The Disorderly Knights (47 page)

The meeting between Lymond and Tom Erskine’s widow took place in private. Jerott, who had no interest in Lady Jenny Fleming, however pretty and however famous as the King of France’s second-string mistress, set about getting the wagons loaded and the oxen hitched, with his men’s help: thank God the weather was still open and the ground reasonably firm. Today, with the mild sun alight and the idle air removing, in quiet groups, the yellow leaves from the trees, Jerott whistled loud and secular tunes, and was grateful when Alec Guthrie, fully stocked with ground-up comment on Randy Bell’s virility, came and joined in the work.

Lady Jenny, it seemed, had given them a charming welcome but to the doctor’s disappointment was only interested in the news from France. Rumour said that she was desperate, now the royal bastard was several months old, to return before the paternal memory faded to engender another. Rumour further said that in order to make a licensed and legitimate reappearance in French royal circles, she was making a dead set at M. d’Oisel, the King of France’s unhappy Ambassador; and rumour must have substance under its hat, for she was making a dead set at nobody else.

Except of course Lymond, whom she had fallen on with tender delight. But that, thought Jerott wisely, might have been to safeguard her newly widowed young daughter Margaret.

At that moment a man came up to him—a vigorous and efficient little man, whose exertions he had noted with half his mind while loading the crates—and said in the accents of Aberdeen, ‘There’s a beast with a bad leg we’ll need to spare, sir. If you’ll give me leave, I’ll ask Lady Jenny up at the castle to loan us another.’

Something about the lined face and the nimble frame and the bronchial whistle under the breath seemed familiar. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ said Jerott sharply.

‘Aye. This morning. Tommy Wishart—Tosh, they call me. I just landed yesterday,’ the little man said.

‘No. In France. Something,’ said Jerott, tracking down a recollection, ‘to do with a donkey.’

‘You’re right, sir. Tightrope work; that was the specialty.’

‘It was the specialty in the area I was in all right,’ said Jerott Blyth, an angry light suddenly dawning, and trapped the little man, before he could move, with a trained grip on the wrist. Tosh, blankly amiable, stood just where he was. ‘You were following me before I came here, in France?’

‘You’re smart, though,’ said Tosh cheerfully. ‘I didna think you’d jalouse. It’s all the same in the end, though; isn’t it, sir?’

‘
What’s
all the same in the end?’ said Jerott nastily, but he knew. While he thought he was fishing for Lymond, Lymond was fishing for him. Long ago he had been marked out as one of the men for this army, and Lymond with perfect logic had taken steps to keep him in sight. God knew how many other casual observers had watched his progress through France before Tosh took up the running at Paris. And he had played into the man’s hands by voluntarily joining him. If he had not, what would Lymond have done? Various answers, all of them an insult to pride, rushed into his mind. He had assumed, without realizing it, that Lymond was aware that he at least, and de Seurre and des Roches surely also, held a watching brief for the Order. Could it be that Lymond, on the contrary, was under the illusion that he had made three easy converts to Mammon?

There was one way to settle that. Removing Tommy Wishart rather too briskly from his path, for he disliked anyone’s spies, Jerott made for Boghall.

It was unfortunate that Joleta also was at Boghall that day. Lady Fleming, never the woman to invite stupid comparisons, had found life at Boghall castle without Joleta quite supportable; but her daughter Margaret, once she had come home, exceedingly silent, and renewed acquaintanceship with the son of her first marriage, who cried, and had paid a solitary and morbid visit to her husband’s grave, from which she returned even more silent, if possible, had shown a neurotic tendency to live at Midculter instead of Boghall. Though Margaret listened to Lady Jenny’s problems and offered very practical solutions, Jenny felt sometimes that her daughter preferred Sybilla’s company to her own.

When, therefore, Margaret Erskine returned from one of these visits bringing Joleta to stay, Jenny greeted the child with sparkling affection and left her to Margaret to entertain. If Margaret thought it would lessen the tension at Midculter to have Joleta where she and Lymond couldn’t quarrel, she was welcome to try. Privately, Lady Fleming thought it would do the little prude good to be the subject of Lymond’s dislike.

It was too tempting, then, when she found Francis Crawford in her own hall, and Joleta unseen and unsuspecting in her solar above. Randy Bell Lady Fleming summed up without difficulty and got rid
of, with guile, to her apothecary. Then she went, to Joleta’s surprise, and sat with Joleta, after arranging artlessly that Francis Crawford, when free, should be brought to her there.

She could not, of course, prevent her daughter from warning him. It was the first thing Margaret Erskine recalled when all the intelligent, rational things about Tom’s death had been said, and after, most unexpectedly to herself and perhaps to him, she had broken into a storm of tears in Lymond’s passionless and steady arms. When it was over, ‘You will hate it, Francis. I’m sorry, but Joleta’s here in the castle,’ she said.

‘Why hate it?’ Lymond asked. He had given her his handkerchief and she had used it unashamedly, blowing her plain nose scarlet on the still-warm lawn. ‘Little girls are always throwing down gauntlets. Or worse. I don’t have to pick them up.’

‘You don’t have to trample on them, either,’ said Margaret Erskine with her customary directness. ‘You spurned, in public, her spirit, her wit and finally her powers of physical attraction. You might have awarded her a minor decoration for trying, at least.’

‘She’s annoyed, is she?’ said Lymond. ‘Good. Let’s find a nice convent for her. I have troubles enough without my name being linked with Gabriel’s sister.’

Joleta Reid Malett was most certainly annoyed. When Lymond entered her room, expecting to take leave of Lady Fleming, and Lady Fleming at the same instant found urgent business elsewhere, Joleta was both startled and angry, and even Lymond was for an instant taken aback.

But after no more than a moment, he continued forward, raised his eyebrows for leave, and picking up a chair sat on it, saying, ‘How awkward. And how like dear Jenny. We shall have to bear five minutes of each other’s company. Never mind. Every absence increases respect. Are you respectable?’

Joleta had been stringing a lute, the apricot hair slung back out of her way and her quilted, loose sleeves rolled up. Her forearm along the ridge of the bone was powdered with freckles; underneath, as she laid down the lute, the flesh was white as curds. She had flushed. ‘I am afraid to say anything,’ she said sweetly, ‘in case another of your dear ones has died.’

‘No.’ Despite the damp handkerchief in his doublet, he would not challenge her good taste a second time. ‘It is the hatchet that has been interred. To save our friends’ nerves, I suggest we meet on a plane of brutal courtesy. It need not interfere with our mutual distrust. Do you play that thing?’

‘Not as well, I am sure, as you do,’ said Joleta, her voice thin. ‘And I don’t intend to toady in public to someone who manhandled me as you did. Conceited men have no attraction for me. Shut the door as you go.’

‘All right,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘But let me mention one thing. Margaret Erskine tells me she removed you from Midculter because of your pranks with my infant nephew. It is no doubt exceedingly hilarious to ply the wet-nurse with alcohol and Kevin cannot retaliate as Richard or my mother certainly would. But it is not the child’s fault he is related to me. Pick someone your own size, my dear.’

The large, sea-green eyes sparkled with angry laughter. ‘But he looked so ridiculous drunk.’

‘And you,’ said Lymond coolly, ‘would look equally ridiculous in your petticoat-tails receiving a thrashing. Do it again, and you’ll get one, from me.’

‘
From you?
’ Erect, glowing with incredulous fury, Joleta stared at her tormentor. ‘I shall do what I like, when I please. If I wish, I shall teach your spying relatives a lesson. Wait till Graham comes!
Thrash me!
I’d like to see anyone in this beggarly country lay a finger on Graham Malett’s sister!’

‘Would you?’ said Lymond lazily, and in one hard, purposeful stride was on her. As his right hand closed on her arm, Joleta, eyes blazing, bent. In two movements she had snatched the half-strung lute from its chair, smashed the fine wood into a jagged, needle-sharp club and was swinging it as he reached for her other arm. The chair went over with a crash.

It was a magnificent struggle. Jenny kept a large number of ornaments in her tower solar, and porcelain and silver, alabaster, soap-stone and Venetian glassware beaded the carpet as the battle raged in the tiny room, and the small tables rained about. It took a long time, twisting and dodging and keeping his fingers sunk deep in the one arm, for Lymond to tear from her grip the battering lute, and he had more than one gash and a cheekbone well opened by the lashing gut before he had done.

Joleta, her hair in viperish coils round her neck, one sleeve off, and her feet bare and quick as a goat’s, was marked dusky red like a schoolboy where she had sent furniture flying, and where Lymond’s steely fingers, controlling by grip in lieu of breaking her bones, had discoloured the milky flesh. And all the time, her teeth set, she lunged from side to side, seizing what weapons she could. A pewter ale-mug hammered at his near shoulder and, wrenched away, was replaced by a sliver of glass, which slit both their hands before she dropped it. With windy sobbing, possessed by her fury, there was nothing she would not risk to defeat him, even to laying hands on his sword. For Lymond, that was the end. Holding her hard, he spoke sharply. ‘Joleta. Don’t be stupid. I’ll have to hurt you.’

Her flushed face burned like a star. ‘Try!’ she said, and seized the hilt with both hands. His brows level, Lymond knocked her away
with the hard edge of his palm, and as she screamed, kicked her legs from under her. Light as she was, she went down like a gravestone, and drew down with her thick dusty skirts all the remaining shorn stumps of the furnishings.

His sword half out, Lymond looked down at her, breathing quickly as she lay in the Sargasso Sea of their wreckage, all the fight for the moment knocked out of her. ‘By God, I ought to thrash you with this!’ he said tartly in the very second that the door behind him heaved in with a crash and Jerott Blyth fell into the room.

He was quick, was Jerott, and trained to a hairsbreadth. Informed demurely below by Lady Jenny where he could find Lymond, he had heard on approaching the sounds of struggle deadened to the household below by the fourteen-feet thickness of wall. Moving fast with the force of his entry he saw the sword flash in Lymond’s hand as he spoke, and below, white and bruised in the dust, the child Joleta, her gown torn, her feet bloodied and bare. Whiter under his tan than the girl, ‘
You nasty, lascivious little rat!
’ said Jerott in astonishment, and jumped at Lymond, who knocked him down.

‘Hah!’ said Joleta, and scrambling to her knees began, a little shrilly, to laugh.

Jerott, scarlet now, his magnificent eyes narrowed, lunged again and got the flat of Lymond’s foot on his hand. ‘My God. Bring on the eunuchs. Calm down, will you? One adolescent at a time is quite enough.’

Without listening, the other man tore himself free, and gripping his scabbard, began hauling his own whinger out. ‘Mr Blyth!’ Joleta, on her feet now, nursing a cut foot in one hand, spoke like a harridan. ‘Don’t be a fool, and mind your own business!’

Jerott’s hand fell, his face going blank.

‘Neatly put,’ said Lymond, approving. His hand, also relaxed, fell back from his hilt.

‘And the same,’ said Joleta, rounding on him, ‘applies to you! Think twice, my smart friend, before you offer to thrash me. I’ll give you something else to remember me by; and it won’t be a scratch.’

‘Your hands are bleeding?’ said Jerott quietly. His chest heaving still from his exertions he looked from the man to the child and back again, his fists clenched, ready to act.

‘She cut herself on the glass she was trying to gouge my eyes out with,’ explained Lymond patiently. ‘She cut her feet on the wreckage and she got bruised because I don’t like being permanently mutilated on Thursdays. I may add that Friday is my day for raping; and I like it quieter than this, and they enjoy it.’

Still Blyth looked helplessly from one to the other. ‘Oh, go away! said Joleta at last, losing what was left of her patience, and seizing the teetering door, jerked it open.

For the first time, Lymond laughed. ‘I advise it, too. Armed with faith within and steel without, beat a retreat.’ Thoughtfully, he looked down at Joleta. ‘You are a violent, self-willed, well-shaped and dangerous creature, and I prefer your honest rages to your parlour archery. But who is going to explain to Lady Jenny?’

For the first time a smile also genuine lit Joleta’s golden face. ‘No explanations necessary. She’ll think it must be Friday.’ The smile on the face of Gabriel’s saintly little sister became wider and more malicious. ‘She’ll
be furious
,’ she remarked.

*

Never afterwards could Jerott clearly recollect that journey home. Waiting stiffly for Lymond, in a mental turmoil, he had tried to piece it out.

There had been a bitter struggle, in which Lymond must have been the aggressor. Yet the girl had shown no fear; had made fun of her rescuer … they both had, damn them … and had ordered him away. What had happened? Had Lymond prevailed? Was she, in her innocence, out of her senses? He saw her again, lying broken at his feet, and had resolved, against all his pride, on going upstairs once more, when Lymond appeared at his side.

‘Come along. We’ve wasted enough time on that spoiled brat,’ he said. ‘Are we loaded?’

‘She was hurt. What happened?’ He had to know.

‘Scratches. The Donati woman is slapping grease on them. She was making a nuisance of herself at Midculter, and when I threatened to thrash her she went for me. Enjoyed it, too.… Gabriel may think she’s a sister-angel, Brother-in-Christ, but she isn’t. It’s worth remembering.’