The Disorderly Knights (7 page)

Her voice was clear: firm-jawed like an adult’s, and sparkling with small, over-careful sibilants. She said, ‘This is the Master of Erskine?’

‘No, Mademoiselle,’ said Madame Donati, still holding her hand. ‘This is another gentleman from Scotland, come to ask the Chevalier’s permission to travel on your ship. His lordship of Culter … Mistress Joleta Reid Malett.’

Her hand was warm, with oval fingernails. He kissed it, and a vivid pleasure at once appeared in her face, followed by, he could have sworn, a flash of pure mischief. ‘I told Gabriel about Lord Culter and his brother Francis,’ said de Villegagnon from beside them. ‘I think you would enjoy his company on the voyage, and I know he will enjoy yours. He has a new son to talk about.’

‘A baby?’ She sat down, studiously maternal, and said, ‘How splendid it is to be surrounded by young life. I had a baby to look after once, at the convent, and Maltese babies are very happy-natured, although of course they do neglect their eyes. Do you have a kind nurse for yours? Perhaps your wife’s own nurse? What is his name?’

The young, freckled face was completely solemn. With the echoes dimly in his ears of a hundred such exchanges with the old beldames of Lanarkshire, Richard Crawford said with equal gravity, ‘His name is Kevin, Mademoiselle. Kevin Crawford, Master of Culter.’

‘Your younger brother then no longer bears that title?’ de Villegagnon asked.

‘No. It is for the heir alone,’ said Richard. And after a moment he added, for Joleta’s benefit, ‘But under the circumstances, luckily for me, my brother Francis does not mind losing it. You must meet him,’ said Richard unguardedly, and then held his tongue. Francis, with his temper, his mistresses, his plunges into drunken adventuring, was alien to this kind of fun-loving innocence. For humanity’s sake, indeed, it was worth making quite an effort to keep these two apart.

*

On that midsummer voyage to Scotland with Joleta and Madame Donati, Lord Culter confirmed that Gabriel’s exquisite young sister was both quick and articulate. Every day, she and her governess ate with Richard and the captain, and then, clinging to poop and rambade, her mandarin hair flung like gauze to the wind, she would devise conundrums and riddles, puns and tales of fantasy to divert them both, which made Richard out of all character laugh aloud, while behind them, bench on bench, the rowers ravenously watched.

Evangelista Donati he also got to know. An Italian lady of unquestionable birth, Madame Donati had made her home on Malta for many years and had shared with the nuns of Joleta’s convent the
task of rearing the parentless child. Without resources of her own, she had been well paid for it, Richard assumed, by the girl’s brother.

Of Sir Graham Malett himself, Madame Donati spoke sparingly and with embarrassing reverence. Like all fighting men, Richard Crawford respected the Knights of St John, the soldiers of Christ who cared for the poor and the sick in Palestine, four hundred years before, and protected the pilgrims against the Saracen on their way to the Holy Land. To fight the Saracen and care for the sick remained the essence of the Order, even after Jerusalem fell and Acre was lost; and instead of defending the Holy Land the knights found themselves pushed into the isles of the Mediterranean, taking their hospital and their fighting men to Cyprus, then to Rhodes, and now to the island of Malta, halfway between Gibraltar and Cyprus, in the Mediterranean Sea.

Twenty-one years ago, the Order had received the gift of Malta from the Emperor Charles V, ‘in order that they might perform in peace the duties of their Religion for the benefit of the Christian community, and employ their forces and arms against the perfidious enemies of Holy Faith’. And so, men of all nations took their vows and went where in prayer and humility the Knights of the Order lived, nursed the poor and sick in their great hospital and fought to sweep the Turk out of the Mediterranean Sea and off the coast of North Africa.

From a land force, theirs became the finest sea-fighting school in the world. And from these medical knights, these pirate knights, these priestly knights with their holy vows and monastic seclusion on the sandstone rocks of Malta under the hot African sun, there came men like the Chevalier de Villegagnon, like Leone Strozzi, and like the knight Graham Malett, or Gabriel, Joleta’s brother.

Gabriel, Joleta’s brother, who after all these years was sending Joleta home to Scotland. ‘Home?’ said Madame Donati sardonically. ‘The child’s home is in Malta, in the sun. But he fears for her. There are always rumours, that this time the Turks will attack Malta, and that their fleet is so large, their Janissaries so ruthless, Dragut so invincible.…’

‘Dragut is only a man,’ Joleta had broken in swiftly. ‘A Moslem corsair in the pay of the Turk. How could the knights, with their Faith behind them, fail to conquer?’

‘Dragut is a seaman to match any in the Order,’ said Richard drily. ‘Your brother is wise to send you home.’

‘Except that she has no home,’ retorted Madame Donati, her faded eyebrows pushing up the thin, sallow skin. ‘As you must know very well, Sir Graham’s home near the Scottish Border was destroyed during the English wars, his lands wasted and his tenants dispersed. He has no possessions at all except what is allowed him through the
Treasury at Malta, and his jewels. He sold them to send Joleta here.’

And to pay you, thought Richard. He knew the rest of the story. The girl was to go to Sir James Sandilands, the head of the Order in Scotland. At his home in Torphichen she would rest from her journey before being placed, with the Order’s powerful backing, in the best convent for her years. Madame Donati, staying with her, would continue to instruct in the gentle arts; and when the danger was over, Gabriel would come for her.

Richard, hearing these plans, had said nothing because he was nearly certain that Sandilands of Torphichen, lazy, rich-living and slipshod in faith, was the last person a Knight Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem would wish to trust with the care of a young and malleable girl. Because he was conscientious, it worried Richard a great deal, for he was very aware that in the person of the child, small-boned as a bat against the east wind, he was bringing Pandora’s box of vexing delights to his country, and he did not want to take the obvious course. He did not want Joleta Malett at his mother’s home of Midculter, in case Francis came back.

Then the matter was taken out of his hands, for the fine weather broke, the wind rose, Madame Donati took to her bed, and the next day the child Joleta, unaffected by storms, who had stayed on deck as the gale blew and chanted Arab ballads until her dancing shadow crept up the sail, fell herself suddenly and inexplicably ill.

They were then off the north-east English coast, opposite Blyth. The captain needed little persuasion to land; and Richard, using all his authority, commandeered food, medicine and horses, and on being assured that the girl could manage a brief journey with safety, carried Joleta and her wan duenna to the nearest family he knew: the Somervilles of Flaw Valleys.

*

The Tyneside manor of Flaw Valleys lay on the English side of the Border, a mile or two north of Hexham. Since the war between England and Scotland had ended, Flaw Valleys and its owner Kate Somerville had welcomed many Scottish visitors, of whom Tom Erskine and the brothers Crawford of Culter were the most frequent. It was a strange friendship, grown out of fear and outrage during the war, when her husband Gideon was alive and these men had invaded her home. Long since she had grown to understand and forgive what they had done; but to her daughter Philippa, now a thin, brown-haired thirteen, Kate had never been able to explain the attraction of these two various-minded brothers. Since she was a child of ten, Philippa had been frightened of Richard Crawford and had hated his brother Lymond.

Nevertheless it was to Flaw Valleys, the kindly, unpretentious big house with its tidy farms and kept woodlands, that Lord Culter on a hot day in May brought Joleta Reid Malett and her governess to claim Mistress Somerville’s charity. Mistress Somerville saw them come.

Since her husband’s death two years before, Kate with her man of business and her excellent farm steward had run her own property. Not that the Somervilles were rich; but up and down Tyneside were farms and mills and cottages paying dues to Flaw Valleys, and in return receiving from Kate the services of her roadmakers, her wheelwrights and her smiths, her granaries in time of need and her shelter in time of war. No more than turned thirty yet, small, sharp-tongued and plain as a brown hen, Kate Somerville was priestess and nanny at once to her people, and a legend to her friends.

At the approach of the most beautiful creature in Europe, the mistress of Flaw Valleys was straddling her farmhouse wall, whither she had climbed to address a passer-by, a weeding-fork in one fist and a hog’s yoke, on its way to the yard to be returned condemned to the maker, round her sun-browned neck.

Observing the Crawford colours through the trees, she waved the weeding-fork, called to Philippa to warn the cooks and hopped down, dragging off the hog yoke. Her hair mostly unfolded with it, so she stuck the fork in the ground and was packing her coiffure into its snood again, elbows akimbo, as the group of travellers trotted up.

It was Richard. She smiled widely none the less and held up her face for his kiss; then turned warmly to the two women whose presence he was explaining so earnestly. The older, a cool, Italian noblewoman labouring under some slight stress, offered a cold hand, The other, wrapped in Richard’s cloak from head to foot, was being carried with great caution by Richard’s mammoth manservant as if she were about to brim over.

This one, according to Richard, was suffering merely from the changed food and climate. ‘Would you take her, Kate, just for a little—and Madame Donati? I have to go on to Midculter, but I’ll send for them as soon as she’s well. Joleta!’ He raised his voice a little, and Kate thought, ‘Paternity suits him, although it seems to have burst into full blossom rather soon.’

‘Joleta!’ said Richard again. ‘Here is Kate Somerville. She’ll look after you.’ And as the bundle in his man’s arms drew level, he reached out and gently turned back its hood so that Kate had her first good look at the contents.

A flood of rose-gold hair lay heaped over the wool, and within it two sea-blue eyes, bright with heat, lit a face disarmingly tinged with green. It smiled. Kate, finding her mouth slightly open, shut it again;
and then grinned and said, ‘Excuse the bovine admiration. We consider ourselves lucky in these regions if there’s an eye on either side of the nose, and a mouth underneath it.’

Joleta’s voice, which had become very light, said, ‘You forget. I belong to these parts. Or very near them.’

‘You do?’ Kate Somerville said. ‘Then they either broke the mould, or gave it to someone to chew. Come along. You can have the Crawfords’ room. The house is yours.’ And Richard knew that, whatever her manner of saying it, she meant precisely that.

‘Well,’ said Kate to her daughter when at the end of that first day they were alone together at last, with Richard on his way home and the governess asleep in her charge’s room. ‘And what do you think of God’s gift from Malta to the Crawfords?’

‘I think Lord Culter doesn’t want, her at his own home,’ said Philippa with accustomed unexpectedness.

Kate, thinking of six possible answers at once, said, ‘Well, she can’t go to Jimmy Sandilands, can she? He wouldn’t have her anyway: she’d tell her brother far too much about what his lordship’s doing with the Order’s property in Scotland. And where else
can
she …?’

‘Lord Culter’s mother may want her,’ said Philippa. ‘Even though his lordship doesn’t. Or she could go to Tom Erskine’s.’ She waited, and said, ‘You think Lymond will come back from France soon, don’t you? I don’t think it matters. Joleta will hate him.’

‘Oh,
Philippa
,’ said Kate, annoyed. ‘He forgot his party manners once, when you were a child, and you’d think he was Beelzebub’s brother. They’ll get on perfectly well when they meet. Besides, he has someone he fancies in France.’

Incautious answer. It was only because it was running in her head—Francis and an Irishwoman, Richard had said: a woman called Oonagh O’Dwyer who had been mistress of some Irish princeling, and whom Francis had filched from her lover. Oonagh O’Dwyer, and beautiful.…

‘
Someone
!’ said Philippa hoarsely. ‘Why, everywhere he goes he has hundreds and hundreds of—’

‘—critics who are not old enough to learn tolerance. Oh, do learn tolerance, infant,’ said Kate sadly. ‘Or how are you to put up with your cross old mother when you’re as old as me?’

For a day or two after that, Joleta Malett lay perfectly still, eating whatever she was brought and discarding it instantly. Only Madame Donati, brewing little morsels over the bedroom fire, seemed able to nourish her at all; and Joleta was happy, obviously, when her governess was there, although she managed a few words always for Kate, and a shadow of a grin for Philippa. Then Evangelista Donati, her impervious good manners unaffected by day and night nursing
in the first heat of June, came to Kate and asked if she knew of any woman in the district versed in herbal remedies.

‘They all are,’ said Kate with the utmost goodwill. ‘Although if you want one of the real fewmets-in-rosewater school, the half-Egyptians are best. But really,’ she said, studying the pale, aristocratic face, ‘my own physician knows better. You still won’t let me send for him?’

But, as always when pressed, Madame Donati retreated into icy politeness. ‘Thank you, no. It is nothing. It will pass. If it does not, then we shall send for him. But Sir Graham has a superstition, you understand?’ Across the wintry face passed a slight smile. ‘Sir Graham does not care that the child should be seen by men. And she does not wish it. An instinct of innocence, Mistress Somerville.’

‘Still,’ said Kate, ‘it won’t do her much good to perish, however modestly unsurveyed. What do you suppose a herb woman can do?’

It was logical enough, in its way. Joleta’s system, the governess explained, was used to Maltese remedies: the old brews common to nomads which even her convent, in all its medical sophistication, had allowed. And these a member of the queer sisterhood of gypsies might well know. ‘Oh, dear,’ said Kate finally. ‘I suppose we’d better
get
Trotty Luckup.’ She paused. ‘She’ll have to travel from Yetholm, and she’s an old gypsy rogue. You’ll have to pay her quite a lot.’