Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [152]
There was a terrifying silence, during which the three women stared at him as if he were an idiot while, hands outstretched, Gabriel took Margaret’s floury fingers in his. Then Kate said quickly and harshly, ‘Stop and listen. She hasn’t been told yet By the Queen Mother’s orders. Break it quickly: she’ll have to know now. Margaret, sit down.’
But Margaret remained standing, clearly unaware, to Philippa’s frightened eyes, of anything but Gabriel’s changing face. His grip on her hands became rigid as Kate spoke; there was a second’s pause, then in a deep voice he said, ‘Sit, for I must ask your forgiveness. I thought you knew. It is bad news, and from Boghall. Your husband was taken with the sweating sickness. He is with your father, at peace in God.’
There was a long silence while Margaret, her face perfectly livid, gazed composedly at Sir Graham. At length, ‘He can’t be,’ she said. ‘Not Tom. Not Tom as well.’
‘Did you think life was always fair and always just?’ said Gabriel. ‘It isn’t. You wouldn’t be the person you are if it were; you would be a happy simpleton. But you are not, and today is your day of mourning.’
The words did what they were meant to do. After a single choked gasp, Margaret Erskine, now Margaret Fleming again, closed her eyes with her two hands and wept.
Shortly afterwards, finding herself unwanted, Kate crept outside the room with Philippa and drying her daughter’s tears, set her to finish the French chicken. Then she sat down and had a limited cry to herself, within hearing of the low murmur of Gabriel’s lovely voice. Margaret could not be in better hands at this moment. She only wished that his spell was less powerful where Philippa was concerned. She then faced, drearily, the fact that her own motives for this were heavily prejudiced; and further the fact that sometimes now she was able to forget: that Philippa’s father was dead. ‘Gideon,’ said Kate silently to herself on one noiseless intake of breath, and rising as if she had been shot, went to help Philippa with the fowl.
IV
The Axe Is Fashioned
(St Mary’s, Autumn 1551)
CARRYING hods in Egypt, grimly, for Gabriel’s sake, Jerott Blyth proceeded to the keep of St Mary’s near the loch of that name in the Central Lowlands of Scotland, and remained there, professionally enthralled, the entire winter, while a legend was born.
Unlike the former Will Scott, Blyth was no inexperienced youth when he joined Francis Crawford. As soon as he arrived with the rest from Midculter in the district called Lymond, he saw that the land was already half-prepared for its burden. In fields newly fenced and hedged were wedders, rams and milk-ewes, all in good order. There were oxen for the table and plough, geese in the ponds and birds in the dovecots and coneys in the warrens. They passed barns stacked with oats, wheat and barley; a sawmiller’s with cuts of oak stacked outside and new wheels leaning against their own shadows and silted full of October leaves.
Then the cottages and outlying buildings of St Mary’s itself came in sight: the stacks of brown peat and charcoal; the forge with the air lively about it and the bell-chime of the hammer sweet above the thud of the horses. The stables, well-built rank upon rank, with covered horselines before, and a separate well. The bake-house, with its peel and tubs and tables and barrels of flour. The brewery, the warm malt-smell thick on the air, with the shining wortstands glimpsed through the windows, and the sweating five-gallon barrels of ale.
He saw the riding-school, and beyond it where the tiltyard had been laid out, and the butts and the practice ground for small and heavy arms shooting. Near these was the armoury, with crates and barrels outside still being unpacked. He had seen their contents being disembarked at Leith with a flaring interest that would not be denied: the shot and arquebuses and demi-culverins, the chests of bows and sheaves of arrows, the staves and dags and bills and axes, the lead malls for the archers,