The Disorderly Knights (85 page)

Adam Blacklock glanced at Philippa and away again. ‘He wants Gabriel arrested first,’ he said. ‘And he won’t allow that until the
evidence is complete. He’s an extremely clever man, Graham Malett. Mr C-Crawford won’t risk any loophole being left. That’s why we are waiting now for Jock Thompson’s report. The official complaint from England about the arms-running into Ireland must have come now, and we may be faced with a major charge of civic disobedience as it is. At least if we can show Gabriel’s complicity, the Queen Dowager won’t give him her trust and the leadership of St Mary’s at once.’

With one long, slender finger, the Dowager traced the ferny pattern of her gown. Without looking up she said, ‘And, of course, if you or Mr Guthrie or Mr Hoddim or my other son were to come forward now with your evidence, your lives would be exposed to attack by Sir Graham. While you are in hiding, you are safe too.’

‘He has that in mind. Lady Culter,’ said Adam Blacklock, his brown eyes direct. ‘If we believed it would serve any purpose, my friends and I would have accused Sir Graham long since.’

Sybilla flashed him an abstracted smile. ‘What an obstinate band of young men you are,’ she said. ‘The leadership of St Mary’s! What does it matter? For leading an unruly assembly, for disobedience, for causing trouble in Ireland, what can they do to him? Fine him, perhaps; keep him in prison until his temper cools. Even if the worst happens and Gabriel goes free, Francis is most unlikely to be asked by law to forfeit his life. So that all this endeavour and all this danger is endured for one reason: the leadership of one excellent small force, which Francis cannot bear to see fall into the wrong hands.
Does
it matter?’ Turning, she confronted the artist, her neatly capped white head cocked, her brows straight. ‘Or is Francis merely bewitched by his own little creation?’

It was Richard Crawford, standing solid and quiet just inside the door, listening, who answered. ‘Francis knows very well what he has done. He has bred a terror in a small nation such as this which could jeopardize the balance of nations and overthrow kings. And he has placed this power in the hands of Graham Malett. Should Gabriel learn what is being plotted against him and fly, he would still be able to take this force with him, virtually intact. This axe may be poised yet to the glory of Gabriel over more defenceless heads than we dream.’

‘It won’t happen,’ said Adam Blacklock abruptly; and bending, he kissed Sybilla’s idle hand, pressed it, and left. And as the throat-constricting silence after that threatened to continue. ‘Don’t think about it,’ said Philippa quickly. ‘Look, here’s Kevin.’ And diving for the door, she lifted from the surprised hands of his passing nurse the vibrating red bolster which was Kevin Crawford, Master of Culter, and sat him on his grandmother’s lap.

‘Mother always says,’ said Philippa, ‘that when the worst is
happening and your knees are rattling like Swiss drummers, there’s nothing like a baby to give you a sense of proportion.’

She did not know then why it misfired. She only knew that at her side, Lord Culter stood dumbly staring at his son, and that Sybilla, her arms embracing that small rotundity, with the red cheeks and black feathery curls and deep, blue-black Irish eyes of Mariotta his mother, bent her head on his dark one and cried.

*

At Boghall and at Branxholm, they also waited. Jenny Fleming, chained by her history to Boghall castle, far from Court, paced her room and visited her royal bastard in his nursery, and wrote long, placating letters to the Constable of France. Her daughter Margaret, waiting in silence for news from the arsenal which was St Mary’s, knew that her mother was obsessed with the need to return to France, to love and power, and gaiety and admiration. Anything, even the courtly respect with which M. d’Oisel had treated her, was fuel to her determination.

As the wife of the French King’s Lieutenant in Scotland, she could return with him to France and to a place in society which would surely include the attentions, however discreet, of the King. Diane was old. The Queen was becoming stouter and plainer. Or if Francis Crawford had been a less fickle child of fortune.… He was wealthy. He had a comté….

‘Don’t fret, child,’ said Jenny Fleming kindly to her daughter Margaret as for the third time that day she found her staring unavailingly out of the window towards the rooftops of Midculter. ‘Once Sir Graham is put down, the Queen Dowager will ask Francis to take his company to France. He will make his name, I’m sure of it.’

Margaret Erskine’s sigh was noiseless. She turned round. ‘You weren’t thinking, by any chance, of going with him?’ she said.

Lovely still, Lady Fleming’s vivid face sparkled. ‘Why, dull child? Do you think he’d object?’

It was a long-standing conspiracy. ‘I know he won’t,’ said her daughter briskly. ‘I’ve discussed it for you, in fact. He said he wouldn’t mind, provided you put your rates up. Villeconnin’s mother, he said, got two hundred thousand crowns in the bank from the last King of France for a son.’

She knew her mother too well to fear any damage to her
amour propre
. Jenny Fleming merely looked exasperated. ‘That young man,’ she said, ‘ought to be plucked out of his pride and impaled on a thornbush. He introduced me to someone as the Controller of the King’s Beam, last time we met.’

Which at least had the merit of making her daughter laugh, if a little wildly.

*

At Branxholm, Janet Beaton had the whole matter strictly in hand.

Bit by bit, her husband had been allowed to learn of Gabriel’s iniquity, and of Joleta’s shortcomings. Of his share in Will’s death Janet said nothing. Lymond had said only, ‘Put him on his guard. Tell him a little. But nothing, for God’s sake, that will send him frothing off to St Mary’s with a noose in his hand. We don’t want Buccleuch dead or Gabriel vanished.’

It was a matter for nice judgement, but Janet knew her Buccleuch. The first time she raised it, he called her a havering ninny, and advised her that the dust was standing in bings under the draw-bed, and she should mind her own feckless business before kilting up other folks’ tails for them.

But he thought about it, and though he poured scorn on the idea at the next airing too, she knew he would surely come round. And soon enough, brows jutting, he was saying bluntly, ‘Yon fellow Crawford’s made a right hotch-potch and mingle mangle o’ it, then. And Sandilands is as bad, by God, letting the de’il stroll in.’

‘Jimmy Sandilands is a creishy wee fox,’ said Dame Janet with emphasis. ‘He’d like fine to line his pockets with the Order’s revenues, and he thinks he sees a way of getting someone else to take the blame for it. Francis had a fair shot at hinting the way things might go, on the way home from Falkland, but the fool whined over his gouty foot and quoted the Scriptures until you would think he was mad. Francis couldna shift the Kerrs, either.’

‘I should hope not,’ said her husband indignantly, allowing a grandchild to drop off his knees. ‘A good-going feud like yon isna put out like a spit on a match. It was going fine long before Graham Malett got his hands on it.’

‘Oh, we all ken that,’ said Janet angrily. ‘Flype a Scott and you find a wee man thumbing his nose at a Kerr. But he pointed out, all power to him, that the lot of ye were no more than playing into the hands of anyone that wanted real power for the asking next to the throne, and no awkward questions from the gentrice. Cessford said,’ she added absently, ‘that as the Scotts werena gentrice, it would make no difference when the Kerrs loused down their points and ran them greetin’ out o’ the land.’

It was next day before she was able to touch on the subject again, and Buccleuch’s feelings were still uncommonly ruffled, but he did agree, growling at last, to take care in all his dealings with the family
Kerr. And also, with greater reluctance, to lend an ear, when the time came, to the discourse of Crawford of Lymond.

‘Thank God,’ remarked Janet at this stage, fanning herself with an infantile garment. ‘Ye’re a dogged au’d besom, Buccleuch. But you’re namely for sense, in the end.’

‘Sense! With the blood of me rotted with nagging! Can ye no envisage a decent reticence, woman, but you’ve to knock and
chop
hourly like the chapel-held clock? Sense!’ bellowed Buccleuch. ‘A purseful of auld sousis for all the sense that ye’d ever spy in this house!’

But Janet was satisfied.

*

And so the time drew to a close, and at St Mary’s Gabriel received and dispatched messengers, and played chess smiling with M. d’Oisel, and watched, with the French Ambassador, while the cream of his men, confident in training and skill, outpaced their French custodians in every exercise of the jousting ground and the butts. For M. d’Oisel was being allowed to discover what kind of weapon Sir Graham had sheathed at the asking, and how smoothly it fitted his hand.

And all the time Jerott Blyth stood at Gabriel’s side. Resisting the easy course, Jerott had come back to justify at last all the Order had given him, when he had nothing to give in return but a past to be buried. He had told Lymond what he intended to do. He meant to save Graham Malett: to give Gabriel the chance no one had given his sister. And yet, to keep his implicit promise to Lymond, he must do it without betraying what he knew, or how close the hounds were at Gabriel’s heels.

It was not possible. It could never have been possible, although Jerott kept his word and in their prayers together, in the long discussions he forced on all the great issues of religion and ethics, he gave no sign that Graham Malett’s own spiritual welfare was his concern.

But by the same token, nothing he could do carried weight. Looking at Gabriel’s unclouded face, that could so easily darken with pain at mention of Joleta or of Lymond, Jerott found it incredible that any man could maintain such a pretence; could kneel, his arm round Jerott’s shoulders in chapel, and pray for Francis Crawford’s black soul. And that such a man, asked to countermand the order to track Lymond by bloodhound, could say quietly, ‘Jerott … have you not learned that the flesh and its ills are less than nothing? His crimes against my sister, the bitter effects of a shameless ambition … these mean disorders of the soul far more desperate than any harm his
body might suffer. He is sick’ said Graham Malett gently, and pressed Jerott’s shoulder. ‘Don’t deny him the healing he needs.’

Then, gazing up into those candid eyes, He
is
sick, thought Jerott Blyth grimly. And I
have
denied him the healing he needs. But in body only, Sir Graham. There is nothing wrong with Francis Crawford’s sense of the major moralities, and a good deal that is admirable. Whereas.…

Whereas in Gabriel, he recognized, sickeningly at last, a power for evil, effortlessly sustained, which could come only from a mind totally warped.

Against this, no living Knight of the Order could hope to succeed. To plead, to reveal what he knew, would merely allow Malett to flee and would place the fate of all Malett’s future victims at his, Jerott’s door. He had been wrong, and Lymond right. The task of returning Graham Malett to the light of grace was the dream of a fool.

Jerott did not go back to Lymond. Only, after two or three days of brutal self-examination, he found out Nicolas de Nicolay who had returned to St Mary’s, secure in his famous name and led by his native, long-whiskered curiosity to watch the duel end. And Nicolas de Nicolay, spry on a keg in a corner of the brewery, watching the big vats toil and ream, turned and said with satisfaction on his gnome-like face, ‘Ah: the cow turned back into Io again. You have come to ask me, I hope, about Malta. I have much about Malta to tell you. And of Tripoli. Come. Let us walk.’

And so, walking head bent over an empty Scottish moor, with the young, cold wind of October running fresh through his cloak, Jerott Blyth was taken back to the blue misty seas and brazen skies and the hot powdery walls, cream-pink against both, of his convent in Malta, and heard the story of Dragut’s attack as Francis Crawford and de Nicolay had pieced it together.

It was the story, when you thought of it, of a cold-blooded pursuit of power without absolute parallel. There was in Graham Malett none of the dynastical ambition that had made the House of Guise great, and that had made of the Queen Dowager’s brothers an amalgam of priest, diplomat and ruthless man of affairs. Nor was he, as Popes and Cardinals had been before him, a man of religion who had formed a taste for secular power and intrigue. ‘This,’ had said Nicolas de Nicolay at the outset calmly, ‘that you worship, you, like a champac tree, is a clod of undeveloped Nature, no more. There are in him, we find, no sinks in which one may trace any particle of feeling for his fellow-man. If he has not this, then all he is and all he does is spurious; and most of all, this blasphemous mummery before the altar.

‘Think,
mon ami
,’ Nicolas de Nicolay had said, wandering from
tussock to tussock, hopping a burn, stopping to pick and twirl the straw fingers of willowherb from the hedgerow. ‘Think of it. A man may make his vows and his life may move into other paths, so that the vows are overlaid and forgotten. It is sad, but common. But here is a man who daily, hourly renews his vows and his protestations on his knees, who searches out God as his dearest confidant and friend and by nothing, by no amazement or defeat or tragedy, will let for one second the sacred mask slip. This is a true prince of darkness, is he not? A man worthy of fear.’

‘For of all men, my God could love you; and I too.’ So Gabriel had told Francis Crawford in those early days when, with magnificent artistry, he had crooked his finger and passed on, smiling, expecting Lymond to follow.

‘Why?’ Jerott said suddenly. ‘Why, when Sir Graham saw that Lymond was going to resist both himself and his Religion, did he simply redouble the pressure? Why try in the first place to make Lymond of all people a disciple? A personal challenge?’

‘A challenge?’ The little geographer, stopped in mid-flight, turned and stared at him. ‘Does such a thing exist? Not to Gabriel. Or not to Gabriel then. Ah no. One thinks this was merely one of many gambits our friend Sir Graham was playing, in his growing disillusionment with the Order. He is a Grand Cross of Grace. He might legitimately have expected to be considered for the Grand Mastership and then the world should shrink and bow the knee! But here is this old man de Homedès, who will not die, who is draining the Treasury and weakening Gabriel’s rightful patrimony so that, when the Turks have finished with it, what will there be in Malta for him? And worse, new names are coming forward: la Valette, de Romegas, even Leone Strozzi. It is by no means sure that he will even become Grand Master in the end. So he looks at the possibilities. There are two. The Grand Master may die, or Gabriel may seek his advancement elsewhere. Where? By crossing, first, to the Turk. If the Turk is to win Malta, then Graham Malett would be well-advised to be on the Turk’s side. Or he could look for a niche elsewhere: another principality which one day he might make his own.