Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [259]
Politely, but firmly, Nicolas de Nicolay cleared his throat. ‘There is something I would ask in all this. You say, and I believe you, that you were afraid when you left Malta that Sir Graham Malett meant to come and take your place at the head of your finished army. Why, then, did you permit him to stay at all? If you had turned him away, so courteously, at the first, he would have had time neither to make disciples nor to undermine your authority. Is this not strange?’
This time there was a long pause. Lymond’s face, again without expression, was turned to the long windows, where the cooling lacquers of dusk had overlaid the bright colours. ‘Turn away this great, militant monk, famous throughout Christendom? Yes, I might have done that. I would have lost most of my best men, and all the Knights of St John, and the others would have every reason to believe me afraid of his stature. But remember—or try to imagine—that I knew him, incredibly, as a man of evil intent: clever, powerful and basking in his gift for inspiring and handling his fellow-mortals.
‘Perhaps, once, he was all he appears to be. Perhaps he plumbed too early the false places of religion and of violence, perhaps he grew bored with his great skills; perhaps, as he once confessed to me, the sheer love of power corrupted what was never very difficult to corrupt.… Perhaps he is insane. But he is not what he seems. He is a great and dangerous man; and if I had turned him from St Mary’s do you think he would have accepted that for a moment? He had no fear, even on the dramatic night of the fuel crisis, that I would allow him to go. On the other hand, if I hadn’t taken a firm hold of the command on that night, I should have lost it to Malett. From then on, he was bound to try to get rid of me. He has refused an offer by the Queen Dowager to depose me, but only because he will be surer of the support of all St Mary’s when I have gone. His prize after all is to be Scotland, so ludicrously vulnerable during the Regency, so strategic in position, so potentially powerful. Failing St Mary’s, he would have found his army elsewhere, and fashioned it out of men less expendable than I am, or less intelligent than you.
‘I had,’ said Lymond, his eyes still remote on the glass, ‘really only two alternatives. I could have killed Graham Malett, or fought him. I should perhaps have killed him; but it would have been without proof and without reason, and I don’t, I suppose, any more than the next man desire to trespass out of this uncertain world through a noose in New Bigging Street. And it would have been the end of St Mary’s and I had—I have—great hopes of St Mary’s. So—I elected to fight. I have probably lost.’
The faces round the table now were ghosts in the dusk, only shapes: long and short-haired, bald, snooded, above shoulders padded, buckled, sheathed in worn leather. No one spoke, though Thompson shifted explosively in his chair and pressing one hand on the table, looked round. ‘No principles and no philosophy,’ said Sybilla, Dowager Lady Culter suddenly, her voice soft and derisive as she quoted his own account of the aims of St Mary’s. ‘And for money alone.’
‘Dragut Rais knew, did he not?’ said Nicolay. ‘You have not asked me what I know of Malta and Tripoli.’
‘Later, if you will,’ said Lymond, his voice flat. Speaking, suddenly, was an obvious effort, but his manner was still, like Sybilla’s, uncompromisingly cold. ‘Dragut Rais knew, yes. After all, Malett was working for him. But only Jerott, perhaps, would fully understand. The case here must stand or fall by what we can prove in Scotland. The case for the Government is a different matter. But I cannot move without proof, and I have come, at last, to the point where I cannot get proof without help. It is too near the end for me.’
‘I see.’ It was