Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [130]
Jerott saw the two men briefly, Lymond’s pale hair gleaming in the flickering lamplight, but he was talking quickly to others: to the lieutenant of the boat in Captain Coste’s absence; to some of the senior knights. Then Graham Malett, from his fine height commanding the room, crossed to Lymond from where he had been speaking to des Roches. The two men briefly conferred. There was a swirl of movement, then men came running, and from the next hold came the sound of the storerooms being opened up.
With difficulty, Blyth burst through at last into the enchanted circle. ‘What …?’
‘Dear Jerott,’ said Lymond warmly. ‘Aren’t you at the banquet? After we saved the castle intact for them? They’d give you a bagnio and three tails for that if they knew. Wouldn’t you like three tails? I think we should go, Malett.’
‘Yes.…’ And as Lymond wilfully had not done, Gabriel swiftly explained. ‘In return for his services, Thompson is to have some of our seamen and stores, and is going to try to sail the brigantine out tonight to Malta, with news of the fall. Crawford and I will go with him.’
And as Jerott started to protest he said calmly, ‘My child, the Grand Master must know. The Turk may fall upon Malta next. We do not know. And he will believe me. If we do not escape, then nothing has been lost. But the fewer who try it the better.’ His tranquil smile deepened. ‘We shall meet in Malta, Jerott. Pray for us all. God has been good tonight.’
‘Thompson has been rather splendid too,’ said Lymond cordially. and waved a cheerful farewell.
A little later, setting course east to hug the far shore of the bay, remote from all the moored Turkish fleet, from the little company of French boats and the borrowed vessels with the freed two hundred on board, a black bulk slid silently from the anchorage and set off under the opaque black sky. Jerott, straining his eyes, thought he could just see the green sparkle of her oars, and knew that in a little, they could have her sails up, and the south wind would send her home.
No one else saw her. At the end of its long, dark spit, the Châtelet burned, red flames glowing behind the broken black teeth of its walls, and the attacking guns had fallen silent round its pyre. Within the bay, the rockets and gunfire had ceased although the castle still blazed, and lights in Tripoli itself showed where parties of soldiers, methodically searching lane by lane, were stripping the houses.
In the castle hall, the banquet was drawing to a close, and soon d’Aramon and de Vallier with their exhausted train would be allowed to retire for what little night was left before their embarkation at dawn.
And below, in the guts of the castle, among the corridors and mosaics where the stifling battle with fire had been fought such a short time ago, the prisons were full of the people of Tripoli and Gozo who had not been released; who might, some of them, be ransomed; but whose fate tomorrow or the next day was almost certainly to be whipped out through the purlieus of the castle and driven to the slave market to be sold.
Among them, but in a room apart because of his rank and ill-health, was Galatian de Césel, Governor of Gozo, who would see no Christian face for many years to come. And at his side, carried off and concealed so smoothly, so plausibly by the casual duplicity of Dragut and the gentle persuasiveness of Graham Malett, was the woman from whom Francis Crawford had been saved.
Oonagh O’Dwyer heard the cannonades; breathed like poison the air of scornful triumph; saw and was scarred by the routine, contemptuous conduct of the victors. Silenced, snatched from her rope that night before Lymond could return, she knew it all for a trap. She and Lymond had never been intended to escape, only to be separated so that she might convincingly appear to die. Only through the unexpected strength of Lymond’s swimming had they travelled farther and run into more danger than anyone meant.
They were parted. The gentle, iron-willed man called Gabriel had achieved what after all he had never relinquished: an unblemished,