The Disorderly Knights

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Lymond did not speak. The robe he was wearing reeked of spirits, and in his face was the question he had lost the right to ask. Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch answered it for him.

  ‘You won’t know: my son’s dead. They were sorry ye left him so soon to get at your drink and your slippers, though I’m sure ye deserved them. When he woke, seemingly, they couldna get ye roused tae speil off a kind word or two, just as he died.’

  There was a long silence. Then Lymond said, ‘I would have … I didn’t know. They couldn’t have tried.’ He was white.

  The grey, matted beard nodded. Buccleuch’s face was covered with a marcasite of fine dust, where he had been riding hard and long against the May wind. ‘His brain was soft a wee, mind. He asked for the Master of Culter, as if ye were his commander; and when they told him ye couldna come, he said you’d be by-ordnar plagued with things to attend to, and we were to tell you never to trouble. But he hoped all the time, they said, that you’d see past it and come.… But that’s no matter. They tell me it was your orders that put him and the rest of them in the castle. There’s just one thing I’ll trouble ye to tell me: which Kerr was it killed him?’

  ‘Wat.…’ said Lymond, and stopped. All the time he had been speaking, Buccleuch’s face had been bathed unheeding in a ceaseless curtain of tears. He was quite unaware of it, it was clear as he plodded on with what he had to say. Nor was the bitterness of his words at all at variance with it. Only Lymond, wordless for once, had to control his own emotion before he could speak. Then he said quietly, ‘I don’t know, Wat. It may not have been a Kerr at all.’

  ‘Aye.’ The old man was not surprised. ‘It’s your heaven-given job, of course, to see there’s nae prejudice between the two families. Are ye going tae manage it soon, do ye think? So it may not be a Kerr,’ he said, the tears twinkling in his mirthless eyes. ‘There’s a lot of left-handed folk going up and down stairs in that part of the world, I warrant you. It’ll be one of them.’

  One could do nothing with that. Lymond left it. He said, ‘Wat: will you let me tell Grizel?’

  ‘The younger Lady of Buccleuch will know by now,’ said Sir Wat, rising with his new, painful formality. The hapless, unnoticed weeping had stopped. ‘Yon fellow Malett rode to tell her right away, wounded shoulder and all. I got him to say a prayer over the lad first.… He wasn’t working for ye again, was he? Will?’

  ‘No,’ said Lymond.

  ‘Oh. I thocht maybe he was, since he took your orders, it seems. Then ye’ll hae no objection if his cousins and I take the body off home?’

  ‘Wat. Stop it, for God’s sake,’ said Lymond. He swung out of bed beside the old Warden, and grasped the rigid, powerful arms. ‘Another day I’ll tell you what happened. But meantime, don’t believe me indifferent. You could have had my right hand.…’

  ‘But you had his, instead,’ said Buccleuch.

  The two pairs of eyes met, and held. ‘All right,’ said Lymond at last, and dropped his arms. ‘But blame me. Not the Kerrs.’

  ‘There’s little, it seems, to choose between you,’ said the old man carelessly. He picked up his bonnet and turned, but halfway to the door stopped to speak. ‘That’s two houses in this land ye needn’t soil with your foot from this day on. Midculter and Branxholm. I hear your brother has banned ye the door.’

  ‘Do you? Who told you that?’ Lymond said, and Buccleuch, half-roused, looked at him Wearily. ‘It’s the clack of Biggar,’ he said. ‘And the conjecture is fair making the Dowager spit. I hear that she and Culter are at odds about it already. The muckle Fiend fend ye; why don’t you leave the country and let us all be at peace? What is there but untruth and heartbreak wherever you go?’

  ‘I like to see friends at my bloodsuppers,’ said Lymond with a sudden, intolerable venom. ‘Pass the word round. To fight against me is to resist the Lord, who visits thy sins with such rods.… I am here, Buccleuch. I am staying here. Until winter, at least.’

  ‘Are ye?’ said Buccleuch. ‘I think ye’ll not. I’ll wager my son’s ring, in fact, to that sapphire ye wear, that the Queen Dowager has ye out before then.… This ring. It’s a good one. Ye’d get a good bit for that,’ said Buccleuch, and threw the band of thick gold on the bed.

  It lay between them, glinting emptily, describing the young, big-boned finger where it belonged. ‘Yon Gabriel,’ said Buccleuch suddenly, and the water had begun running innocently down his surprised and angry face again. ‘He gave me a line of prayer to say. I’ve said it, when I thought of it, whiles ever since. “God give me another lad like thee”, it runs. “God give me another lad like thee … and syne take me to His rest”.’

  And lifting the ring, he went out, full of thought still.

  Soon after that Adam Blacklock, alone in his room, jumped to his feet as the door crashed open on his commander, who slammed it shut and advanced, with what seemed to be a flask in his hand.

  In spite of the violence of his entry, Lymond’s voice was quite soft when he spoke. ‘Adam? This has been left by my bed, and I’ve no use for it. Take it, and for God’s sake throw that other rubbish away.’ And as Blacklock’s dilated eyes fixed on him, Francis Crawford added, still speaking quietly, ‘Do you think I don’t know? Or Abernethy? You’re risking other men’s lives, not your own.’

  Adam flushed. ‘If you think that, you can always ask me to leave.’ The flask Lymond had given him held aqua-vitæ. He added, ‘Why the sudden crusade? I thought I wasn’t to take spirits? Or don’t you want to drink it alone?’

  ‘I do,’ said Lymond lightly. ‘Oh, I do. But I have a sad, Calvinist conscience.’

  ‘Not where girl-children are concerned,’ Blacklock said. He hesitated, and then continued. ‘If the men here ever find out about Malett’s sister, there’ll be hell to pay; you know that.’

  ‘I know,’ said Lymond. He was listening, expressively white, with dark, tangential planes under his eyes.

  ‘Then leave her alone!’ Anger and pity, queer companions, flared in the other man’s eyes. ‘Why risk all this for the sake of a—a romp in a cheap, tavern bed? If you can dispense with drink, you can practise self-control in other forms, too. Or do you simply like to live like a child?’

  ‘Today,’ said Lymond, ‘if you must know, I don’t like living at all. But that’s just immaturity boggling at the sad face of failure. Tomorrow I’ll be bright as a bedbug again.’

  Below in the courtyard as he spoke, someone was talking; then a whip cracked, hooves clattered and a wheel creaked, taking the strain. A moment later they both heard quite clearly the rumble of a cart with a heavy escort of riders, crossing the uneven stones of the bailey below. It passed out of the gates of St Mary’s and turned eastwards and south, where Kincurd and Branxholm both lay.

  Eager no more: quiet and still in his empty farm wagon, grandly robed in Gabriel’s own famous habit, with the Cross of St John on his breast, Will Scott had parted from Lymond for ever, and was going home to his own.

  IX

  Terzetto, Played Without Rests

  (Flaw Valleys, June 1552)

  AT the first possible moment after the Hot Trodd, but several weeks later than he would have liked, Lymond rode to Flaw Valleys, Philippa Somerville’s home in the north of England.

  Not surprisingly, in view of her experiences and what Lymond, in a wry letter to Kate, had described as his misrule both in wit, knowledge and manners, Philippa had not again attempted to travel to Midculter. The Nixons, generously recompensed and rehoused with ringing protest by the Kerrs and the Scotts as part of their fine, were back in Liddesdale, buying new ornaments in even poorer taste with the proceeds of the sale of the Staurotheque to Lancelot Plummer and Hercules Tait. The Turnbulls who survived were in the local almshouse, haggard over the only really nasty trick Fate had played on them: on recovering their blood money lovingly from the little hole hastily dug for it when all their menfolk were killed, they found every lying, smooth-edged bawbee was false.

  Also, St Mary’s had been busy. Damage had b
een done both to the company’s conception of itself and to its reputation abroad. Giving them almost no time to recover, Lymond sought work, splitting them into details for smaller actions and using the whole force for larger, deferring for that reason the naval training which he had expected to start by now. Above all, he did not leave them himself again, nor did he delegate anything. The most striking change was there, for up to then, any one of his knights or his high-ranking officers might find himself in charge of an exercise or a raid, with specific and supreme responsibility. The effect was twofold. He drove them harder than they would ever have driven their fellow-seniors. And there was very little time in the twenty-four hours when he was not either in the saddle or at his desk.

  He did not attend Will Scott’s funeral, although Sybilla went, silent and dry-eyed, with her older son. Joleta she would not allow to go, on account of her youth and the recent unfortunate shaking she had received when her horse fell on its way from Boghall. Lady Fleming and the whole of Boghall, aware that Joleta Malett hadn’t been near them for weeks, heard the explanation with barely-concealed interest; and Margaret Erskine, Jenny’s widowed daughter, took Richard Crawford aside at the church. She was blunt.

  ‘Lord Culter.… Since you brought her back, you presumably know where Joleta was, and how her horse fell. I ought to warn you that my mother apparently promised Joleta she would support the tale that she’d been to Boghall. Joleta hadn’t, of course. Everyone in Biggar knows it. I have no desire to know where she actually was, but you know Jenny. Joleta won’t explain the mystery, apparently, and my mother considers she hasn’t kept her part of the bargain. She’s furious, and very likely she’ll question you.’

  Since the departure of the French King’s Lieutenant, M. d’Oisel, Lady Jenny had been deprived of the wherewithal to plot her own return to France. It would have pleased her, Margaret knew, to unearth a subterfuge of Joleta’s. Joleta was young. The secret was probably no more than some surprise she was arranging for her brother Sir Graham; she might not realize the speculation it had caused. But Lord Culter should.

  Margaret Erskine then noticed that Richard Crawford was unusually pale, and further that this was due to extreme anger. With a callousness quite foreign to her experience of him, Lymond’s older brother said at once, ‘If she does, she’ll get no more for her prying than you will. Joleta’s whereabouts that night are my concern.’

  There was only one person who could unnerve him like that. ‘Or yours and Lymond’s?’ said Margaret Erskine. ‘You needn’t explain. But you should think up a better story unless you want people to put two and two together. People will notice that he doesn’t come home any more.’

  ‘Thank goodness,’ said Sybilla, arriving unexpectedly. With her white hair and white French mourning she looked very sweet and unreal, but for the dark circles under her eyes. ‘It would be bad enough having the grooms fight like rams over Joleta without Francis being drawn to her too. Although she would be a very pleasing daughter-in-law, if a little difficult to live up to, and of course she has a temper—who hasn’t?’

  ‘I see her duenna is here, anyway,’ said Margaret quickly. Sybilla in trouble was something she hated to see.

  ‘Well, it’s a funeral, of course,’ said the Dowager Lady Culter, looking across the hazy candlelit interior of Biggar’s new Collegiate Church to where Evangelista Donati, smooth black head bent and sallow face hidden, knelt at the side of an eager, small man in over-trimmed clothes. ‘And Peter Cranston is here. The combination of religious misery and Peter Cranston would be quite irresistible. Anyway, Graham Malett wanted to talk to his sister alone, so she won’t be missed. It’s rather sad, in a way,’ said Sybilla reflectively. ‘I shouldn’t miss her though. I don’t suppose anyone would, in fact, except Peter Cranston, and he can always fill in by counting his beads or his money, or both. I must be kinder to her. I shouldn’t like to be a person no one missed.’

  Which, thought Margaret Erskine, was the height of charity, considering the lady and her charge had both been domiciled almost without a break at Midculter for something like nine months, and during that time Madame Donati’s only contribution had been to make a disparaging, not to say suggestive remark in Italian about Sybilla’s two sons.

  *

  In the middle of June, Gabriel left to represent Jimmy Sandilands at a meeting with the Queen Mother at Falkland, and since there was for once no immediate task in hand and some sign, by then, that his deliberate reign of terror was nearer provoking rebellion than the angry vigour he wished, Lymond allowed some of his staff to go on furlough, the knights, Bell and Fergie Hoddim among them, and supplied a modicum of work for the rest.

  Then, with the Moor, Abernethy and a few men-at-arms, Lymond left for Flaw Valleys on a hot summer day that recalled the blue shores of Birgu, less than twelve months before.

  On his way, he made a number of calls on all the big lairds of the Border and one woman: Janet Beaton, Lady of Buccleuch. It was not for the first time. Since Will’s death, Lymond had never entered Branxholm when Will’s father was there, although he had visited Kincurd at once, and face to face with Grizel Beaton, Janet’s sister and Will’s widow, had given her an objective and accurate account of how her husband had died. She had thanked him with her usual reserve, her eyes wet, and had added, ‘I understand. It was bound to come. You have nothing to accuse yourself of.’ It was a phrase with which he was not unfamiliar.

  Soon after that, making sure the old man was away, Lymond had sent Tosh to Buccleuch’s wife Janet at Branxholm to ask if she would see him. She did, and after castigating her husband and Lymond both for an acid five minutes, agreed at once to what Lymond proposed. When he left, Thomas Wishart stayed behind, ostensibly as a new body-servant. In fact he was there for one purpose only: to guard Buccleuch’s life with his own.

  That was four weeks ago. Today Lymond had called on Lady Buccleuch partly to reassure her, and partly to find out whether the old man, as Warden of the Middle Marches, was going to the Day of March in July. Touchy, well-fed, well-mounted and ripe with fine grievances, the denizens of the Borders flocked to these periodic summer meetings of Wardens to watch international justice being done; and if there were no quarrels to pick between the two nations, there were plenty to settle themselves. Swords and knives were allowed at March meetings: they were enough for murder, if not quite for war.

  Policing the Hadden Stank meeting of Wardens was likely to be St Mary’s next major task. Among others, Lord Wharton would be there. So would the Kerrs. So, undoubtedly, would the Scotts. It remained to be seen whether old Wat would be one of them.

  ‘He will,’ said Janet bitterly. ‘I’ll warrant he will. Sticking out his elbows and getting Kerrs to fall over his big toe and call him a bastard again, which considering his mother was a Kerr and his first wife was Ferniehurst’s sister makes the Kerrs an easy-going lot. But they wouldna gag over an elephant, now. All they want is an excuse on either side to ding the rest good and dead.’

  ‘If you were a dear, good little wife, Janet,’ had said Lymond, ‘you’d fall into a mortal decline that day, or at least hide his boots.’

  ‘Francis Crawford, are ye daft! What ever kept a Scott from a fight? Women? Boots? If yon one were deid, he’d spend his time in Heaven sclimming up and down the Pearly Gates peppering Kerrs.’

  ‘There is a sweeping assumption in that,’ had said Lymond deprecatingly, ‘which we needn’t go into. Janet, if he hears we shall be there he’ll cause a war for the hell of it. Let’s make it all a beautiful surprise.’

  ‘Oh, Dod, no bother about that,’ said Janet grimly. ‘That’s what we’re used to in these parts. Beautiful surprises.’

  *

  On the way south through the Cheviots, it was cooler, and on the higher reaches of the hills larks purred and trilled high in the summer sky, and the wind rustled the dried grass like the sea. Then they dropped into the pass of Redesdale and thence down green Tyneside towards Hexham. Then, a few miles off the town, they turned asi
de to Kate Somerville’s rolling fields.

  She had hoped, profoundly, that Lymond would come, ever since the breath-stopping day when the Nixon family with their servants and children had come flying wild-eyed in at the gates, bearing a silent Philippa, white of face, with a bruise the size of a fair-token on the side of her jaw.

  Much later, when the Nixons were packed off to bed and she had Philippa to herself in her arms, she got the story, and the tears had come. Then Kate, in spite of her understanding, had felt anger, for again Lymond had embroiled them, willy-nilly, in his private affairs.

  Philippa had been through enough: the corpse in the ditch outside Boghall; the fire which had nearly trapped them at home; and now trapped again in a blood-feud, to be rescued in such a fashion as this.

  Knowing Philippa, she could in theory see how essential that rough handling had been; and his letter of brief apology had further explained. But in her heart she ached for them both.

  So, when she saw the blue and silver colours of Crawford with the engrailed bordure of the second son, Kate Somerville fled from the window and, strolling into the garden where Philippa was pouring soapy water on to her roses and intoning prayers for the greenfly, dispatched the child on some quest to the village. Then she returned, with no time, as fate always decreed, to tidy her blown parcel of mouse-coloured hair or change the gown she had bottled raspberries in, before her visitors had come, and her late husband’s man Charles had seen to the comfort of the horses, Abernethy and the men at arms in that order, and Lymond was standing in the rebuilt music room, avoiding the virginals, avoiding the lute, avoiding all the instruments she and Gideon had once loved to play, and which Lymond had played in other circumstances, waiting till she should come.

  He had not seen her. Soft-footed at the open door, she paused a moment, considering the delicacy which in such matters seldom failed, and was yet coupled with such wilful brutality. She studied his back. Had he changed? Perhaps his hair, bleached by stronger suns, was paler; perhaps, pacing from window to window, he had matured into a spare and harder frame. But he was trim as a cat, immaculate, although Charles said they had been on the move for three days, and in an hour must take the road back again.