Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [159]
Lymond also took with him Bell and Guthrie for, it seemed likely, his own private amusement: the surgeon, breathing heavily, to stalk Lady Jenny, and Alec Guthrie to rationalize the event.
The meeting between Lymond and Tom Erskine’s widow took place in private. Jerott, who had no interest in Lady Jenny Fleming, however pretty and however famous as the King of France’s second-string mistress, set about getting the wagons loaded and the oxen hitched, with his men’s help: thank God the weather was still open and the ground reasonably firm. Today, with the mild sun alight and the idle air removing, in quiet groups, the yellow leaves from the trees, Jerott whistled loud and secular tunes, and was grateful when Alec Guthrie, fully stocked with ground-up comment on Randy Bell’s virility, came and joined in the work.
Lady Jenny, it seemed, had given them a charming welcome but to the doctor’s disappointment was only interested in the news from France. Rumour said that she was desperate, now the royal bastard was several months old, to return before the paternal memory faded to engender another. Rumour further said that in order to make a licensed and legitimate reappearance in French royal circles, she was making a dead set at M. d’Oisel, the King of France’s unhappy Ambassador; and rumour must have substance under its hat, for she was making a dead set at nobody else.
Except of course Lymond, whom she had fallen on with tender delight. But that, thought Jerott wisely, might have been to safeguard her newly widowed young daughter Margaret.
At that moment a man came up to him—a vigorous and efficient little man, whose exertions he had noted with half his mind while loading the crates—and said in the accents of Aberdeen, ‘There’s a beast with a bad leg we’ll need to spare, sir. If you’ll give me leave, I’ll ask Lady Jenny up at the castle to loan us another.’
Something about the lined face and the nimble frame and the bronchial whistle under the breath seemed familiar. ‘I’ve seen you before,’ said Jerott sharply.
‘Aye. This morning. Tommy Wishart—Tosh, they call me. I just landed yesterday,’ the little man said.
‘No. In France. Something,’ said Jerott, tracking down a recollection, ‘to do with a donkey.’
‘You’re right, sir. Tightrope work; that was the specialty.’
‘It was the specialty in the area I was in all right,’ said Jerott Blyth, an angry light suddenly dawning, and trapped the little man, before he could move, with a trained grip on the wrist. Tosh, blankly amiable, stood just where he was. ‘You were following me before I came here, in France?’
‘You’re smart, though,’ said Tosh cheerfully. ‘I didna think you’d jalouse. It’s all the same in the end, though; isn’t it, sir?’
‘What’s all the same in the end?’ said Jerott nastily, but he knew. While he thought he was fishing for Lymond, Lymond was fishing for him. Long ago he had been marked out as one of the men for this army, and Lymond with perfect logic had taken steps to keep him in sight. God knew how many other casual observers had watched his progress through France before Tosh took up the running at Paris. And he had played into the man’s hands by voluntarily joining him. If he had not, what would Lymond have done? Various answers, all of them an insult to pride, rushed into his mind. He had assumed, without realizing it, that Lymond was aware that he at least, and de Seurre and des Roches surely also, held a watching brief for the Order. Could it be that Lymond, on the contrary, was under the illusion that he had made three easy converts to Mammon?
There was one way to settle that. Removing Tommy Wishart rather too briskly from his path, for he disliked anyone’s spies, Jerott made for Boghall.
It was unfortunate that Joleta also