Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [217]
The thought had occurred to Jerott. Before he could speak, however, Adam Blacklock on his other side said, ‘You w-weren’t here two years ago. If folk from one side of the Border met the other, it was to fight; and pick the eyes from the naked dead afterwards. I’ve seen the Douglases and the Scotts play handball through the streets of Kelso with severed English heads for the ball.’
Gabriel’s unclouded blue eyes turned on him. ‘What were you doing there? Sketching them?’
The artist flushed.
Graham Malett noted it, but his voice was gentle. ‘And what did you gain from that? Are you a better artist, Adam, for drawing only men of violence and acting in their brutal engagements? Do you expect to become hardened to it? You never will. You have too fine a grain.’ Graham Malett’s deep, rich voice hardened for a moment. ‘There is nothing romantic about killing for money.’
But Adam Blacklock’s lean, nondescript face with the untidy hair was blank. ‘It depends whom you kill,’ he said.
With a half-exasperated, half-amused groan, Gabriel clapped his free hand to his brow. ‘Francis again,’ he said. ‘Do you know that you are all becoming copyists as faithfully mannered as the Chinaman who sat on the plate? I shall never redeem one of you until I have his ungodly heart.’
‘He hasn’t got one,’ Blyth said shortly. ‘Godly or ungodly.’
‘He has something,’ said Gabriel gently. ‘Or why else do we follow him? Why else is Adam here concealing what he knows? Something happened at Dumbarton, something so painful that Lord Culter has become estranged. Must I ask Culter myself?’
‘Why not ask L-Lymond?’ said Adam Blacklock, his gaze resolutely avoiding Jerott Blyth’s.
‘Because I think he hates me,’ said Gabriel, and his gaze, drifting past them, rested on the distant, confident horseman, leaning down to talk to Wharton’s clerk and then side-stepping to where Buccleuch stood to stoop chatting to him. Lymond’s head, jaune-paille in the clear sun, was without a helm.
‘… I think he hates me,’ Gabriel repeated, bitterness for once in the deep voice. ‘A fine churchman, a dexterous shepherd, is Graham Malett. This one man I cannot reach.’
The words were to remain, engraved leadenly on the air and on Jerott Blyth’s memory. For just as they were spoken, the English Warden Thomas, Lord Wharton, reached the case of the three rows of women.
They were English women, with good Border names, of peasant and small yeoman stock. Not ladies of pedigree; nor, on the other hand, loose women or gypsies. They wore decent fustian gowns and long hair, to show they were unmarried, and they sat in the benches reserved for those lodging complaint. With them, bawling, squealing, fighting, slavering, and much occupied in casual regurgitation, were their children.
The fact became clear gradually as the clerk’s weakening voice wheezed through the list of cases; and as he went on, the depleted crowd round the open-air court became markedly brisker, and in a kind of simmering movement, like oatmeal on the hob, began to thicken and bubble and spread until three-quarters of the total March meeting or all those not otherwise urgently engaged were standing watching the court.
The complaints, notice of which had been received too late to make known until now, were all the same. Nell Hudson, formerly of the Baxter Raw, Carlisle, did complain that Gilbert Kerr of Green-head, having promised her marriage and got her with child, had heinously broken the said promise and had neither taken her honourably to his bed and board, nor acknowledged and maintained the child. Nell Hudson therefore prayed the Wardens to so judge that either Gilbert Kerr of Greenhead should marry her, with all goodly haste, or if constrained by virtue of prior wedlock, should admit to and maintain his son.
Gilbert