The Disorderly Knights (69 page)

‘I’ve heard a rumour or two to that effect,’ Lymond said; and
Gabriel struck his brow in despair. ‘Of course. Your brother is on the Council. And you probably knew the Queen Mother quite well in France.… I am a fool. It is childish. My head is being turned by the illusion that I am at the centre of great affairs, and the truth is that I am nothing of the sort: merely enjoying Jimmy Sandilands’s small shoes. I’m giving no more advice.’ And, smiling up at Lymond from the low arm where he had perched himself, Graham Malett touched him gently on the arm. ‘You are looking well. I’m glad. Thank God you are sleeping.’

There was a gloomy silence. Then, ‘At the moment, I rather wish I were,’ Lymond said, and removing his arm, walked to the tavern door where Blacklock was waiting, his colour high, to accompany Gabriel home.

Graham Malett stayed exactly as he was. ‘No. Isn’t it time we had all this out in the open?’ he said quietly. ‘Blacklock won’t mind. You feel I am a rival, Francis; some kind of contestant in your personal popularity stakes. It reaches such proportions now that you cannot sleep without imagining I am wresting your leadership from you.… You realize, don’t you, that if I had not arranged to have myself called away at intervals, such as now, you would have made yourself ill?’

‘Your consideration,’ said Lymond, ‘is infinite. O how dear are thy thoughts towards me, O strong God! How great is the sum thereof! I would recount them, but they are more than the sand; and Adam, I believe, is quite ready.…’

Graham Malett rose then to his full, golden height. ‘Francis.… You are St Mary’s. You and no other. It sounds trite, but it is precisely true. I don’t know your secret. There is no spiritual bond between you and your company: no common faith, no rites, no rules of chivalry. How is it done?’

‘Charm of personality,’ said Lymond. ‘Allied to a generous wage scale. Blacklock and I are quite convinced that you have no designs on St Mary’s. Do you mind if …?’

‘I mind,’ said Gabriel. He was rather pale. ‘God knows how I mind that you have no belief. You worship strength, do you not? Will you not believe that allied to faith, strength will increase itself tenfold? All the history of Holy Church proves it.’

Always before Lymond had resisted this particular challenge; always before he had remained outside Gabriel’s arguments, a tolerant neutral. Now he said, calmly, standing still before the inn parlour door, ‘History shows, too, great feats of endurance without mystery. What you leave undone, trusting to faith, you would be better to make sure of beforehand.’

‘I hope we all strive for perfection,’ said Gabriel. ‘Shoddy work earns no miracles, surely. But we are human. We can achieve so much
only. With our knowledge of divine grace within us, we may become more than human, that is all.’

‘Why ascribe it all to the Divinity?’ Lymond asked. He was speaking very quietly, without passion, and although he appeared to have forgotten Blacklock’s presence, Adam wondered, suddenly if some part of this was intended for him as, the other day, riding in concourse to Bute, Lymond had talked circuitously for Jerott’s benefit, and Jerott had not understood. So, ‘Why?’ Lymond said, and coming back, roved to the fireplace and turned, mild inquiry in his veiled eyes. ‘Zest and power and exhilaration may spring from so much that is far from divine. Faith in one’s cause, one’s leader, one’s love would equally do.’

Under Gabriel’s pure, fine-grained skin a trace of colour had risen. He said in his deep voice, ‘All these things are fallible.’

‘Of course they are,’ said Lymond. Outside in the yard they could hear the movement of feet and fresh voices which meant that Robert Beaton had come. ‘But are the channels of Holy Church immune to error? Her priests, her offices, her very tenets are subject to doubt. Her interpreters are only human, and most souls, however aspiring, follow the human instrument, not the belief.… If men’s faith in Gabriel were shaken,’ said Francis Crawford blandly, smiling a little, ‘would men follow an abstract faith into battle so readily?’

There was a little pause. Then Gabriel said, strain showing for the first time in the beautiful voice, ‘Francis.… Of course the humble open their hearts to the simulacrum, to the identity they know of and understand. It is for them that the Saints listen, and Our Lady; for them the greatest leader of all time, who will never fail them: Our Lord Jesus Christ.’

The voices had reached outside the door. Lymond glanced at Adam Blacklock and strolling forward, lifted a hand to the latch. ‘Well?’ said Graham Malett. He had risen.

‘Who is more important to Jerott Blyth?’ Lymond said smoothly. ‘You or Christ?’ And ignoring Gabriel’s wordless, wretched appeal, opened the door.

Grizel Beaton had met Lymond once since her husband was killed. Buccleuch, raging, had blamed Francis Crawford for his death, but Janet her sister had said roundly that Wat Scott had been leaping to conclusions as usual; horns blowing like a fuller’s shop and both feet bang in the midden.

She was inclined to believe Janet. It had been a grand marriage, but in a prosaic way, taught by experience, she had not looked for it to go on for ever. Men had a chancy time of it, and Scotts more than most. She had her children. There were maybe two things she regretted. She had just about got him into her way of doing things and there it was, all to waste. And he had been an uncommonly dear lad.

So she gave her hand firmly enough to Francis Crawford, and greeted Adam Blacklock while her brother, at her back, was making himself known. And only then, looking further into the ròom, did she see the tall, diffident figure of the knight who had become her welcome visitor at Kincurd, and who three months before had ridden, wounded himself, to bring her the news of Will’s death.

‘Graham!’ said Grizel Beaton, her definite voice diminished, even in simple surprise. And going forward, red in her face, she lifted her cheek to be kissed.

Women!
thought Adam Blacklock disgustedly, and wondered if Lymond had noticed. ‘Man is a being of varied, manifold and inconstant nature. And woman, by God, is a match for him.’

Shortly after that, when Beaton and his sister had gone, taking Lymond with them, Adam Blacklock left in his turn to accompany Gabriel to his lodging nearby.

Graham Malett looked tired. Nothing had been said, by Blacklock or by Gabriel himself, about that queer ten minutes back in the inn when he and Lymond had crossed metaphysical swords; but the light which had gone then from Malett’s calm face had never returned. And although he attended Adam with every courtesy and installed him in his comfortable chamber with care, it was not long before the Knight Grand Cross excused himself gently and Adam, passing a moment later, saw him through the open door of his room, his shoulders bent, his face hidden, kneeling in silence before the old altar he had dragged over half Europe with his chests.

*

At eight o’clock the following morning, Francis Crawford was summoned to the Presence Chamber of Mary of Guise, Dowager of Scotland. And whether he wished then for Gabriel’s advice, or his prayers, no one was likely to know.

Falkland Palace, the old royal hunting lodge where the Queen Dowager’s husband had died, was all hers now: the lovely grilled French façade; the courtyard lined on three sides by the wings of her husband’s father and grandfather with their medallions and their high decorated dormers; with the butts, the royal tennis courts, the stables, and the thick, flowery forest of Falkland with its echoes of Stewart voices between the lawns and the river. It was hers, and it was where she preferred to stay, above all else.

And because it was crowded, because it was private, because it was hers, her lords of the Privy Council and her Governor loathed it. But Mary of Guise was here, and her friend the French Ambassador was here, and his Grace the Earl of Arran, Governor of Scotland, had gone north in June and would be in Aberdeen for at least a
month yet, so the Queen Mother had no intention of moving.

She had no intention, either, of allowing Francis Crawford to live any longer without enduring, for once, the full and forbidding dominance of the throne. But if Lymond suspected it, he gave no sign at all. He stood on the threshold of the Queen’s Presence Chamber as his names were announced and made the first of the three required bows, the last of which brought him automatically to her feet below the dais of her chair. The usher closed the big doors. The Chamberlain, her secretaries, her women around her, the Queen Dowager of Scotland stared down at him, perspiring a little under her wired cap, her big hands on her knees. The dull morning light, filtering through the leaded west windows, jumped from ring to ring as her hands tightened. She said, ‘You may remain on your knees, M. le Comte. It will remind you that we are royal.’

‘Your Grace,’ said Lymond obediently. ‘I have a glove belonging to our sovereign Lady your daughter which reminds me daily.’ His eyes, slipping past the dais for a second, recognized the presence of Margaret Erskine, newly on duty that day, and then returned to the Queen’s unfriendly face.

The allusion to his past services to the child Queen Mary was not, at the moment, what she wished to hear. In her strong French voice Mary of Guise said, ‘You have, I am told, a fully trained armed force in camp at your home, consisting of thirty officers and now six hundred mercenaries, to whose numbers you are adding as necessary?’

At fourth hand, renewed all winter and spring, he had had her standing offer to buy himself and his company. It was the permanent army she craved. Behind her, a door opened silently and the Baron d’Oisel, the French King’s Ambassador and Lieutenant in Scotland, slipped into the room. ‘You have been correctly informed,’ said Lymond.

The pale blue eyes scanned his calm face, and the hand lying open and relaxed on his raised knee. The little plume of his hat, held loosely in his other hand, lay quite still on the floor. The Queen Dowager drew air, hard, through the high, bony ridge of her nose. ‘Then,’ she said, and inclined her head to M. d’Oisel, arrived at her side, ‘I have to tell you that your company must be paid off and disbanded, the officers dispersed and the mercenaries shipped back at your own expense to wherever they belong. Further, the buildings at St Mary’s are to be pulled down, saving only the castle your home, and the arms stored therein confiscated by the Crown.’

Ten months’ brilliant and bitterly hard work had dissolved with a breath. There was a moment of complete silence. Margaret Erskine’s hands closed on the hardest thing she possessed, an engraved pomander, and gripped it achingly.

On Lymond’s serene and respectful face there was no change whatever. He said, ‘Is it permitted your Highness’s humble servitor to know why?’

The Queen Mother glanced at M. d’Oisel again. ‘We consider such a highly trained force, under a commander such as yourself, to be a threat to the public safety. Damage has been done through your livestock; lives have been lost through your machinery; minor cases of rivalry among the Border families have been magnified by the use of great forces into mass bloodshed in which the best of our young men have been lost. And those who consider themselves under your protection have taken the occasion to show insolence and disrespect to those whose duty it is to keep peace on the Borders. In addition—’

‘Madam!’ said Margaret Erskine, breaking every rule of the Court in one grim decision.

And because Tom Erskine’s widow was one of the few intelligent and reliable women about her, as well as one of the better liked, the Queen Dowager stopped, and turning her head said merely, ‘I was not aware that we had given Dame Margaret permission to speak?’

‘No. Forgive me. I crave your pardon, your Grace,’ said Margaret Erskine bluntly. ‘But the Kerrs were sufficiently provoked to have slaughtered every Scott in the Kingdom, whether an army was there to stop them or not. But for the fear of St Mary’s there would have been the same among many another pair of feuding families this year. And but for St Mary’s, last winter, the families around Yarrow might have starved.’

‘I heard about that errand of mercy.’ It was M. d’Oisel’s voice, but he was speaking to Lymond, not to Margaret Erskine. ‘Carried out by Sir Graham Malett, I believe, against orders. We do not deny that some good might have been done. M. de Sevigny, after all, has had the most competent advice. What concerns us, however, is whether he is of a character to profit by it.’

There was a short silence. Presumably everyone present, Margaret thought, breathless with anger and fright, was thinking of Lymond’s notorious behaviour in France during the Queen Dowager’s visit. Everyone there knew that his own brother had since thrown him out. And at Liddel Keep, according to the Kerrs, before the battle which had cost Will Scott his life, Lymond had been drinking. Even Adam Blacklock, when challenged, had with reluctance agreed. The only person who, consistently, had championed Lymond through the last months had been Graham Malett, of whom Lymond—Richard Crawford had said it, and Adam Blacklock, once, and now, faced with all she had heard, she believed it to be true—
of whom Lymond was afraid
.

And as if she had picked up the thought, the Queen Dowager
suddenly added, ‘In spite of all Sir Graham Malett has had to say in your support, we do not consider you either stable or sufficiently public-spirited to control these men in a small country such as this, particularly during those periods when they must be idle—you may rise,’ said the Queen Dowager, and watched with perhaps a shadow of envy as he did just that, from his cramped posture, without faltering.

‘On whose opinion, may I ask, is this estimate based?’ Lymond asked. Behind the masked eyes there was still no hint of feeling.

‘On the accounts of your neighbours and principal landowners. On the talk of your own men. On the observations of men of detachment such as M. d’Oisel here.’ Mary of Guise paused, for the
coup de grâce
. ‘And of my own observations of your temperament.’

Lymond appeared for a moment to consider, his eyes on M. d’Oisel; then he turned again to the Queen. ‘The principal landowners as you call them, have been educated for years to believe that power and wealth comes not from a well-conducted nation, but from war or litigation with another principal landowner. They resent, naturally, anyone who interferes with this belief. As for my own men—’ Lymond paused. ‘I do not consult his manservant or his chamber-child if I wished a balanced view of, say, M. d’Oisel’s character. They are the subject of his discipline and see only what touches their affairs, and that without necessarily understanding. Nor would I call M. d’Oisel necessarily detached. He stands in relation to the Crown, and the policy of the Crown in this country has been to divide and rule. Indeed,’ said Lymond politely, ‘I should fear all these judgements biased except for your Grace’s, and there I venture to think that some past evidence of … public-spiritedness may yet occur to you.’