The Disorderly Knights (81 page)

Philippa’s unwinking brown gaze flickered shiftily at the Latin and then steadied. ‘I should have told you before. You don’t
mind
?’

‘If you had told me before, you might not have decided to have me for a friend. I don’t mind,’ said Francis Crawford and told, for once, the bare truth.

They took her indoors then, dazed with reaction. Cheese-wame was safe, left in a house Adam knew of. And she had come in time—surely in time, to undo a little of the harm. And she had made a friend.

The moment she had gone Lymond moved, his soaked fair head heavy, first to his knees, then back on his heels, then, laboriously, pulled by Blacklock and the geographer, to his feet. As his spine took the weight he drew a long, sobbing breath and stood perfectly still. ‘
Le malheureux lion languissant, triste et morne
 … 
Peut à peine rugir
,’ he said, though his eyes were closed. He opened them. ‘He didn’t much like seeing Joleta’s trade-mark, did he? I wonder if I could walk to where Joleta is?’ And glancing in passing at the sodden revelry around him where, like children in a fountain, the drunk cheerfully frolicked, ‘That makes me feel very old,’ said Lymond, and stopped trying to walk. ‘Here’s Jerott.’

It was an uneasy encounter. Francis Crawford, his hand gripping de Nicolay’s shoulder, met Jerott’s bright black eyes with very little expression, and Jerott said thickly. ‘You’ve heard? According to the girl, Joleta is … is.…’

‘She is, too,’ Blacklock said briefly. ‘I saw her at Dumbarton.’ And he added a small, carefully chosen epithet.

‘Oh, God, don’t waste time on her,’ said Lymond wearily. ‘Don’t you suppose she’s going to get all, and more than she deserves?’

And shaking off Blacklock’s helping hand, with sudden impatience, he limped quickly and crookedly to where Gabriel, moving at last, was walking clear through the pressed-back, murmuring crowd, to where his sister stood on the steps.

On the stairs, the profiled triangle leading up to the great doors of St Mary’s, Graham Malett and his sister Joleta stood quite alone. Whatever leering glances the soaked grotesques capering still in the courtyard might cast up to the staircase, none of Gabriel’s brothers-in-arms wished to intrude on this, his pitiless disillusionment.

Quick as the flooding water in the darkening courtyard, the word had gone round. It was true, what Lymond had hinted. The Somerville girl, whose dislike of Crawford was notorious, had come barefoot from Hexham to tell it. The pure and lovely Joleta, lodestone of Gabriel’s life, was a wanton, self-willed and careless as a young animal. What he had worshipped was defiled. What he had cherished had secretly mocked at him. No wonder that, in the light from St Mary’s big doors, he seemed to grow in height, to stiffen and harden
in anguish, the water running unregarded down his broad shoulders, soaking his wide sleeves, his long tunic, the hose of his strong, beautifully-turned legs.

Graham Malett lifted his heavy, leonine head till the rain beat on his throat, and his closed lids, and his wet, ruddy gold hair. Then, his throat pulsing, his chest swollen with air, he gave a great cry; a wordless call from the heart that stopped them all, half-sobered, half-limp with convulsive fatigue, where they stood. Standing there, his clenched hands outflung, his eyes slowly opening on his sister, ‘I would have given you my heart to eat,’ said Gabriel’s low, carrying voice. ‘And you have paid me in filth. Go inside. Go.’

Soaked through cloak and night-smock, hollow-cheeked with fatigue, braced against the nameless bulk she was carrying, Joleta stared back, dark rings under her eyes. The straight, sodden mass of her hair, coiled dripping round one thin shoulder, showed like some delicate cast the perfect shape of her head, the lovely line of jaw and neck. She said, harshly and suddenly, in a voice no one there recognized, ‘No! I prefer to stay here.’

There was a pause. Then Graham Malett said softly, ‘You are untouchable. No one here would presume to interfere between us.’

‘One man would,’ said Joleta. In her bloodless face her eyes were as Jerott had seen them once, at Boghall, screaming from the floor at Lymond: wild with anger and a kind of unstable excitement. ‘Shall I speak to him, Graham? Shall I ask him for my brother’s living heart for my Morgengab? I would let him whip me, Graham. That would be only fair, wouldn’t it?’ And as Gabriel, his face suddenly quiet, made a small movement towards her, Joleta said, ‘Take care, Knight of the Ass. Knight of the Ass, stuffed with cotton and shown in a cage with two monkeys, St John and St Andrew.’ She laughed, and still watching him, began to climb, sideways, the steps above them that led to the big doors. ‘It is great sport, in Francis Crawford’s yoke,’ she said, and laughed again. Graham Malett began to climb after her.

Below, Adam Blacklock released a long breath and took another. ‘She’s crazed. She’ll drive him to attack her.’

‘She merely warns him,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay, in prosaic voice, ‘that if he harms her, she has it in her power to betray him. She does it with unwise violence, I think. It is possibly her nature.’

Jerott had not heard. He was staring, like a man in a nightmare, at the vanishing figure of his dream. Joleta, to whom her brother could cry aloud as he had. And who could answer, brightly and cruelly, that cry with a jibe.

Then Lymond arrived incredibly, by some blind obstinacy, at the foot of the same steps, looked up and called, on a long, painfully-gathered breath. ‘Joleta!
Come here!
’ And as she stopped, hesitating,
Francis Crawford said reasonably, ‘You must not put upon Sir Graham the sin of harming you. Come here. Jerott … take Sir Graham to his room.’

It was an order. And cold, wet and tired as they were, no one demurred. Few people, thought Adam Blacklock, his throat tight, could have looked less a leader than the man holding himself upright with such an effort at the foot of his own steps—a man they had just manhandled and flogged. Why then did no one laugh at the command? Because, whatever else might be proved against him, he had not wilfully despoiled the innocence of Gabriel’s child-sister? Or because, as he had, they had seen Gabriel’s face when, whip in hand, he stood back and looked at Lymond prone on the ground?

Jerott had seen that look too. He moved slowly forward, but before he reached the foot of the steps, Gabriel turned round. God-like in his despair and his agony, he looked at no one but Lymond. ‘It is great sport, in Francis Crawford’s yoke,’ he said, his deep voice blank of expression. ‘
Is it?
Francis Crawford, having found what she was, would make no effort to redeem her, would he? He would confide her to no one that might repair her, body or soul; he would, so tender is he of my peace, give me no chance of saving my own flesh and blood. He took the gifts so marvellously offered … he took a lust-crazed woman and.…’ His voice thinned and choked.

‘Send her down,’ said Lymond.

‘If you will come up,’ said Sir Graham Reid Malett huskily.

What happened then, none of them ever forgot. As Lymond hesitated, his eyes on Joleta, motionless on the top landing, her back pressed into the railed outer corner between landing and descent, Jerott moved swiftly forward. ‘
I’ll
take her down.’

‘You fool. He’ll kill her first,’ said Lymond, and took the stairs at a limping run, Jerott behind him.

Gabriel laughed. It was a mirthless, heartbreaking laugh that stopped Jerott dead in his tracks, and Blacklock and de Nicolay and the rest just behind him. He was bargaining only with Lymond, they all saw, for Joleta’s life. And only the initiated knew why Lymond was risking his own life to save her. For if Joleta lived and confessed, Gabriel was defeated.

But Francis Crawford, this time, made two frightening mistakes. He overestimated the strength he could summon. And he underestimated by far Gabriel’s inspired opportunism in the face of attack. His face mask-like with the drive of his will, Lymond got up the stairs somehow, and kept ahead somehow of Jerott until he was within Gabriel’s reach.

And against all expectations, Gabriel did not try there and then to seize him, to strike him, to vindicate on his flesh all the passion stark in his face. Instead, Gabriel’s famous arm, bearing his naked
sword, swept round and hurled the persistent, unsteady young man at his heels, with the flat of his blade, up the remaining steps and back into Joleta’s arms. She cried out as Lymond crashed into her, his own breath coming in great sobs from the blow on his pulped back; then she gripped him, an opportune shield, her back pressed into the angle of iron which railed the high platform overhanging the crowded courtyard below, as Gabriel, flinging after them, smiling, presented his sword a yard, no more, from Lymond’s bared breast.

To Blacklock and de Nicolay, watching, his intention was never in doubt. To kill Francis Crawford, licensed by these appalling discoveries, while Lymond protected Joleta. Or to force Francis Crawford to play craven now, in full view of the crowd, and by saving himself, expose Joleta to that murderous blade. For Graham Malett would want rid of Joleta, who might yet betray him and confess. And Lymond’s only chance of ensuring her safety was to die himself on Gabriel’s sword.

From among all the faces below, intent, aghast, ‘Oh, my God!’ said Plummer suddenly. ‘Jump!’ There was just room, Blacklock judged, his face grey, for a slender man twisting round to drop between the rails to the ground. For a woman, a pregnant woman, there was none. And so the choice, as the great sword in front of him steadied and behind him, dyed with the blood from his back, the cruel, untameable child called Joleta pressed herself sobbing against the rail of the platform, was Francis Crawford’s.

Bright-eyed and colourless, his hair sea-wet with the rain, Lymond left it pitifully late: the vital decision, the last turning in the road he had chosen, thirteen months before, alone in Dragut’s quiet tent. He could live on, to fight Gabriel at the cost of this perverted child’s life; at the cost of throwing away all that Philippa had risked her life for. Or he could die, and trust that Joleta would live under Jerott’s strong arm, and would add her own damning testimony to the evidence against Graham Malett which he had now set in train. Either way, Gabriel had proved himself master indeed.

Jerott Blyth shut his eyes. Then, with all the power of Graham Malett’s great shoulders, Gabriel’s sword began its drive home.

Quick, quiet, light and unfleshed as a gull, Lymond dropped downwards and sideways, and with a thrust of his long hands, rolled between the lowest two bars of the railing to fall, a loose, undisciplined heap, into the courtyard below.

Above and behind, the sword he had escaped drove on, unhindered, into and through the heart of the girl.

No one moved. Below, a desert of shining pavement around him, Lymond lay where he had dropped. After the first unbelieving reflex, jerking back his sword arm, with the clotted blade already clearing with rain, Graham Malett stood, his back pressed against the castle
wall, frozen also in stillness. Joleta screamed three times, a thin, breathy kind of scream, with her hands spread rigid, like shining, flesh-eating plants before her. Then, collapsing forward and sideways, she hit the top step with her shoulder at her brother’s feet, her rose-gold, rain-heavy hair whipping her cheek, and with a grotesque slowness tumbled from step to step, clumsily, downstairs.

She would have passed Jerott but, falling to his knees, he arrested her with his strong hands, and unfolding the tumbled clothing and putting back the silken hair, found and looked at her face. The eyes were open, and a look of surprised fury, terrifying in its malevolence, lit the dead face. As he watched, it vanished. Jerott laid down, heavy on his hand, the loveliest child in Christendom, and got to his feet. ‘She’s dead. Go inside,’ he said abruptly; and after a moment, Gabriel stirred, like a dead man himself, and moved without speaking into the castle.

Jerott turned round. Below him Adam Blacklock, his face turned away, was gripping the lower rail. Beside him, the geographer, his face unusually pale, said incomprehensibly to the vacant air, ‘It was right. What use proof, if he died? The man Gabriel was crazed. He would have killed the sister too, or she would have fallen. Is it not so?’

Blacklock, his face invisible, shook his head. The others, behind said nothing. Only their eyes, Jerott found, were turning, first one then the other towards himself. His hands shaking, his bowels water within him, Jerott said steadily, ‘Bring Mr Crawford here and take him indoors. He is still a prisoner, with charges to answer. What he has just done … is not, of course, a matter for law.’

But it was not, either, a matter that the men of St Mary’s, new to Gabriel’s demented violence, new to Joleta’s reported perfidy, could stomach. Before their officers, without hurrying, could reach the unconscious huddle in the dark rainswept courtyard that contained the lewd elegance, the hauteur, the Olympian irony of Francis Crawford, the men had got there first. And although Plummer and de Seurre and Bell and the rest used their voices, cuttingly, to promise retribution of the unpleasantest sort, they did nothing much to prevent Lymond’s own men from dragging him, bruised and bloodied afresh by the fall, witlessly yielding, from below the rain-washed railings to where the whipping-post stood, and fastening round wrists and ankles the chains he had so recently left. Then they threw a few things, but by that time, however dilatory, their superiors were on them, and cuffed them out of the way and across the courtyard in the drumming rain at last to their own quarters.

The last of the torches by then had gone out. In the dim light from the castle windows and from the lanterns kept alight at the gatehouse and on the far walls, Jerott checked with his colleagues that no
drunken reveller remained, asleep in the mud, to be found raving in the morning.

By his orders, Randy Bell had gone indoors to Gabriel; and two of his fellow-knights, their hands gentle, had faced the task of lifting Joleta and carrying her indoors to his bed. The debris in the great hall, also by his orders, was being cleared. No one went near the dark post in the centre of the courtyard or looked at the man bound there. After a sharp exchange, Adam Blacklock had walked off, grimly, in the opposite direction. So Jerott, by his own design, was alone when at last, his eyes sunk in his head, every nerve throbbing with tiredness, he walked slowly across to the post.