Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [174]
They all waited, their gaze fixed on Gabriel.
Malett’s white face had flushed, and for a moment genuine anger showed in the tired blue eyes. Then he said steadily, ‘Why? Why refuse to release me? Why this craving to dominate, to humiliate the Order? Look, I beg you, into your heart. You cannot dream of subjugating us to your ways. Is it jealousy because we obey a Master other than yourself? Or have you discovered the truth, that your army will not have physical unity without spiritual unity, and that it will not have spiritual unity without us and our Faith?’
The little fire had burned up. It flickered, hiding, revealing the intent faces of the men standing about it in the dim hall; it stencilled in long, rosy lines the person of Lymond, standing considering in front of it, and fell full on the strained face of Gabriel, sitting rigid in the big chair before him. And again, Lymond refused the challenge: refused as so often in Malta to show what lay under the armour. Instead he said, ‘We are being imprecise in our terms, are we not? We are in free association, you and I. I can neither release you nor hold you. The only condition I have made applies to all, and not to the knights only. I lead. You may argue gold into radishes over how, where and why I lead, but the final authority must be mine. Two masters we cannot have.’
The carrying voice of Alec Guthrie said unexpectedly, ‘But as Sir Graham has already pointed out, every practising Christian must serve two masters.’
‘My God … I know it,’ said Lymond. ‘My nerves are on edge like a Dublin butcher over the conversation as it is. The situation is that Sir Graham’s other Master and I are in perfect accord; whereas, being human, I am not convinced that Sir Graham and I should necessarily be.’
It was Adam Blacklock who began to laugh, and against his will, Jerott followed. It was impudence.… It was blasphemous impudence, come to that. But you remembered that never, at any point, had Lymond challenged any personal practice or principle of those within his command. His difference with Gabriel had been over an issue of ill-advised planning, not over the Christian services he had performed.
Against his will, Jerott laughed, and Lymond, moving forward, touched Graham Malett lightly on his bowed shoulders. ‘Get some rest,’ he said. ‘Spiritual unity, you should know, can come from other things besides your precious religion. Don’t despair of us yet.’
*
Within three days, supplies of fuel were coming through from all Buccleuch’s vast territory, and St Mary’s was lit and warmed and all the cold houses in Yarrow supplied. Calling at Branxholm to thank the old man in person, Lymond found that Sir Wat Scott and his wife Janet already knew of the confrontation between Graham Malett and himself.
‘Aye, ye’re an irreverent, loose-living man,’ said the old man with satisfaction, rolling one of his grandsons along the settle and sitting down, unnoticing, on a rattle belonging to one of his sons. ‘I hear ye stripped the Chevalier and put him into the stocks for overdoing his good works?’
‘It’s a damned lie,’ said Lymond cheerfully. There was a kind of desperate elation about Francis Crawford that day that neither Will Scott nor his stepmother remembered seeing before.
‘And called him God’s own madcap ox tae his face.’
‘Manners,’ said Lymond reprovingly. ‘Behind his back, maybe. Not to his face.’
‘Why did ye risk it?’ asked Buccleuch bluntly. ‘He might well hae left ye. He’s plenty of other pots on the boil. Jimmy Sandilands has sent him a few times to Council meetings since he was laid up with his quinsy throat, and he’s fairly thick with the Queen Dowager at Falkland. Janet’s brother Robbie says he’s the only disinterested man of God she’s got to advise her, and she knows it. She’ll take him from you, and his knights with him.’
‘No, she won’t,’ said Lymond amiably. ‘She’ll wait until she thinks she can get us all.’