The Disorderly Knights (74 page)

Alec Guthrie raised his eyebrows. One stocky booted leg cocked on the other; his thumbs tucked into his belt, his spine curved at the bottom of his chair, he was the most relaxed man there. ‘You’re the cleverest drunken lecher I know; and the only one who’d stand there and give me the chance to say it,’ he said.

‘Wrong,’ said a thick voice mildly.

Guthrie grinned.

Thompson the corsair, lifting his matted beard out of his jerkin, stared back. ‘Wrong,’ he said again. ‘Dead cold sober to the point of ociosity.’

‘At Dumbarton?’ said Lord Culter’s cold voice.

‘Once,’ said Thompson calmly. ‘In the better part of a year. I have a wee rule. I’ll do no business with a sober man. I’ll tell ye this more. I’ll no do business with Francis Crawford again, drunk or sober. I had a stound in my brain-pan the next morning and a second-hand feel to my own affairs that I didna relish. I talked. I dinna doubt it.’

‘Some of it to purpose,’ said Lymond, smiling a little, and came back and sat down, as Janet said flatly, ‘If we’re to be as fussy as yon, I might mention that according to Wat ye fair reeked with whisky that night ye know of. Not that I blame you.’

The night that Lymond, their brilliant archer, had given his bow
at Liddel Keep to Will Scott, Adam thought, because his hands were not to be trusted. The night Will Scott died, and Lymond had brought through a flagon of neat aqua-vitæ, full.

‘If I can speak?’ said Archie Abernethy woodenly from the door.

‘No. You are partisan,’ said Lymond quietly.

‘But,’ the brown, scarred little man persisted. ‘Mr Hoddim there will recollect. We tried to rouse you, when the laddie was dying. The spirits got all over the place. That was Sir Graham.’

‘Someone,’ said Lymond slowly, ‘left the flask beside me?’

‘That was Sir Graham,’ Fergie Hoddim, his face absorbed, confirmed. ‘But a reasonable thing to do, under the circumstances.’

‘Under the circumstances,’ said Lymond, ‘an act of God-damned calculated bloody-mindedness that.…’ He halted.

‘That completed the alienation of Buccleuch, you would say,’ said Alec Guthrie blandly. ‘But Graham Malett, surely, has never knowingly caused you pain. His affection for you has never been hidden. He stood up for you in all his talks with me; he’s sometimes been the only one who did. The only grief of his life, we all know, is that he canna bring you to the light as well. You’ve proved maybe that he’s ower skilly with other folk, and maybe ambitious, and maybe with a quirk or two in him he tried to conceal. But you’ve proved little more.’

‘
I haven’t started yet
,’ said Lymond, and the soft intensity of it silenced them all. ‘Bear with me.… Only bear with me.’

The sun moved. Inside the great hall, the coloured light moved over the ten intent faces and the centre of their attention as he talked, watching them all: referring occasionally to one or other of them; making each point with cold clarity.

‘Let us consider the siege engine,’ he began. ‘The siege engine, built lovingly by Plummer and Bell, which had run out of control and capsized, killing a boy and trapping Effie Harperfield and her four children. The siege engine which had required Gabriel’s special skills to raise and free them. Thomas Wishart had discovered the accident, and had helped to free the unfortunate family.… Tosh?’ directed Lymond.

Buccleuch’s bodyguard, nimble, grinning, got up from his hunkers beside Abernethy. He’d examined the engine. The brake had been off. He’d also looked for the wheel-marks. It had been left standing at a level point near the top of the small incline. From that position, the ridged earth indicated, it had been levered to the top of the hill and allowed to run. ‘Yon was no accident,’ said Tosh with positive enjoyment. ‘Yon was engineered, and be damned to Effie Harperfield and her weans.’

‘It may have been, but Sir Graham had no chance to do it alone,’ said Fergie Hoddim sharply. ‘Someone was with him all that day.’

‘Agreed,’ said Lymond. ‘However, let us turn now to the curious
matter of Philippa Somerville. Philippa discovered, never mind how, that George Paris is a double agent, working for England as well as ourselves. I hope you’ve severed your connexion with him, Thompson my friend, for his time is running out very fast now. She knew also that Graham Malett was aware that Paris was an English agent. She did not know, as I did, on Tosh’s advice, that Malett had seen Paris several times in France and knew that he was supposed to be working for Scotland and Ireland as well. For some reason he does not wish it known, it seems, that he possesses this knowledge. For one thing the Queen Dowager would be upset to think that Gabriel knows of Paris’s treachery, and has done nothing about it.’

‘Have you?’ said Richard Crawford, and Guthrie smiled.

‘I might have done,’ said Lymond. ‘Except that the Queen Dowager’s activities
vis-à-vis
Ireland in the past year haven’t mattered a damn; and it seemed a good deal more important to guess Gabriel’s game. Also I could hardly move without discrediting Thompson and hence St Mary’s through the Thompson connexion. All my precautions in that direction have now been nullified, obviously enough, by Thompson’s fool behaviour in Ireland. But that’s something else again. The point is that Philippa seems to have constituted a danger in Graham Malett’s eyes. He made one or two unsuccessful attempts to escort her here and there, and while staying with her on one occasion was much disturbed when the building nearly burned to the ground. The rendezvous at Liddel Keep with Will Scott was his suggestion, and it seems more than a coincidence that the Turnbulls, who lived so conveniently near the Keep, were paid to do what they did
when
they did. Which brings us to the Hot Trodd.’

‘But Will was killed by a left-handed man,’ said Janet Beaton of Buccleuch suddenly.

For a moment Lymond said nothing. Then he asked softly, ‘Why did Will take the route he did when he followed the Turnbulls, Janet? It took him two days and a night to discover them. Granted they dodged all over the place, but his tracking used to be better than that.’

‘It wasna a matter that was troubling him on his return, so we’ll never know, will we?’ said Janet uncompromisingly. ‘I mind the rest, though, saying something about new hoofmarks coming smack in your eye at every bend of the road like horse-dashings.’

‘You would almost think, wouldn’t you, that they were deliberately being led astray?’ said Lymond. ‘Would a few questions among the men who were on the Trodd do any good, d’you think, Janet?’

‘I could try,’ she said. A big, stalwart woman with a mind of her own, she had caught Sybilla’s eye and was frowning, thoughtfully.

‘Alec? Fergie?’ said Lymond. ‘You were both with Gabriel. Was it possible that for these two days he was leading you away from Scott?’

Carefully, ‘It’s possible,’ said Fergie Hoddim at length. ‘But if
you’ll remember, the real hindrance was your own absence and Sir Graham’s reluctance to usurp your command, after that affair of the fuel supplies.’

‘My absence.… Yes,’ said Lymond briefly. ‘Adam, this is where you come into your own.’

Adam Blacklock laid hold of the arms of his chair. His sharpened voice saying, ‘I don’t want to say anything of that!’ clashed with Lord Culter’s, as Lymond’s brother sprang to his feet at the foot of the table and said, his voice harsh with angry disgust, ‘My God, we don’t have to listen to this. Haven’t you smeared Graham Malett with mud enough, without dragging in his sister?’

‘But don’t you think,’ said Lymond pointedly, ‘that Graham Malett has been remarkably successful in maligning me? At every opportunity my drinking, my morals, my ability to organize and my general fitness to command St Mary’s have been called into question. Will’s death was laid at my door; Philippa’s, no doubt, would have been due to me also. In his brotherly concern for me, he did nothing to change Philippa’s own dislike and distrust of me personally, and he made quite successfully worse the unhappy relationship that was developing with Jerott Blyth. If events at Dumbarton had turned out on that occasion as planned, Jerott Blyth would have precipitated the crisis that ended my career at St Mary’s. As it was, Richard bore the brunt, and being my brother, kept it to himself. Which didn’t suit Sir Graham at all. He nearly succeeded at the Hadden Stank in badgering Richard into proclaiming my shame to the world, but not quite. Although I had to be bloody obstreperous, Richard, to get you to break off the encounter before the worst befell. If apologies are any good to you, I offer you mine, publicly, now. If we ever get out of this bloody mess, the credit will be yours. Adam, your natural delicacy does you honour; but in the matter of Gabriel’s rare and lovely Joleta, you are the only witness for the defence.’

Lymond paused. Round the long table, the hardening of their attention was plain to see. He was approaching the inexcusable: something that all of them, except for de Nicolay, knew or suspected; and they awaited it with shrinking revulsion. Only among the women, Jenny looked less than disturbed, and Thompson, with a chuckle, shuffled lower in his chair. Margaret Erskine, her face deliberately calm, sent a silent message of support over the table to the Dowager of Culter.

Lymond continued, his cold voice unaltered, ‘Two of the prime moves towards usurping power, it seemed to me, would be to attack on two fronts at once: to rouse the Government—in this case, the Queen Dowager against me, which he has done—do you really think, Thompson, that Logan’s attack on you was a coincidence?—and to discredit me, finally, with the company. The one person associated
with him who walked also in clouds of sanctity, and possessed as well extreme youth and extreme beauty, was his sister Joleta.’

‘Ah, the golden child. I know her,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay lingeringly. ‘But you suspect Sir Graham Malett, you would say, of accusing you of molesting her? Your exposition enchants me, but this I find hard to believe.’

‘You needn’t. It’s true,’ said Lymond drily. The clinical blue gaze looked for the recoil and found it, from face to face round the table. ‘The point being,’ he continued, staring at them, ‘that Sir Graham has almost certainly been accusing people of debauching Joleta since she became eligible for seduction. Joleta is not a virgin. She was experienced when she came here from Malta. In addition, she has, as Adam will confirm for you later, borne at least one child. She is pregnant now, though not by me. These are facts, however unpleasant. There are, also, other traits of character which some of us can put before you which might lead you to agree that she is not the winsome vessel she appears. What you must also bring yourselves to understand … is that Gabriel knows it.’

‘
Gabriel knows it!
But this is sacrilegious rubbish!’ The voice, the contempt, were Lord Culter’s. But Alec Guthrie’s followed immediately after. ‘You’ll have trouble substantiating that. If it were true, he would never have brought her. Too much of a liability.’

Lady Jenny sparkled. If her attention had wandered through some of the discussion, it had become remarkably vigorous at mention of Joleta. ‘A liability? With Francis?’ she said, the lightest malice in her tone. ‘I should think Joleta was Sir Graham’s greatest asset.’

Unexpectedly, Lymond smiled back. ‘He thought so,’ he said. ‘No effort was spared to press home the point that Joleta was to be my redemption. So that I became enslaved, he was prepared to contemplate marriage—anything. It would have saved him a remarkable amount of trouble, obviously, to have me a doting member of the family. Joleta did her best.… My God, it was a display. Fiery, disdainful, contemptuous, and as inviting as hell. That was before Gabriel arrived. I refused the invitation, much to her surprise. There was always the chance, still, that when he found out he couldn’t do it the easy way, he might not come. I didn’t quite know the full extent of his vanity then. He must have written back trouncing her, and she abandoned the intellectual approach and came trailing nubile misery to St Mary’s, where if she didn’t manage to stay the night, at least she went on record as being innocently adoring. In fact, she was furious, with him and with me. Then he installed himself finally, and battle was joined.’

‘Dumbarton?’ said Adam Blacklock. It fitted so neatly, you could see them all thinking. It fitted so neatly that only a master strategist could have devised it. But which of them
had
devised it? The gentle,
maligned Gabriel, flying from Malta? Or Francis Crawford, who had met his master and would not admit it?

‘
Mille douceurs, mille bon mots, mille plaisirs
: Dumbarton. To which Gabriel was so gently insistent that I should not go, that I fell into the trap. So Jerott, Adam, Richard and I arrived at Dumbarton to take counsel with Thompson. Joleta was already there, and able to insert herself into my room before I got there myself. How did she know I should be there? Richard left after she did. But it was Gabriel who relayed to me the message that Thompson was waiting. Gabriel could have told her, well in advance. Gabriel could also have paid the Turnbulls to make their cattle foray at precisely the right time, so that Bell’s arrival at Dumbarton with the news interrupted the happy union between myself and Joleta. That was, in fact, precisely what happened. But for Adam, who hid her for me, the whole sordid business would have been exposed there and then, and to Jerott, Gabriel’s adoring disciple: poor bloody Jerott, torn in two.… He was to be Gabriel’s Baptist and oust me before he came, did you realize that? Luckily Jerott is an intelligent man as well as an honest one, and it didn’t happen. One of the things I have promised myself is to get Jerott out of this safely.’

Lymond paused. Often before, at St Mary’s, Adam had seen this kind of marathon. Properly projected, Lymond’s voice did not tire, and his concentration was sustained with no obvious effort. Even now, when what he was saying was both disagreeable and emotional in content, and so momentous for his own future, he talked as if giving them yet another of his precise, coldly documented briefings. Adam wondered where in the Culter family had gone all Sybilla’s vast store of warmth. Wit was there—yes, when it suited him; as the whipping-post was there also. If the tale about Joleta were true—and Adam, more than anyone there, had cause to believe it might be true—he pitied, if he pitied either of them, the promiscuous bitch which was Joleta.