Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [142]
‘Allow me to present my most heartfelt apologies,’ said Joleta, and fainted straight off.
‘Francis!’
‘It wasn’t my fault,’ said Lymond doucely.
‘How the devil was she fooled into firing in the first place? Don’t tell me that wasn’t your fault,’ said Lord Culter, a familiar wariness displacing the warmth of reunion.
‘All right, I won’t,’ said Lymond. ‘Jerott, did you get shot also? No. Then kindly muster the lady in your monkish arms and ride with her to the castle. Yours is the only reputation that will stand it. And don’t say I don’t endow you with princely rewards for sitting on your bloody arse doing precisely nothing.’
Which was the manner of Lymond’s homecoming from Malta.
*
Stepping over the Midculter threshold with his treasured burden like a penguin changing the habitat of its only begotten egg, Jerott Blyth missed the true homecoming.
Sybilla, Dowager Lady Culter, clucking over the unconscious Joleta, directing the disposal of Archie Abernethy and his twenty men, and dispatching her son Richard to entertain Will Scott in the castle’s elegant hall, was largely unconscious of all these things.
Reality for her began when her absent son Francis, bright, sun-browned and vivid, stood deferentially at the door of her parlour and she was able to say, her voice sweet, ‘Well, mon cher? I hear, Heaven preserve the counted, that you are a Count …?’
Then Lymond closed the door, and not even Richard would have intruded on them then.
II
The Widdershins Wooing
(Midculter Castle, the Same Day)
WHEN, under the direction of a stalwart Venetian madam to whom he took an instant dislike, Jerott placed his childish burden tenderly on her bed, Joleta was still unconscious. Her skin was so fine, he saw, that the veins ran like Sicilian marble over her temples and jaw. From her thinly framed nose to her invisible eyebrows, her sparely moulded pink mouth, her prodigious golden lashes, there was nothing coarse about her; and her hair, blown lightly on the lawn of her pillow, was insubstantial as new-loomed silk.
Stumbling slightly, Jerott Blyth removed himself from the room and the old madam’s glare, and nearly walked into Archie Abernethy, marching along the corridor. From the colour of his neck it was clear that he, anyway, had had the promised interview with his lordship of Lymond. Then, tripping along the passage with her white hair and blue eyes and high-handed, small-boned elegance, came Francis Crawford’s mother.
‘Jerott!’ said Sybilla, and clutching with her two small hands as much of his worn leather chest as she could reach, hauled down his head for an embrace. She smelt marvellous. ‘All the most beautiful men become monks,’ she said. ‘It’s a oecumenical law or something. I can’t imagine how they keep up the breed. What’s wrong? Has Francis been rude? Then you must try to overlook it. I know you wouldn’t think so, but he is thoroughly upset by Tom Erskine’s death; and when Francis is troubled he doesn’t show it, he just goes and makes life wretched for somebody.’
Smiling, she slipped her small, strong hand under his arm. ‘How splendid that you and he met again. Come and be introduced, and tell me your news. Is your mother still so well and so shamingly loaded with energy …?’
It was neatly done, and Jerott didn’t try to resist. Setting aside his private reservations about a commander who, however disturbed, let fly at his lieutenant in public with no cause whatever, he followed the Dowager Lady Culter into her elegant hall.
In the year of Lymond’s absence, Midculter had done rather well. The Crawfords, like his own family, had always been wealthy, of course; less from their skill in war, though that was considerable, than from sheer intelligence and a native ingenuity in the handling of characterful experts. Sybilla, who made them laugh, had always been her people’s idol. Richard, who risked his life for their sons on the battlefield, was respected and liked.