wrong done them that day. The door was burned down. The ladders were there on the grass. As Graham Malett led the company of St Mary’s as fast as horse could run down the dark turf to the tower, the besiegers, impervious to hurt, burst into the burning building and over the broken, blazing floor to the stairs. When the company arrived, in perfect formation, surrounding the yard and sweeping all the remaining Kerrs into custody, the Keep was a fiery finger in the black vale, with the clashing of swords and the cries of the maimed within rising above the even roar of the flames.

Orders, more orders. Blacklock, Guthrie, Tait, Plummer, Hoddim, de Seurre, des Roches, controlling each their part of the jigsaw, proceeded with ladder and rope to enter every possible aperture, while a chain from the bailey wells was set up to safeguard their return. Inside, their bodies raw with chance burns, their spleen savage as
ever, Scotts and Kerrs reeled and struggled in hand-to-hand fighting, in space hardly enough for the sword. Gabriel’s men captured them, one by one, extricating each family and sending them willy-nilly down the ropes, or hurtling downstairs and through the charred door, over steps sticky with blood.

Lymond and Gabriel came face to face on the roofwalk, where ropes dangled from the deep crenellations and Tait was steering the traffic up and down. The fire was quietly progressing but the noise was much less. Isolated fighting only was going on still in the upper rooms, and even that would soon clearly cease. The only other sounds were from the hurt and the dying. The game the Scotts and the Kerrs played was a mortal one.

Gabriel smiled. He was pale, but his eyes in the flame-shot darkness were lucid as ever. ‘So you got safely back,’ he said. ‘We were troubled for you.’ Then he added, his voice sharpened, ‘You’re hurt?’

Inside Lymond’s burst doublet, itself covered with dirt and smears from superficial cuts and burns, there was a line of dried blood on his shirt. Lymond stared at it as if he had never seen it before, and then said, ‘I don’t think so,’ and Adam Blacklock, coming up beside him, said without thinking, ‘No, you had that at Dumbarton,’ and then held his tongue.

Gabriel, naturally, looked surprised. Lymond did not even register it. He walked past them both, and took up his stance again where Gabriel had found him, in a corner of the stone-flagged alure. In the rosy glow from the fire, you could see there were several men there already, kneeling or prone. Blacklock’s eyes met Graham Malett’s, and they followed him.

Will Scott was prostrate on the sweating roofwalk, his blazing hair touched to flame by the light; his face grey-white, with the boisterous, wilful vigour all gone. In place of his right arm and side was a mass of blood-sodden wrappings. On one side, Randy Bell, kneeling, held one wrist, while on the other Archie Abernethy, with hands used to gentling his animals, finished binding what was useless to bind.

A great silence fell, stirred distantly by occasional voices. The fighting had stopped. Gabriel said quietly, ‘How did it happen?’

Lymond did not speak. Randy Bell said without looking up, ‘He took the brunt of the rush for the stairs. I was in the middle, and Crawford at the top when they burst in, and he pushed past us all. It was his fight, you see.’

‘On the
stairs?
’ said Blacklock. ‘But how could he lose his right …’

‘How could he lose his right arm on the stairs?’ said the big doctor, laying Will Scott’s wrist down gently and rising to his spurred feet. ‘You forget, Adam. You forget. The Kerrs are a left-handed
race.’ His gaze went from Gabriel to Francis Crawford and back again. ‘Don’t be sorry for him, though. He won’t live to miss it. And he’ll have died fighting the Kerrs. Isn’t that their idea of glory?’

‘No,’ said Lymond suddenly and rudely. He added, ‘Are we staying here until the bloody peel falls?’ And then, ‘Archie? What about it?’

‘We’ll have to take him down the stairs,’ said Abernethy, gazing owlishly up from his task. ‘Ye canna dangle yon frae a rope.’

And so, while the rest of the Keep was cleared of men, Lymond bent and with infinite patience lifted Buccleuch’s oldest son. The sandy-fringed lids didn’t open as Will Scott was carried from his last battlefield, nor when, slack in a horse-litter, he was borne in their midst from the yard.

He did not know how many Kerrs had been killed in this one night of savagery which he, of all his family, had been dedicated to prevent. He did not know how many Scotts had died with him on the stairs. And alone of all that silent company that set off back with Lymond to St Mary’s, he did not look round at the last turn of the hill and see among its spilled wreckage, the tall brand of Liddel Keep, a cracked finger of fire in the empty black void of the night.

A little later, Gabriel collapsed, slipping wordlessly to the ground. The wound they found in his shoulder was not dangerous, but he had lost a great deal of blood. Lymond had him placed in a second litter, and with Jerott leading the company and Alec Guthrie in the rear, they resumed the long journey home.

With their cattle, their dead and their wounded, the other Scotts had soon left them for Branxholm. The Kerrs Lymond kept under guard until, two or three miles up the road, they came upon an old fort with a light at the window, and Lymond halted the troop to bring out all those of the family Turnbull that the Hot Trodd had spared.

Repeated to Cessford’s face, the tale of the cattle killing; of the bribe paid by a stranger was not wonderfully convincing, but it was enough to give them all pause. It might have been some ruse of their enemies. They had plenty, God knew. And, cold after battle, both Sir Walter Kerr of Cessford and Sir John Kerr of Ferniehurst knew this night’s work would exact its own price.

Shortly afterwards, Lymond freed the Kerr family as well.

It was high noon when they themselves reached St Mary’s, and through all the journey Lymond had ridden back and forwards, speaking to the few who were wounded; discoursing, chatting. Trying, thought Jerott Blyth, irritated in his fatigue by the restless murmur, to recover lost ground.

Of course, in this, their first minor action, the new company had disastrously failed. The robbers they were paid to deliver to justice had been found and killed first by the robbed. The two families
they were dedicated to keeping apart had fought each other with a fruitless loss on both sides. And Will Scott, only grown heir to all the lands of Buccleuch, was dying.

But for Graham Malett, every Scott in Liddesdale Tower would have been dead. Far from helping, Lymond’s belated orders for the Scotts to stand siege had nearly sent them as a clan to their death. Better far to have let them meet the Kerrs in the open, man to man. Evenly matched, they might well have suffered less in the end.

So every man there would be thinking. Nor would these restive attentions erase what they had heard and had seen.… So Jerott Blyth thought until the dawn birdsong began, and with the first light he saw Lymond’s face.

Lymond was very well aware of the situation, but he was not trying to handle it. He was merely fidgeting, Jerott saw without sympathy, because he was tired.

Much later, they rode into the orderly courtyard at St Mary’s with the new, well-mannered buildings above them, flushed with spring sun; and Jerott checked, as he had noted Lymond checking again and again through the night, that Will Scott was unconscious but living, and that Gabriel was comfortable still.

Gabriel was not only rested, but awake, and a good deal recovered. As they slid from their horses he got himself out of his litter and, without help, walked stiffly to where Lymond sat, mounted still. Graham Malett laid a hand on his knee.

‘Francis. Before we disperse; before we give our attention to other things; before our recollection is blunted, might we discuss what went wrong last night?’ And as Lymond stared at him without speaking, Sir Graham added gently, ‘It wasn’t a notable success you know, in spite of all your fine work through the winter. We ought to know why. We are all tired. I know you are, too. But the future of the force may depend on it.’

‘You are possibly right,’ Lymond said. His voice was completely without timbre and his face, blank as a soapstone mask, was turned to the courtyard, where Salablanca should be.

Archie Abernethy came instead and said, ‘Scott’s alive yet, sir, although I’ve no great hopes,’ and in the bygoing, offered his shoulder. Gabriel said, ‘Francis?’ and Lymond turned his head. ‘Yes, I heard you,’ he said. ‘I agree. I have only to dismount, and be sick, and then I am, as ever, your man.’

A minute later and he had descended, one hand gripping Archie’s shoulder, and crossing the courtyard was at once sick, his hands against the high, handsome wall. For a moment he rested there, without turning, and Gabriel, his wounded arm stuffed awkwardly into his doublet, began to drag himself after until Abernethy charitably barred the way. ‘It’ll just be something he ate.’

‘Or drank,’ said Jerott Blyth.

‘Or the fact,’ said Adam Blacklock tartly, ‘that he has ridden three hundred miles and fought an action without any sleep?’

Gabriel said sharply, ‘What?’ And then, ‘Why was I not told of this? He must rest, of course, and at once. I shall take the meeting, if he will permit me.’

‘I’ll live to take it,’ said Lymond quietly. He had returned as coolly as he had gone, scandalizing Lancelot Plummer, whom he caught out with a turn of the head. ‘A thick skin, and a certain misplaced sang-froid,’ he added helpfully, turning Plummer’s face scarlet. ‘My sang at the moment is quite marvellously froid. Come along, gentlemen.’ He smiled at them, with a shade of the old irony, and led the way in.