The Disorderly Knights (78 page)

Sir Graham Malett paused, his shoulders thrown back, his clear eyes surveying them from his magnificent height, and like a schoolboy, passed his fingers through his badly-cut golden hair. ‘Meantime, foolishly, I must find something to live on. The Order impounded all I have, and although my needs are nothing, there is my sister.… But these are troubles that need not concern you. They concern me very little: my God will not desert me. So I shall take my sword and sell it wherever it may be needed to preserve Christ’s Church.… Perhaps, one day, I shall find a company to match this. I doubt it. I shall miss you all.’

Sir Graham Malett drew a deep breath. His blue eyes, over-brilliant, left the rumbling, rising throb of responding impulse and
settled, slowly focusing in pleased astonishment, on the back of the hall. ‘Jerott! Already?’ And then, his whole face lambent with delight, ‘Joleta is here?’

You would expect Jerott Blyth to be tired. He had, after all, covered the ground between St Mary’s and Midculter twice since the afternoon. But he looked, to those who craned round, resenting Gabriel’s lost attention, like a man set on by thieves. Des Roches thought, ‘The girl is dead.’ And then, before he could help himself ‘Ah, now he will stay?’

Then the young man at the door, the grey blindness still in his face, said, ‘I couldn’t stop her. She should have stayed.’ And realizing, perhaps, from the altered expression of Gabriel’s face that he was making frightening nonsense, Jerott made a sharp and visible effort, his hands cramped to his thighs, and said, ‘Could you spare a moment, Sir Graham? Your sister is with me, but she is not.…’

He was saying ‘well’ when Joleta Malett, walking slowly, dreamlike in fatigue, came and stood by his side. Above the furred cloak she wore, its muddied hem dragging the ground, her face was pale as a windflower and misted with fine sweat. Her long hair, a tangled skein on one shoulder, was bronzed with it. ‘You haven’t told him,’ she said.

Her voice was reasonable, and just a little higher in pitch than was usual. Jerott said, ‘We shall tell him together, when he is alone. You mustn’t worry him here. Come to his room.’

‘No.’ Although addressing Jerott, Joleta’s filmed pale blue eyes were fixed on her brother. She said, ‘Tell him.’

There were two steps down from the dais. Graham Malett took them in one stride, and was halfway towards them when Joleta cried out. ‘No! Stay where you are. I want every man of them to know!’

‘Joleta!’ said Blyth desperately. She was unfit to travel. She should never have come. He had been through hell with her and then through worse than hell, anticipating this moment. He had carried her in his arms through the night from Midculter and she had said over and over, ‘I will tell them all. I will tell them all. They will all know what he has made of me.’ Sick with loathing, sick with revulsion after shouting, in the midst of his shock, at the useless duenna, raging over the absence of Sybilla and Richard Crawford to revile, he had been subdued by Joleta’s terrible need.

Now, leaving him at the door, she began to walk down the long hall. On either side, uneasily, admiringly, lasciviously in the last fumes of the sherry, the watching men scanned her; the child sister, the little flower of the nuns; Graham Malett’s translucent Joleta. Then, facing her brother, she stopped, and her white, kitten’s teeth sparkled. ‘I have a saint for a brother,’ she said. ‘Do you not envy me?’ and laughed.

Gabriel, his baby skin suddenly white, took a step forward. ‘Oh, no,’ said Joleta, and stepped back. ‘A saint for a brother. Who will say, “This poor young man who still lives by his senses can be taught by us both to lift his eyes to greater things”.’ In her fresh, sibilant voice, the cadences of Gabriel’s rich one sounded harsh. ‘Take time, my child. Learn to know him, for I know he will learn to love you. And if, one day, you find you love him in return, there is none in this world I should rather have for my brother.…’

Her voice faltered then, and broke; but her eyes, staring distended at Gabriel’s stunned face, were perfectly dry. ‘You said that of Francis Crawford,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘He came. And I learned to love him, oh yes. And he taught me to comfort him in my bed for the holy power of his love for me that did him such violence when we prayed.…’

Joleta dragged herself forward and, freeing one childish arm from her cloak, she brought it unavailingly, like a thin flail, across her brother’s smooth cheek. Gabriel did not move. ‘That is for my maidenhood,’ she said. ‘Do you want him still for brother? I have asked him to marry me—there is all the sum of my pride. He laughs and says the landscape has lost its novelty. Look, Graham. He planted his bastard on me, those days at Midculter; but that is all he troubled to do.’

She dropped her cloak. Twisted over her pathetic girth, her night-smock was grimy with travel and sweat. Bodily she looked worn and ill and abused. But her face, despite the stains of fatigue, had kept all its pure beauty. The skin was lovelier than Jerott had ever seen it; her fine brows and long lashes and thin, shapely nose added to the poignancy of what lay below.

Never shifting his eyes as she talked, Gabriel swayed once, and Jerott thought he would faint. But then, he stayed silent, listening, although every few moments he would draw a long, shuddering breath, as if in the intervals the machine of his body had lapsed, and the lungs refused their office. At the end he said, his voice low, ‘You are very tired. But I am glad you came. You know there is nothing to fear now. I am here.’ He put out his hand, tentatively, and laid it on her thin arm. ‘Come and sleep.’

Concentrated completely on Joleta he was ignoring, Jerott saw, the noise of comment mounting around them; and for Joleta, it did not seem to exist. In the hot, crowded room, thick with the raw fumes of wine and humanity, their emotions at loose, enlarged and played upon by alcohol and adulation both, every man there felt, as Jerott did, the shock and outrage at Joleta’s pitiful tale. Like some helpless audience at a play, they heard Joleta say, with the same obsessive clarity, ‘Where is he? He should see your nephew, shouldn’t he?’ And suddenly breaking out again, with tears of anger for the first
time streaming down her damp skin: ‘He hates you! Won’t you realize it? That’s why he has done this! He hates you and all you stand for! And you thought you could
convert him!
’ And, standing in her dirty gown, she laughed and sobbed at once, her hands hanging loose.

It was Jerott who, seeing that Gabriel dared not touch her, picked up her cloak and held her, wrapped again, against his travel-stained shoulder. Gabriel said, the magnificent voice uncertain, ‘I didn’t hope to … convert him. That would have been too officious. Joleta … Joleta, I only wanted him to worship you as I did. With that light in his life, he would have achieved nothing but good.’

‘His achievements are obvious,’ said Joleta bitterly. ‘
Where is he?
’

‘
We
shall go before he comes,’ said Gabriel quickly. ‘I was leaving anyway. We need only go a little earlier than I thought. Grizel Scott will take us in.’

With the girl’s weight heavy on his arm, ‘She can’t travel,’ said Jerott flatly. ‘And for God’s sake, you’re not going to let Lymond turn her out? Or turn you out, for that matter.’

Slurred still, but intelligible, Lancelot Plummer’s voice intruded. ‘So this is his little pastime—our fireball Count who’s so finicky about other gentlemen’s manners. I don’t think,’ said the architect with precise loathing, ‘that I care to continue in his unedifying company. De Seurre?’

‘He’ll find a few to his own taste, no doubt,’ said Michel de Seurre abruptly, called from sleep, like the rest, by a silent des Roches. ‘I shan’t be among them.’

‘Nor I,’ said Tait, and the growl was taken up and echoed along the strewn tables, where in knots and groups the men of St Mary’s had begun to move forward.

Gabriel lifted his head. ‘Wait.…’ he said, but there was no conviction now in his voice, and urgency and new force in Jerott’s as he said, ‘Wait? What for? Who will follow Francis Crawford after this? What fool would trust him?’

And Randy Bell, standing grimly beside him, said, ‘You didn’t hear Sir Graham address us just now on the dangers of loose living and lax discipline in a fighting group. He didn’t talk about the times our gallant leader has failed us already. He hated Sir Graham all right. Mistress Joleta is right. Think of the winter campaigns Sir Graham was forced to take part in and suffer; think of the night he came back from his work of mercy with the fuel. Think of the Hot Trodd when Crawford left him to do all the work and face all the danger—do you know why? Do you know that was the night, the night before Will Scott died, that Lymond was forcing Gabriel’s sister in an inn in Dumbarton?’

For a moment he paused; for a moment in that ugly drunken
assembly there was silence. Then as pandemonium belaboured the air, Randy raised his voice to a bellow. ‘Think of that, and think how again and again, Sir Graham has saved Lymond and protected him. But for Gabriel, would Effie Harperfield and her children have escaped yon day the siege-engine ran off? Would we have succeeded even so far as we did at the Hot Trodd; would we be blessed by the Church and have the regard of M. d’Oisel and the Queen Dowager? I tell you, if Gabriel hadn’t spoken out at Falkland the other day there would be no St Mary’s now, and no future for any of us.’

Inflamed with drink and an overmastering rage, Randy Bell glared at the roaring concourse around him. ‘How much of all the great work we’ve heard of has been
Graham Malett’s
doing,
not
Lymond’s? Graham Malett’s, aided by God?’

‘God knows,’ said a lazy voice, cool and familiar, from behind. ‘But looking round the policies I can tell that either Gabriel or the
Saint-Esprit
is a past master at housework.… Good evening,’ said Lymond politely to all the hostile faces as they turned. ‘Wouldn’t you prefer to stab me in the front, rather than the back? I am here, like the Blessed Gerard himself, ready to fall like a fruit, ripe for eternity.’

In the second’s flinching silence, it was the girl who spoke first. Pushing herself off Jerott’s shoulder, Joleta turned, and with her eyes fixed on the speaker, moved to her brother’s side and clasped both frail hands, hard, on his arm. ‘It’s Francis Crawford,’ she said, her young voice harsh. ‘Kill him for me?’ And as, around them, the sluggish noise climbed of men nursing their anger through drink and oratory and resented fatigue, Jerott Blyth bent his head, and drawing his sword smoothly from its long, leather scabbard, turned, last of them all.

Profoundly unexcited, Francis Crawford stood framed in his own carved doorway and gazed, in polite inquiry, at the receding rows of dishevelled tables crowded with hostile, sullen faces; the long raised table at the far end where Plummer stood watching, with Tait and Bell at his side; and Cormac O’Connor sprawled at ease, a tight-lipped smile on his fleshy, unshaven face; and lastly at the small knot of people standing alone between himself and the dais: Gabriel, with his sister’s slight, swollen figure on his arm, and Jerott, his sword balanced delicately between his two palms, facing him at their side. Then, raising his hands to his short, square-collared cloak, Lymond unclipped it and threw it aside, followed, a second later, by his sword belt.

‘That’s in case anyone feels nervous,’ said Lymond. ‘I take it
all
of you are drunk?’ And looking round at the thronging men and the ruins of his elegant hall, his long mouth twitched. ‘Ah, yes,’ said Lymond. ‘Our dear Masters, the sick. Mr O’Connor has been too generous.’

Jerott, his purpose fractionally interrupted, said sharply, ‘How did you know that?’ And then, ‘Your cloak is dry!’

‘The look-out, unfortunately, is not,’ said Lymond agreeably. ‘I have been here for half an hour. I passed you on the way. I thought I would allow Sir Graham rather than myself the pleasure of upbraiding the fallen under the circumstances.… It is not a question, Joleta, of squabbling over your honour. There are verifiable facts about that of which even Sir Graham is unaware. He won’t be much happier for knowing them, but then this public exposé isn’t my choice. He and I no doubt later will make our peace.…’

‘
Make our peace!
’ Graham Malett’s easy voice was stripped to its warp. He did not move, his face turned, stiffly blank, on his chosen novice. He said slowly, using the words of King Clodoreus to his son, ‘Thou cursed harlot! If this is true, then nothing else in this world is of moment. And other courtesy than death you will not have.’

The sword in Jerott’s hands flashed as he caressed it. ‘It
is
true, isn’t it?’ he said. ‘Thompson’s women were a little coarse in the grain. You preferred to teach a fifteen-year-old to serve you, and carelessly got her with child. Would we ever have known, if I hadn’t called at Midculter today, and your precious mother and brother hadn’t been out? What were they planning to do with it when it was born? Drown it? Threaten Joleta to keep quiet?’

‘My dear Jerott,’ said Lymond. ‘Lemand lamp of lechery I may be, but neither I nor my family are naïve. To get Joleta with child meant the end of my career at St Mary’s. Even if my family weren’t the solid pillars of virtue they unfortunately are, no one could possibly conceal the birth of the child, whatever fantasy you are proposing. My God, half the Lowlands of Scotland is alive with rumour already. Use your head, Jerott. Surely, if the child had been mine, I would have married her?’

For a second, Jerott’s black brows drew together. Then he laughed, his teeth flashing in his white face. ‘
Married
her? You heard her. She wants you dead.’

‘Don’t shout. Naturally,’ said Lymond. ‘Because I won’t marry her. Could we all sit down?’

The point of Jerott’s sword, swung smoothly round, sparkled before Lymond’s soft, exposed throat. ‘Not yet,’ said Jerott tersely. ‘Do we understand that Joleta ever dreamed of marrying you?’

‘Ask her,’ said Lymond. ‘Ask my mother and brother. Ask Madame Donati. Ask yourself if she cried out for help when you found us at Boghall, or at Dumbarton. She had only to scream at Dumbarton and you would have caught us hand-havand, as Fergie Hoddim would say. And as he would also say, under these circumstances we have a clear ruling in law.
Volenti non fit injuria
, Jerott. No injury may be reckoned done to a consenting party.’