Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [153]
To assemble these things faultlessly, and from a distance, meant some very high-power organizing indeed. It also meant a long purse—a startlingly long purse, even for a man with two homes and a comté of unknown resources abroad. Jerott Blyth at about this point turned a conjecturing look on Francis Crawford of Lymond riding easily at his side and wondered what else he had overlooked during these hot August weeks on Malta and Tripoli.
The first person he met in the clean and beautiful courtyard of St Mary’s was Michel de Seurre, Knight of the Order of St John. The second was the Serving Brother des Roches who had defended the harbour fort at Tripoli, and the third was the Moor Salablanca. Lymond in Africa had not wasted his time.
The task force which was to become famous in Europe began with two hundred men and eight officers. Later, other knights came to join it, and a number of exiles like Jerott who had made their homes overseas, bringing the total by Christmas up to thirty men all of whom had had at least a gentleman’s training in war, and some of whom, like de Seurre and Jerott himself, were highly qualified.
To contain them, an excellent dormitory wing had been built on to St Mary’s, which Jerott remembered as a war-crumbled keep untouched since the first Baron’s day, and which had been completely restored to frankly Florentine splendours. Lancelot Plummer, the engineer and master-architect who designed it, was living there now, drawn by curiosity to become a pupil in his own new academy.
Jerott, who had met the exquisite gentleman in France, knew he was as hard as nails and had a whimsy of iron, and wondered, grimly amused, how Lymond thought he could handle him. Or Fergie Hoddim the lawyer, who knew more about vice than probably any man living; or Randy Bell the surgeon whose experience was nearly as wide and not nearly so academic; and Alec Guthrie who had lectured in Latin and Greek in nearly every university in Italy and Germany and France: a home-spun Humanist who would have had Socrates himself saying weakly, ‘Take my case for example.…’
And Hercules Tait, antiquarian, diplomat, collector and businessman, who not only knew all the crowned heads of Europe but was related to most of them; and Adam Blacklock the painter, with his stutter and his wasted leg that he had taught himself to skate and ride and vault with, and his alcoholic fits of despair.
Jerott Blyth thought of the Knights of the Order with their violent, warring personalities reduced by the strict rules of the Church, by danger and hard work, by the rivalry of the Langues, the isolation from vice and free will and, above all, by the universal fire of their faith, and wondered cynically how a public warehouse for soldiers, with Francis Crawford as sole director and tout, could expect to succeed.
He found out during his first night at St Mary’s. Used to communal living, he had early found himself a bed next to Randy Bell and stowed his possessions; then made himself roughly familiar with his fellow-scholars and with the chief technicians who were to run St Mary’s and its equipment, and with the enlisted mercenaries who were to be the standing nucleus of its force.
It was a heavy day, and when at last he got to bed long after dark he was bone-weary; his mind deadened by new people and new impressions on top of the long journey to Scotland. The other seven in his room, some of them arrived only hours before and still unpacked, were equally worn. Few words were exchanged as one by one they came into the chamber and rolled, half-dressed or naked into bed.
At midnight, in a clangorous frenzy, the alarm bell rang. At first Jerott, clogged with sleep, thought it meant Turks. He struggled upright, the cold hilt of his sword to his