Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [168]
‘His breeding being therefore ignoble, I offer the child to thyself for the paltry sum of a thousand écus. Less I could not take for the trouble we have had to safeguard his life, his mother wishing him dead. Should misfortune divide thee from thy purchase, we shall permit her to kill him, since only Alläh knows in whose tent he was engendered. The woman I sell.’
The reply came when the baby was seven weeks old, naked in its basket of cotton, with new-grown golden lashes round newly-smiling blue eyes. The packet enclosed ten thousand écus. ‘Keep the woman and treat her well,’ the message enjoined, ‘with this money for her well-being and as the price of the child. Rear the boy, I beg you, by the God we each serve, until I may come for him, or make further petition; and may the Most High reward you.…’
And firmly and clearly, Graham Malett had signed.
VI
The Hand on the Axe
(St Mary’s, 1551/2)
CAREFULLY as a Hospitaller nursing his sick, Gabriel said no word to Francis Crawford of the birth of the child called Khaireddin; nor did he take any steps to send word to Cormac O’Connor, although he knew where he was. The only person he told, because he was closer to her than to any other alive, was his sister Joleta, as she sat brushing the brilliant hair back from her flushed skin, snatching periodically as tantalizingly he held her long ribbons just out of reach.
‘Brute! Give me them! So he still thinks the woman died at Tripoli?’ said Joleta, who as Lymond had found was not easily shocked.
‘Yes. And it is better that he should. There is work for him here that matters much more. In any case, I believe the attachment was only a chance one: he did not look to me passionately involved. He could be, so easily, and with the wrong person. I wish you were on better terms with him, Joleta.’
Her colour high, she snatched at the ribbons again, and when she missed, flung down her brush. ‘I have tried. I went down to that arctic encampment to apologize, and had to wait three hours to see him. He said I impinged on his Happy Hour.’
Startled, her brother loosed a shout of deep laughter. ‘His what?’
‘His Happy Hour. When he dries the tears of all the sad soldiers he chastised in the morning. Melancholy Man into Sanguine Man in an hour. He’s good, isn’t he?’ said Joleta suddenly, her eyes bright.
Gabriel nodded, watching her.
Aware of it, she bent, in a stirring of gauze, to retrieve her hairbrush and, straightening, met his gaze with her own. ‘Is the baby his?’
There was a pause. Then Gabriel said, ‘It isn’t Cormac’s. That is certain. Nor is it de Césel’s: it must have been conceived in France, before the lady and the Governor met. My charming Francis’s behaviour in France last year was notorious, as you know; and Oonagh O’Dwyer was one of the favoured many. But even Cormac O’Connor, as jealous an unseated princeling as any I know, does not accuse her of being any other man’s mistress. Yes, the child is of Francis Crawford’s blood, and the only one, I suspect.… He has taught you a lesson, has he?’ said Gabriel gently. ‘That not everyone is prepared to be entranced?’
Joleta sat upright, her blue eyes huge. ‘He is the most conceited.…’
Gabriel laughed. ‘Because he finds your friendship so easy to resist? Your charms, sweetheart, are ageing, or you haven’t properly tried. Convert him for me,’ said Graham Malett, and leaning forward, slipped the lovely ribbon under her hair, and closing it round her throat, drew his sister forward and kissed her. ‘Convert him. But don’t, Joleta, tell him of Khaireddin out of pique. Or I shall be angry.’ And he kissed her again.
It had been a hideous winter. In place of the normal season in Scotland, the weather stayed open only till December, when the last of the knights from Malta arrived.
Then the frost came, from a metallurgical sky, and by dawn the last of the leaves, dry and fluted as walnuts, lay in unstirring heaps on the white roof of the forge.
An oven cracked, and the man responsible was flogged, for Lymond