Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [185]
Joleta stared back. The sheet, unheeded, hung from her bruised arms and her cheeks were stained and dirtied with tears. ‘It’s too late,’ she said. ‘Too late for help.’ And before he could move, slipped to the floor, lying quiet with her bright hair on his shoes.
Slowly, Richard knelt. He gathered up the light weight, folding the torn sheet softly about her, and carrying her into Lymond’s room, laid her on the wrecked bed. Then he closed the door, equally slowly, and standing before it, as Lymond hours earlier had done, he said quietly to Lymond’s still back, ‘So this is the outcome of it all. This is why Tom Erskine preserved you; why Christian Stewart died and Gabriel has worked to redeem you … for this. Francis, I would sooner have discovered you dead.’
His brother turned. Fair hair tumbled, eyes blazingly bright, he was breathing hard still, his fine shirt twisted loose from its cords. ‘I wish to God it had been anyone but you,’ he said. ‘Because for my sake and Joleta’s honour you won’t tell, will you?’ His voice was bitter. ‘You’ll go home and mope like a dog, so that Sybilla is sure to wonder what’s wrong. It won’t occur to you …’ He stopped.
Richard found that he was not only cold, but trembling with shock and loathing and fear. ‘What won’t occur to me?’
‘That she was a bitch,’ Lymond said. ‘Just a bitch who needed a lesson.’
He waited without moving while Richard strode up to him, and did not lift his hands even when Culter took him in a double grip that must have hurt to the bone.
‘It would help if I hit you, wouldn’t it?’ said Richard at last. ‘I’m not going to. I merely want to point out that were she three-faced Hecate herself, she is Graham Malett’s sister and a guest under your mother’s roof.’
Loosing his hands, he stepped back. ‘But she isn’t Hecate, is she? She’s sixteen, convent-bred and a little spoiled, and you are afraid of her brother, so you’ve used her … you’ve used her like an old dockside bawd.’
He halted, his voice suddenly out of control. ‘I meant what I said. I wish you’d died first.’
A sort of deadly derision appeared for a second in Lymond’s blank eyes. ‘I don’t think she does,’ he said, and then stopped at the look on her brother’s face. After a moment, he added curtly, ‘Will you take her back to Midculter? Will you say nothing to Sybilla? The girl won’t mention it if you don’t.’
Richard, his flat brown hair fallen over his face, knelt by Joleta, the brisk, the clever, the bright, with whom he had journeyed from France, and took her bleeding wrists in his hands. ‘You can rely on me, as always,’ he said. ‘You know better, of course, than to come to Midculter again.’
He did not look round, and it seemed a long time before Lymond’s voice said, ‘What, then, will you tell Sybilla?’
After a fashion, Lord Culter had clothed her, wrapping her in sheets and blankets, and then in the torn and crushed furry cloak. Her eyes were still closed. Richard raised Joleta Malett again in his arms and looked up, the pink-gold hair streaming over his arm. ‘That you are going abroad. I take it you are. I cannot imagine even you could face Gabriel again.’
‘Then your imagination is uncommonly poor,’ said Lymond with a kind of mulish bravura. ‘I can face anyone except possibly Sybilla. I am going straight back to St Mary’s. Why not? I’ve no more to do here. To market, to market, to buy a plum bun.…’
The door slammed.
‘Home again, home again,’ continued Francis Crawford genteelly to the strewn, empty room. ‘Market is done.’
VIII
The Hot Trodd
(The Scottish Border, May 1552)
THE only person who slept undisturbed that night on either side of the Scottish Border was Philippa Somerville, waiting at Liddel Keep with a small escort and one of Kate’s serving women for Will Scott to take her to Midculter next day.
In fact, Will Scott had forgotten her, being at that moment briskly engaged. The previous night, the Kerr sheep and cattle had been lifted by a family of rogues called Turnbull, long since thrown out of Philiphaugh