Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [165]
‘Old age,’ said Gabriel. ‘It’s my second adventure in two days, in fact. On my first night at Flaw Valleys the kitchen chimney caught fire and then the room above; and Mistress Somerville, who appears as a rule to be most entertainingly level-headed, became extraordinarily upset at the idea of damage to her precious music room and we had to mobilize the countryside. Which reminds me, Francis. Her daughter Philippa is no friend of yours.’
‘I know,’ said Lymond. With the rest, they were walking to their horses. The Harperfields, with Tosh, had long since been taken to neighbours and the November moon was coming up in the dusk, smoky red and vast as a city.
‘Then you know your own business best,’ said Gabriel mildly. ‘But I ought to tell you that she has some silly plan to shake your dignity. I don’t know what it is and I’m not even supposed to know it’s aimed at you. But my advice would be to give her a chance to forget you. She will, in time.’
‘I can hardly wait,’ said Lymond. ‘You will, of course, stay as long as you wish after your magnificent endeavours, unless the household staff demand a holiday too.’
‘You’re going to declare a rest period?’ asked Jerott. Leisure, with Gabriel there, seemed too good to be true.
‘Rumour being what it is, I imagine it will have declared itself by now,’ Lymond said. ‘Yes. We shall take three days from our labours to relax. Provided Sir Graham understands that by midday tomorrow St Mary’s will be empty and all the men at arms and half the officers whoring in Peebles.’
In the half-dark you could guess at Gabriel’s smile. ‘Do you think I don’t know human nature?’ he said. ‘They are bound by no vows. But as they learn to respect you, they will do as you do.’
‘That’s what we’re all afraid of,’ said Jerott; and there was a ripple of laughter and a flash of amusement, he saw, from Lymond himself. But he had not meant to be as funny as that.
*
The following day, Gabriel left. Before he went, he sought out Francis Crawford and asked him, as a young lance might do, if he might later return to St Mary’s and join his command.
The interview, by Gabriel’s own contrivance, was private; but by some alchemy, on that misty morning, as they buckled on their cuirasses for the day’s work, every officer at St Mary’s knew of it, and speculated on what Lymond would say. And Jerott, for one, promised himself that if Francis Crawford’s response was to humiliate Gabriel, he, Jerott, would walk out forthwith.
For what else remained for Graham Malett to do? His self-appointed task in Europe was done: Malta was a closed door. From the Knight of St John who had brought the Queen Dowager from France, Jerott already knew that the French Ambassador to Turkey had been vindicated by the efforts in Malta of de Villegagnon, though they had learned from Gabriel that a bitter struggle went on still for the life of the Marshal de Vallier, who had been thrown, a sick man, into the rock dungeon of St Angelo, and whose ‘confession’ under torture to treachery had been sent off to France. Rumours of bribery, of false trials and serpentine deceit by the Grand Master de Homedès were almost certainly true.
So without resources of money and land, his own Scottish birthplace destroyed, and too proud to hire his sword, as de Villegagnon and the Strozzis had done, to a foreign command, Graham Malett had come to his homeland. Torphichen Priory, for more than four hundred years the Order’s centre in Scotland, would give him shelter but he could not strain Sandilands’ kindness too far. As it was, were it known Sir James was on friendly terms with a knight called to justice, he would not remain Preceptor of Torphichen for long.
As they dressed, Fergie Hoddim and Tait and Blacklock speculated fiercely on Gabriel’s reasons for selling his services to an obscure, half-trained corps such as St Mary’s. And when presently they moved chatting into the hall and found there Sir Graham Malett, one booted foot on the hearth, waiting in idle talk with Lymond for a chance to depart, they paused, each trying without being obvious to read two