The Disorderly Knights (80 page)

Cut into the fine skin of the breast, the new scar sharp and black in the light, was a crude attempt at an Eight-Sided Cross. Jerott did not know its history, although Adam Blacklock might have told him, and Lymond’s own family at Midculter certainly could. He only knew, as some of them did, that Lymond had borne the mark, whatever it was, since the day of the Hot Trodd and Will Scott’s death.

It was perhaps the reminder of that occasion, and of Lymond’s drunken débâcle, that made Graham Malett’s gentle face change in the torch-light; made him draw himself up, as he seldom did, to his great height and stretching his hand, take himself from its hook the strong, knotted thong Lymond was accustomed to use, in time of need, on the backs of his men.

‘Pray,’ said Graham Malett to the man chained alone in the dark night before his own house, his own men in a shrinking, shuffling ring of bright faces around. ‘And repent. For we are here, a small sort of knights and squires, to bring you in your vilety to fear God and greet pain as His mentor. Let us taste,’ said Gabriel, his white teeth suddenly clenched, ‘this lewd elegance, this hauteur, this Olympian irony now.’

And from his great height, his forearms ridged through his sleeves, he brought down the whip.

XV
D
eath of an
I
llusion

(
St Mary’s, September 1552
)

I
T
seemed almost certain that Cheese-wame Henderson was dead. He had not replied for a long time when Philippa spoke to him, and when she prodded him as he lay, doubled forward on her horse’s neck, he did not move any more. It would have been sensible to have shouldered him in a respectful way down to the ground and then mounted herself, for her shoes had fallen apart and she was walking among the papery bracken and wiry heather of these trackless Scottish hills in her bare feet. But if he proved not to be dead, Philippa didn’t think that, without his help, she could ever get him back on to the mare. And unless she got them both food and shelter soon, she felt she would probably die herself. And Kate would not approve of that.

At the thought of it, a watery grin crossed Philippa’s white, swollen face and she stopped again, as she often did, to rest herself and the horse, but mainly to check a childish wandering in her thoughts, and to remind herself sternly of her plans and her duties.

She had got herself lost on leaving Wauchope Forest: that she knew. Long before now she should have met some kind of cabin or keep: even the homes of thieves like the Turnbulls who infested the district. But she had met no one, and the sun had appeared briefly and gone early, leaving a grey noon that had deepened, with unbelievable ill luck, into fog. In the end she had simply sat down, and although Cheese-wame was very weak, she had got him dismounted and he had started a fire, and they had eaten the last of the food.

They had stayed by the fire in the dank gloom until the heavy moisture that beaded her hair and sparkled in Cheese-wame’s brown beard turned imperceptibly to rain, and she got Cheese-wame somehow, with his help, on to the mare, which was fresher, and through the clearing mists to a belt of trees, dimly seen in the distance.

She was walking then, because it was the only way she could hold him properly in the saddle, and it hardly mattered at the time when Henderson’s horse, with a freakish impulse of energy twisted his reins from their knot and vanished soundlessly through the grey web of trees.

When the rain stopped, visibility was better, or else they were viewing the nameless, rolling land to the north from a different angle; for Henderson, full of constant, hoarse apology and harsh breathing which angered and frightened her both, thought he recognized the terrain. He pointed out a line of march, which was just as well, as he shortly ceased to take any interest and Philippa was left, doggedly marching, with her shoes falling to pieces.

When night fell, she was still marching, steering by her own good sense and the stars. Tinkers or not, enemies or not, Philippa Somerville was going to stop the first stray cottager, the first stray pedlar, the first gypsy, the first human being on two legs she met, and beg them for help. It was her own deserved good luck, and by no means the incredible coincidence it seemed, that the first person she actually met that September night was Adam Blacklock.

She met him because he was on his way from that heart-searching meeting with Lymond at Boghall straight to the last meeting-place of the Turnbulls, of whom he intended to ask some very cogent questions indeed. And he found her because he was trained at St Mary’s to read geography with his body at night like a bat, and heard but could not interpret the stumbling step of a tired and heavily loaded horse, accompanied by the shuffling, clattering tread of a walker also tired, and short of leg, and most lamentably shod.

Adam Blacklock turned his horse from the causeway and rode gently, his hand on his sword, in the direction of the noise.

It stopped. But the tableau he saw silhouetted against the pale rocks of the hill was that of a drooping horse with a man laid across it, and beside it a slight figure which must be a woman’s. He said, pitching his voice clearly and quietly across the small, wild sounds of the night, ‘Are you in trouble? Don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm. But if you are, perhaps I may help.’

The tone was civilized, the voice kindly, the offer unimpeachable. Philippa Somerville, whom little daunted, laid her poor swollen face on the wet flanks of her mare and burst into uncontrollable tears.

*

After the whipping had gone on for quite some time, Joleta was sick, and Randy Bell, after a hesitant glance at her brother, took her to lie, exhausted, on his coat on the cold steps. At the same time Jerott Blyth, one hand on his arm, tried to make Gabriel stop.

It was necessary. Doing his caravans in the Mediterranean, Jerott had seen men flogged to death. He knew the process, stage by stage, and remembered that Lymond, too, must know it; must often have seen men die, and must have suffered flogging himself, often enough, in his days at the oars.

So, unlike most men, he must know exactly what he could bear. You had privacy, to begin with. Your back was to your chastiser. As long as you could hold your head up, pressed hard against the cold post, your agony was your own also. You braced yourself for each stroke, and in the end exorcised the pain with your voice.

Francis Crawford did not move when Gabriel raised his arm for the first stroke; only his closed lids tightened, a fraction, as it fell. Before Jerott’s fascinated eyes, the thong rose and then, curling, fell again, and then for a third time with no more effect. Lymond must, surely, be experiencing the agony—the three livid weals across his back, slowly welling with blood, testified to that. But he had, it would seem, divorced himself by some effort of will from the context.

Gabriel, perhaps, had reached some such conclusion too, but it did not suggest to him that his arm should falter. Divine as some punishing God, his fist rose and fell, and around him, released by his own violence from his own rules, the sherry-sack reappeared joyously, and sank from throat to throat, and the whole restored
salon des singes
, observed Nicolas de Nicolay, watching wanly himself, in some druidical frenzy, flung themselves capering and bawling and singing round the bright silent post, and roared at the sound of each blow.

For how long, thought Nicolas de Nicolay, had Graham Malett longed to do just this thing? For twelve long months Lymond had held out against him. For a year he had resisted the mightiest blandishments known to man; returned all Gabriel’s advances with raillery; obstructed all Graham Malett’s confident plans and finally, shown a courage and a stamina under constant, devious attack that must have maddened this great god of a man, so contemptuous of his fellows.

And through it all until now, neither man had betrayed his true mind. Rather than spread this evil, Lymond had fought it himself, until he had the means to destroy it. And only now, secure in his triumph, borne on this wave of hatred, of drunken emotion so neatly pre-formed, with Lymond’s standing here at St Mary’s almost totally destroyed and the Queen Dowager’s wrath pending—only now was Sir Graham able, in public, to void some of his impotent anger in open chastisement.

Contentedly, the whip whined and thudded until, at last, Graham Malett had what he wanted. The immunity broke, or could hold out no longer. When Gabriel’s next, careful blow fell Lymond moved, in spite of himself, his face suddenly taut, and Gabriel, his lips drawn back in the smile known throughout the Christian world, increased at once the speed of his blows.

From then on, the progression was routine: were you a man of iron, you could not avoid it. The recoil, in silence, that could no
longer be controlled; the shuddering intake of breath which was all one’s mechanism could contrive between each blind onslaught of pain … the nausea and the dizziness, coming more and more often, and cured, sharply and drowningly, by shrewdly applied pails of cold water, coursing down, meddling curiously with the exposed red sponge of one’s back.

It was then that Joleta was ill, and Jerott, saying “
That’s enough!
’ seized Gabriel’s iron arm and got, for his pains, the thonged lash full over the face.

Jerott fell back gasping, his hand over his cheek. He saw that the blow had been perfectly automatic, that Gabriel was hardly more conscious of it than if he had brushed off a gnat. And to a chorus of harrowing groans, some encouraging, some mellowly pained, Graham Malett, his fine face all suffused, turned back to the post, and raising his arm, with all his might brought down the thong, again and again, on his enemy’s back.

That was what Philippa Somerville saw when she rode in Blacklock’s arms out of the darkness, out of the rain that had begun, patteringly, to hiss on the torches and drum on the paving and on the pewter and on the soiled leather shoulders of the shouting, gesticulating figures before the big castle, in the crowded courtyard blazing with lights; and on the central, superb figure of Gabriel, all-powerful, unflagging, avenging his wrongs.

She jumped from Adam’s pithless embrace and, like a decapitated hen, ran squawking straight for the post.

Through all the noise and the pain, Lymond must have heard her. He opened his eyes and Jerott, released from an icy limbo of shock followed their direction and lunging, scooped the screaming girl into his arms. ‘What the hell are you doing here? He’s seduced Joleta,
that’s
what’s wrong. Get back into the.…’

And then he realized what she was saying.

Gabriel, too, had heard it. His hand arrested, he seemed to freeze where he stood, an awakening horror on his face. Then Graham Malett fell back, staring, to where Jerott and Philippa stood, and stammered, ‘What have I done? Jerott.… Oh, God, it is a spreading evil. I think its spores have entered us all.…’

But he was looking at Philippa, and Philippa, her lips trembling, her mouse-brown hair plastered in mouse-brown streaks on her neck, was recounting at last the secret that old Trotty Luckup had confided, in gratitude for all his past favours, to Tom Erskine as he died. She had told him knowing that Jamie Fleming was fond of Joleta. And the dying man had wished Francis Crawford to know, and to be forewarned.

The truth was a single fact—de Nicolay knew it already: the fact that Joleta’s illness at Flaw Valleys was nothing less than the results
of an abortion; and that, as Trotty had learned from her ravings, Joleta had already borne a child, already known many men when in Malta. A simple fact, but substantiated now, with all it implied, by this distraught girl who had no cause to love Lymond, it withdrew with one bloodless pull the barb from all Lymond had done. And by the same token, drew all the listening, curious faces to where Graham Malett stood panting, sick-white in the torchlight, his dilated eyes on the far steps where his sister was crouched.

‘Philippa!’ said Lymond’s voice. Nicolas had used the interval, with spry effectiveness, to unshackle and lower him, talking all the time fiercely, thoughtlessly, in French. ‘Do you hear me, Francis? You were right. Someone was afraid of Philippa’s secret. But
this
was the damaging information she possessed, not Paris’s stupid affair.’ Pausing, Nicolas de Nicolay clucked his tongue; then leaning forward on wet knees, put his warm hands over Lymond’s icy ones, cramped on the wet flags as he lay. ‘It vindicates you. Do you see it? The baby Joleta expects might be anyone’s now!’

‘You sound as if you … didn’t believe it before,’ said Francis Crawford’s voice, muffled, but not missing by much its usual note. He raised himself a fraction and said more clearly, ‘If that’s blood, I ought to be dead: oh God, no: it’s raining … I can’t turn round. Tell me what’s happening.’

‘Jerott is coming over here. Gabriel is saying nothing, simply staring across at Joleta, and Joleta has got up, hurriedly. Bell’s got well back.’

‘She’s right to be frightened. He’ll cast her off now. He’s got to, for his own sake. Shock, Christian outrage, shattered love—all the rest. Either that or admit he’s been pimping for the woman all along.’

It was then that he called Philippa and she came rushing to him; then hesitated and, scowling, knelt slowly down at his side. There was blood, streaming rosy with rainwater over the bruised white skin of his face, and blood, liquid and black, shining through the light cloak de Nicolay had laid over his back, but he turned slowly, his weight on his elbow, and said, ‘You knew you might be killed if you rode out of Flaw Valleys.… You wouldn’t have made Kate very happy. Or me.’

‘You have to pay for your mistakes,’ Philippa said hardily. From white, in the dim light, she had turned poppy red.

Lymond said quietly, ‘You had good reason to hate me. I always understood that. I don’t know why you should think differently now, but take care. Don’t build up another false image. I may be the picturesque sufferer now, but when I have the whip-hold, I shall behave quite as crudely, or worse. I have no pretty faults. Only, sometimes, a purpose.’ He paused, and said, ‘
Est conformis precedenti
. I owe the Somervilles rather a lot already.’