Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [243]
Adam sat down, confused. ‘How do you know she’s going to foist it on you?’
‘Because she has done everything in her power, since I came, first to attract me, and then when that failed, to compromise me, willy-nilly.’ He smiled faintly. ‘That night at Dumbarton was a classic of its kind. She had hopes still, I think, of enslaving me despite myself with her charms. And I probably thought the same. We both found we were mistaken. It had its moments; but she has the mind and morals of a jungle cat. She didn’t enjoy meeting … another of the same.’
‘So she wants to take her revenge?’
‘She has threatened that, unless I marry her, to Gabriel’s fond applause, she will name me as her seducer. Grand climax to Gabriel’s loving comradeship with Crawford of Lymond.’
‘And to your control over St Mary’s,’ said Adam Blacklock slowly. ‘She and Gabriel are mystic symbols of fortune to at least half your men. One whisper of this, and they’ll leave you.’
‘It’ll be more than a whisper by mid-September,’ said Lymond, calculating. ‘Even if she wears tablecloths.… I wonder whose it is?’
‘It isn’t yours?’ asked Adam. But he knew already, from that cool ‘What are you doing here?’ heard that night in Dumbarton, that it was not.
‘No. And could be proved not to be, I suppose. But that doesn’t matter a damn in an emotional crisis of that kind. It’ll be too late when they turn out to be baby Berbers, or a litter of Moors. Poor bastards. Sybilla will do something for them.’
‘My advice,’ said Adam thoughtfully, ‘would be to get your mother to immure her in a convent for a very long time.’
‘The first thing Gabriel would do is visit her,’ Lymond said. From defiant jubilation he had become quiet. ‘It’s odd to think that in four weeks, five at the most, it will all be over. St Mary’s won’t exist. Or it will continue under my command, without Gabriel. Or under Gabriel, without me. How would you enjoy fighting under Graham Malett, Adam?’
Adam Blacklock looked as levelly as he knew how into Lymond’s bright blue eyes. ‘So it’s come, has it?’ he said slowly. ‘This is what you have been afraid of, all along? It has to be one or other of you; it can’t be both. Graham Malett never will have you at his side.’
‘Yes, it has come,’ said Lymond. He had moved away again, without attending to Blacklock, and his voice was curt. ‘The Queen Dowager has successfully brought it to a head, but the final choice won’t be hers. It will lie with St Mary’s, and the excellence or otherwise of our work there. If I have made men, they will act like men.’
‘You may be a man, and fear God still,’ said Adam steadily.
Lymond’s face, too, was wholly sober as he looked away, over the low hills of Fife. ‘I know But I, too, learned a lesson in Malta. Never mind their eyes.… Watch their hands! Adam, I have to go to Midculter to see Joleta. Then I am moving across to Boghall, where Margaret Erskine should be joining her mother shortly to wait for me. I have asked a number of other people to meet me there too. If you want to come with them, I should … welcome you. If you prefer to go straight to St Mary’s, I shall understand. All I ask is that you say nothing of the gathering at Boghall. In any case, our ways part now. I am going home alone.’
Adam Blacklock looked down at his hands. ‘Small, subversive gatherings in corners? Not St Mary’s as we knew it.’
Lymond’s answering gaze was disconcertingly sharp. ‘But St Mary’s never was an army,’ he said. ‘Only a battlefield. You must have realized that?’
XIII
The Axe Is Turned on Itself
(Midculter, Flaw Volleys, Boghall, September 1552)
IN the meantime, the unease which had settled on St Mary’s, Falkland and several points on the Irish seaboard had assumed, at Midculter, the proportions of plague. Swirling furiously among the