Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [176]
‘You mean,’ said Janet, casting a vicious glance at her husband who was spitting on the floor, ‘that if Will here killed a Kerr, you’d see him hanged for it?’
‘He wouldn’t hang, if there had been provocation. If there wasn’t, then he’d get all he deserved. I should see that he was brought to justice, that’s all. Left to themselves, Cessford or Ferniehurst would take a revenge worse than any sentence a judge might impose.’
‘Of course they would, ye wandering fool. And if they saw Will locked up safe out of their reach by a lot of mim-faced judges, they’d never rest till they’d killed a dozen Scotts to his Kerr, and Will himself on release.’
‘They wouldn’t, you know,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘For I should stop them.’
‘With yon clecking of foreigners at St Mary’s?’ Buccleuch’s nose and mouth, vocally paired, defined his opinion.
‘You don’t know what he has at St Mary’s,’ said Will Scott abruptly. He got to his feet, his hot blue stare fixed on Lymond. ‘The training is finished?’
Francis Crawford inclined his head.
‘It’s military rule, then?’ said Buccleuch’s heir.
‘No. We act within the law only.’
Buccleuch, his old eyes narrowed, had lost all his antic derision. ‘This is a thrawn countryside, Crawford. There are folk who’ll never thole that. They’d sooner call in the English.’
‘They’d be too late,’ said Lymond drily. ‘The English have called me in first.’
*
Will Scott saw their guest off. Standing on the windy steps of Branxholm castle, looking over the wide fiefs of Buccleuch, with the slithering rush of the thaw in their ears, ‘Ye ken there’s no hope,’ said Buccleuch’s son to Lymond. ‘The auld yin’ll not change.’
‘I know. Nor will Kerr of Cessford or of Ferniehurst either. But you will; given a chance to live; and the Kerrs who follow.’ Lymond’s horse and escort were ready. He turned suddenly, his eyes searching the earnest, carrot-topped face. ‘You do understand what I’m doing?’
‘Aye,’ said Will Scott flatly. ‘Aye, and I ken that you’re right. It’s just that life’ll be awful dull without the antrin wee stint at making mince of the Kerrs.’ He said wistfully, ‘You’ll have the new hackbuts, I expect, and pistols maybe; and a standard of marksmanship that’s fair astronomical. I wish.…’
‘Don’t wish,’ said Lymond curtly. ‘Your work is here, guarding the name and the future of one of the nation’s great families. Thank God for the strength to do your job, and the gift of wife and children to sustain you in it.’ His voice cooled to its usual irony. ‘Though whether the mass murder of strangers for one’s principles ranks higher in virtue than attacking one’s neighbours for the hell of it is a point I’m glad I don’t have to settle.’
He was mounted. Will Scott reached up a hand, smiling. ‘If you are patrolling the Borders for the English, I may meet you one of these darker nights.’
‘For both sides, not only the English. We are the Wardens’ mailed fist, to be rushed in where there’s trouble.’
‘And if there’s no trouble, you’ll make it,’ offered Will Scott, his eyes bright, his cheeks red.
‘No. At the moment,’ affirmed Lymond grimly, ‘I am having truck with nothing less than total calamity.’
VII
The Lusty May
(Dumbarton, April/May 1552)
FAT, perfected, and longing to bloody their weapons, the company at St Mary’s obeyed with reluctance Lymond’s decree that the spring and summer of their first flowering should be devoted to Scotland.
Some, like Gabriel, Guthrie and Bell, agreed that the work he proposed, the safeguarding, policing, shepherding, the patrolling of the Debatable Land, the thieves’ waste between England and Scotland, was worth while in itself. All of them came to see, in the end, that the series of small, difficult actions into which he plunged them were satisfying, gave them confidence in each other, and were quickly hardening them into a team.
They did not, apparently, have any pressing need for an income, which