Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [365]
Someone shouted, then, from a belt of trees on the hill just ahead of him. He had been going to ride on, but it was not a place in his life where he would deny help to any man. So he turned the mare’s head, and putting her into a gentle trot, rode up and over.
*
Richard shouted twice, smiling. They had not quite reached the trees when they had seen, far off, the moving horse with its bareheaded rider who turned, hearing his voice, and then after a moment put the horse at the sloping ground which led to the pine grove.
With Jerott alongside, Culter laughed aloud and kicked his mount into a gallop. Just before the two horses drew abreast of the wood, a man walked out of it.
A dark young man, too well dressed, one could see even at this remove, to be a cottager. A man with something dark in each hand, who paid no attention to the two horsemen approaching behind him, but looked only in the other direction, where the single rider, slowing a little, was unawares nearing the hilltop.
And so the amber hair of Francis Crawford’s father, which all his life had marked him out: for hurt, for passion; for treachery; performed its last destined office in the sunshine and fresh winds of England that morning. A single rider, a sober doublet and cloak might have escaped notice. But not the bare, golden head.
Austin Grey had left Berwick with a longer journey than Lymond to make. He counted on the slowness of the armed escort, and perhaps some weakness in Lymond himself to give him the advantage he needed. And riding faster than he had ever done in his life, he reached before Lymond the point just short of Flaw Valleys where their two paths must intersect.
Then, it was merely a matter of waiting.
He knew he was about to act outside the law, as his own executioner. No other man would do it. No other man could see, it seemed, the rottenness under the enchantments; the hypocrisy within that plotting brain, that graceless tongue. The greed, the lust, the careless arrogance that had broken Philippa.
He had learned, at Guînes, to kill his man to save others. When his quarry, unsuspecting, had moved within range Austin Grey walked steadily forward and lifting the first of his pistols, took aim.
Riding flat out, Richard might have reached him in time. It was Jerott, his face white as ghost coal, who seized his sword-arm and reins and hindered him, the horses stamping and plunging. And it was Jerott who cried out as, amazed and distracted, Richard fought him, ‘No. Oh Christ, no. It should have happened long ago. Don’t stop it. No one else could do it for him.’
While he was speaking, the pistol in the trees fired, and then its neighbour; and in a screaming rush, the birds left the woodland.
At pointblank range, there was no possibility of missing. He aimed into the fair, weary, rancourless face, and then at the heart, and both balls found their mark and brought death in the end, not with the sweet ambiguity of an arrow but with the finality which frees the earth at once of body and soul, and all that was good or bad in either.
Either ball would have killed. The second struck through to the horse, which fell, dying. Archie Abernethy cried thickly, ‘Don’t look!’ as Philippa slid to the ground; and kneeling, cradled her there on the grass, her eyes muffled against his rough jerkin. Then Jerott dragged out the pistol he, too, carried, and dismounting, walked towards Austin.
The young Marquis of Allendale made no effort to evade him. It was an execution. Allendale was not afraid to answer for it to Lymond’s rotten cohorts. Only the smile on his lips wavered when he saw Philippa: and he was not sorry to die when Jerott, weeping, lifted his weapon and fired it.
After that, Archie could not hold her; but by then the horse was still, and Richard had flung his cloak and Jerott’s over the carnage. She lifted only a corner;