Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [207]
‘And did they?’ said Lymond expectantly.
‘You don’t know Uncle Somerville,’ said Kate. ‘Or the Privy Council. It went straight back to the Treasury. And when poor Paris appeared with his tale of woe, to squeeze another purse from them, they told him to learn to swim next time he went boating with gold in his pocket, goodbye.’
‘Neat,’ said Lymond. She could make nothing of his expression. If it had been anyone else, she would have said he looked flummoxed. He said, looking at her for the first time for a while, ‘So you had to dry Sir Graham off and receive the gentle benison of his thanks. Did he pray a lot?’
At the tone, Kate’s clever gaze sharpened. A moment’s thought, and illumination burst on her at last. ‘He was staying with Ormond, not with me. Francis! Is Graham Malett leading the forces of light? Is it Gabriel you are afraid of losing your disciples to?’
So much for her plans. As the soporific sunlight began to embrace his chair, Francis Crawford leaped to his feet with such force that the seat crashed to the floor behind him. He said, ‘Sorry, Kate!’ without stopping and flung away from her, the full length of the room.
There he halted, fighting for equanimity, and after a long, difficult silence turned, with obvious reluctance. Kate, standing, had been going to speak. Instead she stared at him, thinking numbly about hot milk and blankets, and saying nothing at all.
He misread her face. He said quickly, ‘Don’t be frightened. You look as if you expected me to strike you.…’ And then, his eyes widening with tired shock, ‘Did you? Did you, Kate? Oh God, what does it matter then?’ he said, and dropping to his knees beside the stifling windowseat, pressed both hands hard over his eyes, his elbows buried in Kate’s old flock cushions.
Above the white voile of his shirt a pulse was beating, very fast, under the fair skin. After a moment he said, without moving, ‘Would you give me a bed if I asked for one?’
‘My dear, my dear,’ said Kate, but to herself. ‘I would give you my soul in a blackberry pie; and a knife to cut it with.’
*
In fact, he fell asleep, there where he knelt, and she had to persuade him to move. Once he had given in, he was too tired to undress; too tired to think any more. Kate had guessed rightly at overwork. He had said nothing to her of the useless, persistent, maddening trivia that disrupted his rest so that an hour uninterrupted was Nirvana; and several hours’ continuous sleep something he had ceased to expect.
So he slept, in the end, on that same windowseat, with the shutters closed to keep out the sun: slept again, the moment he buried his head in the cushions. To Philippa, who stalked in defiantly halfway through these dispositions, Kate hissed, ‘Say one word and you go to the Nixons.’
‘I just came to make sure he hadn’t hit you,’ stated her daughter haughtily from the safety of the doorway, and marched out.
Two hours later when Kate Somerville, for the sake of her nerves, had found Philippa something to do elsewhere in the house, and was trying to fasten her own attention on something other than that silent room upstairs, the clack of hooves far off on the dry, dusty road told of two, maybe three riders coming south fast, obviously bent for Flaw Valleys.
One of them Philippa, materializing with astonishing speed, identified at once as Jerott Blyth. The others were soldiers.
At the gatehouse Brother Jerott, with his curling raven hair and hawk nose over a beautiful Florentine cuirass, wasted no time. ‘Crawford of Lymond: is he here?’
As in some deadly cycle, due to move round and round to eternity, Kate saw her child run down the long drive waving. ‘Mr Crawford? He’s here!’
‘He’s here,’ Kate repeated herself, to the unfriendly young man in her hall. ‘But I am sorry, he cannot be disturbed until morning. You