The Disorderly Knights (68 page)

‘It’s not … unlikely,’ said Lymond, pausing for the first time. ‘I’ve told Thompson to sever his connexion with the pair of them and with all his other clients right away. Not that that’s a great deal of good. Paris must have enough evidence against Thompson alone to send him to the Tolbooth for life.’

‘And Paris lives in Ireland? Why doesn’t Thompson or someone visit him and force him, if necessary, to hand over all the incriminating papers?’ said Blacklock; and meeting Lymond’s sardonic blue gaze, realized he had been naïve.

‘Why the hell do you think I’ve been breaking my neck to get the
Magdalena
to sea with the lot of you this week? Paris is due in Scotland next month, and I’m willing to wager the
Magdalena’s
skiffs will be up every creek in Ireland hunting for him before Thompson brings her back. He was a worried man when we left him yesterday, which is no more than the crafty old profligate deserves.’

‘And if he doesn’t find Paris in Ireland?’

‘Then we shall have to wait until Paris comes to Scotland, and persuade my favourite agent to give us his records then, won’t we? Which will in turn warn him that exposure is in the air, and make us his criminal associates … syndication with Thompson is proving rather expensive,’ said Francis Crawford reflectively. ‘I feel that our wellbeing, yours and mine, is about to be sacrificed for the greater good, and I am not prepared to sanction it, just yet. Why do you stay with me?’

It was the kind of sudden question that made his stammer worse. Eventually, Adam got it out. ‘I have a f-fancy to draw you. Let us say.’

‘You’ve drawn me hundreds of times. You have a sixth sense for evil, haven’t you, Adam? Gabriel was right when he said you shouldn’t have been a soldier. Your eye tells your brain too much. I should have left you on board. You haven’t sketched Randy. Or any of the lot at St Mary’s now.’

‘No,’ said Adam. There was a long silence, broken by Lymond laughing softly. ‘Your company is most disarming, Adam. How many rages would Jerott have achieved by now? But you are entitled to ask the obvious question and expect an answer, at least.’

Adam Blacklock smiled. ‘I don’t like t-trouble, that’s all. All right. Who is the man we were following, and have now passed, since our pace has dropped to a little less than murderous?’

Lymond grinned. ‘Yes, we’ve passed him. Didn’t you see him, a thick black tree of a man at the last posting-station, on a broken-down hack? The poor beast is supporting a King’s thigh, my boy. That great, bouncing basthoon of an Irishman on his way, too, to Falkland is my brutish friend Cormac O’Connor.’

‘Ah. We are heading for an unp-pleasantness,’ said Adam Blacklock.

‘We are heading for that, anyway, I suspect,’ said Lymond cheerfully. ‘The Queen Mother doesn’t send out orders of this kind just to make Robbie Forman sea-sick.… What do you think is going wrong at St Mary’s at this moment?’

‘Why should anything be going wrong at St Mary’s?’ said Blacklock, after a moment.

‘Why indeed?’ said Lymond. ‘I panic easily, that’s all. I don’t know how long the Queen Dowager will keep me, but if Gabriel is still at Falkland, you had better find him and wait there until I come.’

‘And O’Connor?’ said Adam.

‘Thompson brought him. He was on the
Magdalena
when she arrived, but disembarked, encouraged by Jock, before we came on board. Thompson thinks he has merely come to petition the Queen Mother for rebel money, and the visit will be short. On the other hand, he may be making up his mind to betray Paris soon. And if he is, I rather want to dissuade him … but without Ross Herald at my elbow, for choice.… It would be nice, Adam, if you could make a cartoon of Cormac O’Connor’s resolves for me.’

‘Why? Am I likely to meet him?’

‘My dear man, Falkland is a village round a palace,’ said Lymond. ‘Nothing more. Put Cormac O’Connor in a back street in London, and you would meet him in a quarter of an hour. He’s that kind of man.’

XII
T
he
C
rown and the
A
nchorite

(
Falkland Palace, August 1552
)

F
ALKLAND
was full. The pepperpot towers of the palace, the statues and the handsome grilled French windows rose from a blue haze of woodsmoke. Every lodging and inn in the little burgh was filled with the Queen Dowager’s staff and courtiers. Only because he had no need of a room and a lethal kind of charm when he chose to use it, was Francis Crawford able to command a meal for himself and his companions on arrival at the principal tavern in the little square.

He had no need of a room because he had found two invitations waiting for him: one from Sir Graham Malett, who was staying in the Order’s lodging in Falkland, and one from Robert Beaton of Creich, Keeper of Falkland, who happened also to be brother to Janet Beaton, wife of Buccleuch. And he had leisure to have a meal because he had learned, on reporting to the palace, that the Queen Dowager was not yet prepared to see him.

There were people he knew in the tavern: a surprising collection of gentlemen of the chamber off duty, merchants, men of the Church, and lairds from Fife, the Lothians and the Merse. Salablanca had made himself scarce. Adam, sitting comfortably tired in the late afternoon sunshine outside the tavern door, a pot of wine and a wedge of bread and mutton on the board in front of him, was introduced to a number of strangers who came out from the smoky turmoil inside to speak to his leader. Twice a friend of his own came across to greet him.

Inevitably, after a while, he lost Lymond altogether to the company inside. Watching him through the open window moving desultorily, wine in hand, from table to table, Adam guessed that a little well-concealed research into the atmosphere at the palace was going on and stretching his booted legs comfortably, left Lymond to it. It was then that, idly watching the cobbled street that led past the palace, he saw a little group of horsemen shouldering their way through the crowds, and recognized in the lead the burly, black-browed hulk whom Lymond had called Cormac O’Connor.

He had a moment, perhaps, in which to wonder whether it was coincidence that Oonagh O’Dwyer’s lover was making direct for the tavern where Lymond was. Then, as the group arrived, dismounted and silently surrounded him, he realized that Cormac O’Connor, too, had used his eyes on the journey from the
Magdalena
, and that he himself, sitting outside the inn door, had been as good as a signpost. Then the table, with his food on it, was kicked rattling to the ground, and a knotted, gloved hand travelled casually for the pit of his stomach. ‘Faix, we know ye can run,’ said the son of kings, while his companions laughed. ‘Can ye jump now, as well?’

Adam Blacklock might have been tired, might have been heavy with food, did certainly have his weaknesses. But after a season at St Mary’s, assault technique was not one of them. The big Irishman’s fist didn’t reach the cloth over Adam’s hard belly. Instead, his wrist was seized in a triangle of iron: there were two quick movements, and before the grin was off his face Cormac hit the inn wall behind Blacklock with a crash, and Adam, his sword and dagger both out and the upset table between himself and O’Connor’s six men, was waiting watchfully for O’Connor to pick himself up.

The inn door was at his back, but Adam didn’t trouble to call. He took O’Connor’s next rush with elbow and sword, and spun round in time to spike with his dagger point the man who came in at him over the table. The man screamed and O’Connor spat at him in Gaelic as he cleared the table with a kick and, sword out, came shoulder to shoulder with two others at Adam. A voice behind Adam’s shoulder, gently rebuking, said, ‘Cormac dear: you don’t want to fight us
all
, do you? It’s so hot for hopping about.’ And Lymond, loitering in the tavern doorway with a growing crowd of spectators, raised his eyebrows at the Irishman, whose sword-hand slowly fell. ‘Christ, it’s the singin’ acrobat, playin’ the cat’s melody behind the strong arm of his nurse,’ said Cormac O’Connor, and ignoring both Blacklock and his men, waiting watchfully for orders, he walked slowly forward to Francis Crawford.

Lymond’s level blue gaze did not shift from the big, bronzed, sweating frame. He waited, dry as ash, with his peculiar bleached elegance that Adam had long since given up trying to capture, and said eventually, ‘Adam defends himself, not me; and does it most ably, as you have noticed. Would you care to pick your friend up? They get
hysterical
about litter. Brawling, too,’ he added, as an afterthought.

‘Do you tell me?’ said Cormac O’Connor. He said it very softly, but each word fell like a small, starving leech into the gossip-gorged body of Falkland. ‘And what do they say, my delicate fellow, what do they say of the little, whispering, crawling person that would steal a woman, and throw her aside, and leave her drowned in the weeds
of a sea that is not her own, to roll from shore to shore of far-off lands for ever more? Do they care about tidiness in Tripoli,’ said Cormac O’Connor, ‘when they catch her finger-bones and her long black hair in their nets?’

Listening in silence, the Irishmen shuffling beside him, Adam Blacklock wondered if any other man there knew that they spoke of Oonagh O’Dwyer. Nicolas de Nicolay had called her a green-eyed morrow, and had told, too, of the misery of her life with this same Cormac O’Connor, and the blue bruises she wore from head to foot when she had sailed for Malta. Yet the tears stood in Cormac O’Connor’s eyes, although Lymond’s remained blue and openly contemptuous. Francis Crawford said, ‘Of course. I had forgotten we had something in common. You know, by the way, that if you start a disturbance here, you are liable to be arrested?’

The Irishman smiled, and his big hand, covered with coarse pelt, fondled the hilt of his sword. ‘It would be worth it,’ he said.

‘And your six friends? Do they think so?’

‘This is between you and me,’ said Cormac O’Connor.

‘And George Paris,’ said Lymond, smiling again with his lips. ‘That well-known friend of Scotland and France. You have a redhead with you these days, I’m told. Yes? Then don’t give her my address when the Queen Dowager sends for you; that’s all I ask.’

But already the big hand on the sword-hilt had tightened, and the wet, round eyes narrowed. ‘I should maybe remember my sweet Christian mother, and forget the wrongs others have done me? Is there ill-will in you?’

‘Candidly,’ said Lymond, ‘I don’t want to be arrested either. Suppose we let the dead rest, and you come and drink to red hair with me?’ And warily, side by side, they entered the inn, pressing through a jocular crowd, while O’Connor’s six men, the wounded one stumbling among them, shuffled off to the yard and Adam Blacklock, putting up his sword in some surprise, found himself the centre of a little group who righted his table, brought him food and besought him to throw them, one by one.

‘How was it done?’ said Lymond later when, O’Connor gone and the tavern emptied for the evening audience, they had the common-room nearly to themselves. ‘How is anything done with that kind? Fear and self-interest, that’s all. His betrayal of Paris is the coin he proposes to use to buy himself out of the insurance swindle. I left him in doubt about whether, in fact, the Queen Dowager doesn’t know about Paris already. He isn’t sure how much I know, but equally he isn’t sure that, if he has picked me up rightly, he hasn’t lost the only bargaining power he had to get the Queen Dowager’s favour. It was,’ said Lymond gravely, ‘a very ambiguous conversation.’

‘In these surroundings, it would seem quite plausible,’ said Blacklock. The cunning of it shook him a little, as always. He said, ‘You haven’t exactly made him a friend, but you’ve certainly tamed him. And if he thinks the Queen Dowager knows all about Paris, he won’t be very anxious to present himself at the palace now.… And yet he would have killed you, at the start.’

‘He may change his mind,’ said Lymond. Lying back in his chair in the flickering candlelight, waiting for Graham Malett to call, he sounded lazy as a cat. ‘Or have it changed for him. That’s your little task. Watch him for me. As for killing me—’

Lymond paused, and Adam thought, Of course. The expertise of St Mary’s. Alone, O’Connor would have had no chance. And through him ran again the frisson of pleasure he had felt at his own sweet automatic response to violence, and the pang of fear that always followed, because of that joy.

‘As for killing me,’ Lymond was still saying, half to himself, ‘O’Connor could have done it all right, in that first second, come hell or Adam Blacklock … if he had loved Oonagh enough. With one arm, with twenty against him, he should have run me straight through.’

For a moment, Adam was speechless. Then he said, ‘Did you believe that when you came out of the inn at my back?’

Francis Crawford inspected him curiously. ‘Yes, of course,’ he said. ‘Why? Dissimulation is a bastard art beloved of bores. All the same.…’ He stopped, half changing his mind.

‘What?’ said Adam flatly.

‘You do not know,’ said Lymond drily, ‘how close
I
came to killing
him
.’

*

Later that evening Graham Malett called to reaffirm his warmly offered hospitality; and on his heels Robert Beaton with his sister Grizel.

Watching Lymond and Gabriel together in the empty inn common-room, Adam heard that he was to stay in Gabriel’s tall crooked house of St John, while Lymond lodged a dozen miles away at Beaton’s castle of Creich. Lymond’s audience would take place in the morning, Gabriel thought; and before the others arrived, the big knight, in his gentle voice, set himself to warn Lymond about this; about the Queen’s desire to rule Scotland for her daughter with French help; about her readiness to hand out favours to every faction and ease the discomfort of all, friend or enemy, who might help her achieve this end.