Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [141]
Their fun was not wholly unkind. Their trembling appeals for compassion, their good advice to Archie, hotly explaining, were all merely compensation for the facts that she was ravishing, well-born, and not for them. Further, that in their leader’s most opportune absence, this was the nearest they might ever hope to approach.
Cuddie Hob was shrieking, ‘He’s an auld man! He’s an auld man! He’s got a weak hert and six mitherless bairns! Hae mercy, mistress!’ and Archie Abernethy, bald head glinting in the flares, was saying angrily, ‘We found the old woman; we didna kill her; we’re on our way to Midculter now. For God’s sake stop this nonsense. I beg your ladyship’s pardon; that thing might go off. We’re young Crawford’s men, my lady: Crawford of Lymond—will you bloody bastards shut your mouths?’
Then Jerott took his one step and halted, for Crawford of Lymond had moved into the road twenty paces behind the girl’s back.
They did not all at first see him, so the shouting died naturally. Only Archie and the girl at whose pistol-end he stood noticed nothing. Within the silken flame of her hair, Joleta’s milk-white face was rosy with anger, her eyes brightly thicketed with shadow. ‘So you say,’ she retorted. ‘Then why isn’t he here? Or doesn’t he care if his uncouth and uncontrolled following batter an old woman to death?’
‘It’s a lie. They’ve never battered an old woman to death in their lives,’ said Lymond’s cold, plaintive voice. During his long walk up the road to Joleta’s back, not a pebble had shifted. He had taken no visible precautions; hands tucked into his sword belt, he had given the appearance merely of strolling into the scene, and his horsemen, after a sporadic attack of bemused silence, had shouted dutifully on, though in a noticeably innocuous vein, until he halted at last, a dozen steps from the girl.
‘Young ones, now: that’s different.’
It was a ruse so old that it was almost an insult. Archie Abernethy, by then aware of Lymond, should have been ready at the first sound of his voice to snatch Joleta’s pistol as the girl started round. It didn’t work because as Lymond moved into place, an eager torch-bearer closed up behind him to give him more light. Before he opened his mouth, Lymond’s shadow slid on before him, grey and revealing, up to Joleta and past her, and as he began to speak, Joleta whirled round and fired.
A scream, inhuman in its pain, tore across the ungentlemanly little theatre and died sobbing in a shuddering void, while a curtain of smoke spread silver before every motionless man.
It was impossible to see beyond it. Jerott, for one, did not want to see. She had fired, Christ preserve them, in a line dead behind. In a heavy silence he waited, rigid with the rest, and infinitesimally the veil spread, hovered, and began softly to melt.
In the distance, from the direction of Midculter, he was conscious of hoofbeats. Lord Culter, doubtless, summoned to rescue Joleta.…
From the lessening mists a voice spoke: the same voice as before, its tone vastly polite. ‘Mortia la bastia, morta, I hope, la rabbia o veneno …’ And through the clearing smoke they all deciphered the singularly unconcerned person of Lymond, talking pleasantly still. ‘That, Cuddie Hob, was your brown mare expiring. Give her a nice funeral. The torchbearer who moved, Archie, is to be flogged and turned off without pay. I should like to speak to you in my room when we get to Midculter. Ah, Richard. There you are. You’ve missed all the fun.’
That was his brother arriving, summoned from Midculter by Joleta to waylay her murderers, with some twenty or thirty men at arms with him. Remembering the Richard, Lord Culter of nine years before, Jerott Blyth saw little changed in this thickset, mild-mannered man with the shapeless brown hair. But the quality of his greeting to his younger brother was new, as was Lymond’s response.
Then, ‘Richard, introduce me,’ Lymond was saying, in the same undisturbed voice; and he turned at last to where, dumb now, the child Joleta still stood, the smoking pistol dragging her hand. ‘Attempted