Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [221]
Lord Culter, standing reins in hand before the ordered bustle of his following, ready to mount and ride home, saw Francis approaching. He saw him, but although his colour became very high and his cold eyes colder yet, he did not interrupt the soft violence of Gabriel’s tirade. Unseeing, his back squarely to the coming horseman, Graham Malett was saying over and over, his hands gripping Culter’s leather sleeves, ‘What can it count, some trifling misdemeanour, against kinship such as yours? Is it worth the misery on your mother’s face, whatever it is? If it has meaning, surely Christianity means forgiveness?’ He paused, and added, ‘I have no brother, to my sorrow. But I have a sister, dearer to me than my soul, who is mischievous as well as wholesome, like the child that she is.… If the mischievous child grieves me, do you think I forget the loving spirit that lies behind? I forgive her before she troubles me, comfort her when she wrongs me; for she is my sister, and there is no act she could commit in this world which would estrange me from her.’
‘You have great confidence in each other,’ said Lord Culter quietly. Only those who knew him well might have guessed at the incredulous anger behind the flat tone: anger that, being committed to immoral silence, he should now be expected to maintain it in public before the well-meaning onslaught of the very man his brother had wronged.… And here was Francis, cheapening the impossibly cheap by coming to invigilate him.
‘I have confidence in Joleta,’ said Sir Graham, smiling, ‘but not necessarily in the whole of womankind. She is fallible to the small sins of the flesh. And God has given her beauty: not an easy gift for a child.… If she had disrupted your home … if your parting from your brother is in any way Joleta’s fault, I beg you to tell me? Indeed, I shall ask her myself.… I shall insist on an answer.’
‘Well, is it Joleta’s fault, brother?’ said Lymond’s lazy voice. Still gracefully mounted, he paced into Gabriel’s view and stopped, between the two men. ‘One of these small sins of the flesh, perhaps? Whither are you going, pretty fair maid, with your white face and your yellow hair?’
The long, silken hair of his bay’s mane dropped, lock by golden lock, from his outstretched hand, leaving the fingers poised, elegantly cupped, in mid-air. Then smiling, he dismounted. ‘Tell him, Richard. How jealousy hunted me from your door.’
Unhurried, Gabriel turned his head and studied Lymond’s face. He said calmly, ‘If I hadn’t seen Mariotta, I might have believed it. It isn’t because of any competition for her favours that Joleta looked ill the last time I saw her, and had a face white with crying. I think rather the reverse.’
Francis Crawford cried, ‘She’s in love with Richard!’ and half a dozen people in the vicinity, including Adam Blacklock and Jerott Blyth, lingering uneasily for orders, looked at them. Invention blazed in Lymond’s blue eyes. ‘And contrived some reason for Richard to get rid of me!’
With one swift, unexpected movement, Graham Malett caught and gripped Lymond’s two airy hands. ‘I implore you … don’t mock,’ he said, and there was deep distress in his voice. ‘She loves you.… She is pining for you. Don’t you know it? And she is only a child. You must not be cruel.’
‘Tout animal n’a pas toutes propriétés,’ observed Lymond. ‘Some like it cruel.’ He raised his own hand, encased now in Gabriel’s, and planted a solid salute on the other man’s big, knuckled fingers. ‘Io baccio la sua cortese e valorosa mano—And some like it polite.’ Gabriel removed his hands as if stung. ‘And some think they like it polite, but find they prefer to be handled rough. Tastes differ.… You should find her a husband.’
‘I thought