Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [209]
Kate had one last brief talk with Francis Crawford, after she had served a quick, generous meal to them all and had their horses made ready. ‘… About Philippa,’ she said, as his pretence of a meal came to an end, and he waited for her to rise. Jerott and the rest were outside already.
‘Yes?’ said Lymond. ‘You would like me to see her and apologize? I shall, of course. But I don’t think.…’
‘No, no. What possible good would that do? But I should like,’ said Kate, ploughing on, against the clock and Lymond’s own silent opposition, ‘to hear the whole tale of the Hot Trodd. It might help to explain. What happened, for example, to the child you half-killed at the Turnbulls’?’
The blank cornflower gaze at her side came slowly to life. The fair brows rose to impossible heights. ‘Kate!’ said Lymond. ‘I know we luxuriate in every kind of melodrama, but I haven’t started making a meal of infants, even Turnbull infants, yet. Who put round that extraordinary story?’
Kate laughed. ‘Philippa picked it up from the big doctor—what’s his name? Bell? When he came by one day to see how she was doing. She swore he said you had gone to torment a child in order to get the woman to confess where the Kerr cattle were. And you know that’s Philippa’s.…’
‘Bête noire, I think, is the phrase,’ said Lymond. ‘She’s not far wrong, in a sense. I got the facts I wanted from the mother, all right, but I didn’t have to touch the child. Only told her that if she didn’t help me, I’d take the poor half-starved object to Edinburgh and have it brought up a douce, well-fed solid citizen. That put the fear of God into her all right.’ He shook his head. ‘Give up, Kate. Whatever you tell her, she’ll only believe now what she wants to believe.’
He pushed back his chair gently, and she rose. As he took her arm to walk out to the yard with her, she looked up and said, ‘Why is the March meeting so important? It is important, isn’t it?’
‘For three reasons,’ said Lymond. ‘First, because old Wat Scott of Buccleuch will be there, aching to provoke the bloodiest kind of battle with the Kerrs who, he thinks, murdered his son. Second, because the cream of the English northern command will be there, and for all our sakes we must impress them. And third, because someone thought it worth while to see that two separate messages, from the English Warden and from Tosh, my man watching Buccleuch, about this change of date didn’t reach us.’ Arrived at the doorway, he stopped and turned. ‘Kate Somerville, thank you. You did it against your will. But if you hadn’t let Jerott in to wake me.…’
‘Gabriel would have taken the command,’ said Kate gently. ‘Would that have been so terrible?’
‘Yes,’ said Lymond; and cold temper grated suddenly in his soft voice. ‘Yes, it would.’
*
That night at supper, Kate found her daughter poor company. And since, nerving herself for the reasoned exposition she was about to make, she had remarkably little appetite herself, the meal was funereal in the extreme, and she was quite thankful when Philippa said, out of the blue, ‘I didn’t stay in the kitchen.’
‘Oh?’ said Kate, running her mind rapidly over several snatches of dialogue.
‘No. I heard what that man said about the Hot Trodd.’
‘Oh,’ said Kate.
‘You believed him when he said he didn’t ill-treat that baby,’ said Philippa.
‘The gullible sort,’ agreed Kate.
There was a pause. Philippa’s small, sallow face with the ringed brown eyes was pale, and a strand of mud-coloured hair, unregarded, fell over her cheek. She said eventually, ‘He thanked you. You wakened him, and it was horrible; and he thanked you.’
Kate hadn’t known that Philippa was there during that little exercise in sadism. She said, ‘He had a duty to do, chick. It was more important than sleep.’
‘But he came here to sleep. Didn’t he?’ said Philippa.
‘No,’ said Kate, her stomach snail-like within her. ‘Come and sit in the garden before you crumb the whole table.’ And, sitting on the grass under the apple trees, with both their