The Disorderly Knights (45 page)

But Margaret remained standing, clearly unaware, to Philippa’s frightened eyes, of anything but Gabriel’s changing face. His grip on her hands became rigid as Kate spoke; there was a second’s pause, then in a deep voice he said, ‘Sit, for I must ask your forgiveness. I thought you knew. It is bad news, and from Boghall. Your husband was taken with the sweating sickness. He is with your father, at peace in God.’

There was a long silence while Margaret, her face perfectly livid, gazed composedly at Sir Graham. At length, ‘He can’t be,’ she said. ‘Not Tom. Not Tom
as well
.’

‘Did you think life was always fair and always just?’ said Gabriel. ‘It isn’t. You wouldn’t be the person you are if it were; you would be a happy simpleton. But you are not, and today is your day of mourning.’

The words did what they were meant to do. After a single choked gasp, Margaret Erskine, now Margaret Fleming again, closed her eyes with her two hands and wept.

Shortly afterwards, finding herself unwanted, Kate crept outside the room with Philippa and drying her daughter’s tears, set her to finish the French chicken. Then she sat down and had a limited cry to herself, within hearing of the low murmur of Gabriel’s lovely voice. Margaret could not be in better hands at this moment. She only wished that his spell was less powerful where Philippa was concerned. She then faced, drearily, the fact that her own motives for this were heavily prejudiced; and further the fact that sometimes now she was able to forget: that Philippa’s father was dead. ‘
Gideon
,’ said Kate silently to herself on one noiseless intake of breath, and rising as if she had been shot, went to help Philippa with the fowl.

IV
T
he
A
xe
I
s
F
ashioned

(
St Mary’s, Autumn 1551
)

C
ARRYING
hods in Egypt, grimly, for Gabriel’s sake, Jerott Blyth proceeded to the keep of St Mary’s near the loch of that name in the Central Lowlands of Scotland, and remained there, professionally enthralled, the entire winter, while a legend was born.

Unlike the former Will Scott, Blyth was no inexperienced youth when he joined Francis Crawford. As soon as he arrived with the rest from Midculter in the district called Lymond, he saw that the land was already half-prepared for its burden. In fields newly fenced and hedged were wedders, rams and milk-ewes, all in good order. There were oxen for the table and plough, geese in the ponds and birds in the dovecots and coneys in the warrens. They passed barns stacked with oats, wheat and barley; a sawmiller’s with cuts of oak stacked outside and new wheels leaning against their own shadows and silted full of October leaves.

Then the cottages and outlying buildings of St Mary’s itself came in sight: the stacks of brown peat and charcoal; the forge with the air lively about it and the bell-chime of the hammer sweet above the thud of the horses. The stables, well-built rank upon rank, with covered horselines before, and a separate well. The bake-house, with its peel and tubs and tables and barrels of flour. The brewery, the warm malt-smell thick on the air, with the shining wortstands glimpsed through the windows, and the sweating five-gallon barrels of ale.

He saw the riding-school, and beyond it where the tiltyard had been laid out, and the butts and the practice ground for small and heavy arms shooting. Near these was the armoury, with crates and barrels outside still being unpacked. He had seen their contents being disembarked at Leith with a flaring interest that would not be denied: the shot and arquebuses and demi-culverins, the chests of bows and sheaves of arrows, the staves and dags and bills and axes, the lead malls for the archers, the pikeheads and powder, the touch boxes and flasks, the lint and the tar and the pitch and the halberds and the stacks of chain mail, headpieces, corselets; the wire for faggots,
staves for ladles, hides, crowbars, harness buckles and prongs; the sieves, the ramrods, the handbaskets and shears—such was the marrow of war.

To assemble these things faultlessly, and from a distance, meant some very high-power organizing indeed. It also meant a long purse—a startlingly long purse, even for a man with two homes and a comté of unknown resources abroad. Jerott Blyth at about this point turned a conjecturing look on Francis Crawford of Lymond riding easily at his side and wondered what else he had overlooked during these hot August weeks on Malta and Tripoli.

The first person he met in the clean and beautiful courtyard of St Mary’s was Michel de Seurre, Knight of the Order of St John. The second was the Serving Brother des Roches who had defended the harbour fort at Tripoli, and the third was the Moor Salablanca. Lymond in Africa had not wasted his time.

The task force which was to become famous in Europe began with two hundred men and eight officers. Later, other knights came to join it, and a number of exiles like Jerott who had made their homes overseas, bringing the total by Christmas up to thirty men all of whom had had at least a gentleman’s training in war, and some of whom, like de Seurre and Jerott himself, were highly qualified.

To contain them, an excellent dormitory wing had been built on to St Mary’s, which Jerott remembered as a war-crumbled keep untouched since the first Baron’s day, and which had been completely restored to frankly Florentine splendours. Lancelot Plummer, the engineer and master-architect who designed it, was living there now, drawn by curiosity to become a pupil in his own new academy.

Jerott, who had met the exquisite gentleman in France, knew he was as hard as nails and had a whimsy of iron, and wondered, grimly amused, how Lymond thought he could handle him. Or Fergie Hoddim the lawyer, who knew more about vice than probably any man living; or Randy Bell the surgeon whose experience was nearly as wide and not nearly so academic; and Alec Guthrie who had lectured in Latin and Greek in nearly every university in Italy and Germany and France: a home-spun Humanist who would have had Socrates himself saying weakly, ‘Take my case for example.…’

And Hercules Tait, antiquarian, diplomat, collector and businessman, who not only knew all the crowned heads of Europe but was related to most of them; and Adam Blacklock the painter, with his stutter and his wasted leg that he had taught himself to skate and ride and vault with, and his alcoholic fits of despair.

Jerott Blyth thought of the Knights of the Order with their violent, warring personalities reduced by the strict rules of the Church, by danger and hard work, by the rivalry of the Langues, the isolation
from vice and free will and, above all, by the universal fire of their faith, and wondered cynically how a public warehouse for soldiers, with Francis Crawford as sole director and tout, could expect to succeed.

He found out during his first night at St Mary’s. Used to communal living, he had early found himself a bed next to Randy Bell and stowed his possessions; then made himself roughly familiar with his fellow-scholars and with the chief technicians who were to run St Mary’s and its equipment, and with the enlisted mercenaries who were to be the standing nucleus of its force.

It was a heavy day, and when at last he got to bed long after dark he was bone-weary; his mind deadened by new people and new impressions on top of the long journey to Scotland. The other seven in his room, some of them arrived only hours before and still unpacked, were equally worn. Few words were exchanged as one by one they came into the chamber and rolled, half-dressed or naked into bed.

At midnight, in a clangorous frenzy, the alarm bell rang. At first Jerott, clogged with sleep, thought it meant Turks. He struggled upright, the cold hilt of his sword to his hand, and then saw that he was in St Mary’s, and that the cursing sleepers around him, slowly struggling to life under the single dim cresset, were as bemused as himself. Then a voice, a cultured voice which Jerott recognized as belonging to Salablanca, the Moor Lymond had rescued from Tripoli, spoke from the doorway in Spanish.

‘Gentlemen. The apologies of Mr Crawford for disturbing you. Your presence is required, dressed, in the great hall in five minutes. I am asked to say that any gentleman later than this will be free to leave St Mary’s at once.’

No one was late. But the quality of the silence when, seated grimly in rows in the blazingly lit hall, a bunch of dissident intellectuals awaited their leader, was corrosive in the extreme.

Lymond had been little in evidence that day: the sheer bulk of paper-work awaiting him on this his first visit to the altered St Mary’s must have been daunting in itself. But now, when they were scarcely assembled, he came quickly on to the empty dais, bareheaded and unsmiling, glanced round, noting numbers, and then spoke, pleasantly and without unduly raising his voice.

‘Gentlemen.… This is not the last time I shall exact from you unquestioning obedience. It is, however, the last time I shall do it without prior consultation.’

Clever stuff, thought Jerott sardonically. There was a fragile slackening of the outrage in the atmosphere and Lymond felt it, he was sure. He spoke again. ‘By now you have met each other. You are all intelligent men, and men of consequence and ability. The others
who will join you are of the same kind. Among you there will be no rank and no distinction. Any money this force may earn will be distributed equally among you. Your living expenses should we earn no income will be guaranteed by me. We are therefore a money-making unit, but the financial risk is mine, and these, which I am making clear to you now, are my conditions for taking it.’

Two conditions, said Jerott Blyth’s wincing spirit. ‘Worship me, and make me a rich man.’

As if he read his mind, Lymond’s eyes rested for a moment on Jerott’s, then passed on. He said, ‘Your reasons for joining me are your own affair. You should know mine for having you. There is no standing army in England, although there has been an attempt to ensure one by paying noble landowners to raise and arm troops and to produce them at need. When the Government needs help it has to call in mercenaries under their captains from Germany and the Low Countries.’

He paused, testing their restlessness: no one moved. ‘In Scotland there is no money for annual commissions. Even if there were, the natural leaders have been decimated by wars and divided by religious differences and rival claims to the throne. There have been proposals for a standing army of mercenaries; there is strong pressure currently to instal an official army of French. Both these would be operated for and through the Crown, and in my view both would be dangerous.…’

Below, someone stirred. Alec Guthrie, his greying hair thickly on end, said impatiently in his grating, lecturer’s voice, ‘May we speak? No one ever made a fortune protecting Scotland. If the French want to spend money that way, let them get on with it.’

‘On the contrary,’ said Lymond. ‘If France or anyone else wants to spend money on that little job, let them pay us. Mercenaries and foreign garrisons we all know cause endless trouble. In any case the Emperor probably wouldn’t release any more Germans or Swiss, and France has other uses for her troops, even if she could persuade them to go on fighting here.…’

‘… So we are to become the fighting arm of the Queen Dowager,’ said Hercules Tait lazily. ‘I had a strange feeling it would come to that all along.’

‘We are to become,’ said Lymond, and suddenly his pleasant voice cut like edged glass, ‘the strongest
independent
fighting unit these islands have ever known. We take work, for which we shall be paid, and we lay down the terms under which we carry out such work. If we think the work undesirable from any point of view, moral or material, we refuse.’

‘M. le Comte …’ It was the Chevalier de Seurre’s bantering voice. ‘May I point out that what you are proposing is to establish military
rule in your country? You are creating an
élite
of professional leaders to replace your vanishing noblemen. The Queen Dowager comes to you, very humbly, for an army, say, with which to invade England. You say, you, “No. I do not wish to attack England today. Instead we shall turn on our garrisons and push out the French.” And so it is done. What can she do to stop you? You have the strongest fighting force in these islands.’

‘And who takes these decisions in any case?’ came Alec Guthrie’s level growl. ‘Yourself alone?’

Jerott found he was smiling a satisfied smile. So much for under-rehearsed empire building. Lymond said agreeably, ‘Let’s put another question before we start thinking of answers. Since when was the Queen Dowager at once a diplomat, a lawyer, an expert on political and military strategy, a seaman, a philosopher, a clear-minded and unprejudiced onlooker? I am none of these things. She, because in fact she is in many ways a good woman, is some of them. But we, as a unit,
are all of them
.’

‘I repeat my premise,’ said Alec Guthrie, but the fierce eyes under their hooded brows were narrowed on Lymond. ‘You want to rule.’

His hands loosely behind his back, Lymond considered his answer. He spoke almost at once. ‘My intention is to move among the battlefields of Europe and elsewhere and earn a great deal of money. My conditions are that at the same time we police and protect this nation as best we may, regulating the international squabbles, clearing both sides of the Border of the thieves and the lawless, carrying out justice where justice has up to now failed because of the threat of blood feuds. Beyond that I have no wish to usurp the authority of the Crown. For these services I should expect to be paid, by the Queen Dowager in Scotland and by the English Government over the Border. The payment, I can warn you now, will be in bags of tin pennies. But to your sons and grandsons the effects, if we do our work worthily, should be worth their measure in gold.’

Surprise, thought Jerott in the ensuing silence. Spiritual values have tottered into the discussion. He sounded as though he meant it. It doesn’t matter whether he means it or not. He needs a unifying principle, and he’s picked a crusade … any crusade. Malta, thy wing is here.