Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [260]
Lymond’s half-smile could be felt in the dusk. ‘I must confess, it would be more … convenient if I could convince you now. If not, there is one thing at least you can do. Richard.… If anything happens to me, Lymond will be your property. Do what the Queen Mother has threatened to do. Blow it up. Dismantle the cabins and all the encampment, disperse the stock, destroy the weapons. It was created with my money; it is not Graham Malett’s or the Queen Dowager’s, it is mine. I would forgive no one, least of all a man of my own blood, if something I had created became a knife at the throat of my own country. And if you are then convinced, pursue Gabriel; pursue him to the ends of the earth, for wherever he is, there will be nothing but waste.’
‘No,’ said Lord Culter, and stood up.
The emotionless voice beside Adam Blacklock stopped, and he felt, in the gloom, Lymond give some movement, at once controlled. It was odd, Adam thought, that Lymond’s harshest opponent should be his brother, and that each man had such power to hurt the other.
A sound at the door made him look round again. It was Margaret again, with the three men, each bearing a taper. Light ran round the room from bracket to bracket, garlanding the tapestried walls, turning the table into a ruddy pool round which the bright, fleshy faces calyxed in linen and gauze and fancy Swiss bobbin-lace looked with surmise and relief, each to the other. ‘How would the other verdicts run?’ thought Adam. Margaret Erskine, pale and big-eyed, was already biased against Gabriel, and was a loyal adherent of Lymond’s, Adam knew, for many years now. Sybilla, for all her sharp, unsentimental brain, was a kindred soul with her younger son, and Lady Jenny from jealousy alone would support any man who maligned Joleta. Add Janet Beaton and a natural wish to find someone—anyone—who would exorcise the misery of her stepson’s death, and you could say that the women were on Francis Crawford’s side.
One might have expected as much, and in the counsels of the Dowager and the power they could bring him in men—the Flemings, the Grahams, the Scotts—this was not a trifle. But Adam knew, and Lymond knew, that unless he had convinced these men—Fergie Hoddim, Alec Guthrie, Thompson who had no principles you could appeal to, his own brother Culter and, Adam supposed, he himself whom Lymond had trusted some of the way at least, and whose self-respect he had rescued by trusting him.… Unless he had induced these men by logic, by half-proofs, by the compressed, powerful current of the prosecution thus coldly concluded to believe that what he said was correct, he was beaten at last.
And on Lymond’s face, clearly seen for the first time since Richard had made his disclaimer, you could tell that he had braced himself to meet the first proof of his failure. Elbows on the table, chin propped on his two thumbs, he sat quietly, his lashes lowered, his lips pressed against his interlaced fingers. He did not move again when Richard repeated more clearly, ‘No. There will be no call to pursue Graham Malett then or any time in the future. We must cut him down now.’
The heavy lids lifted. After a long moment, Lymond lowered his hands with great care from his face to the table, and said, ‘Why?’ Beside him, Adam noticed, Sybilla’s blue eyes were running with tears.
There was mild impatience on Lord Culter’s pleasant, undistinguished face. ‘Because you have done all that skill could devise to present a detached case, and failed. Because you are asking for help, and you hate asking for help. Because of our mother’s evidence, and Blacklock’s evidence, and Margaret’s evidence, and the fact that you asked Guthrie and Hoddim and the fact that they came. This may be,’ said Richard with unexpected wry humour, ‘a crusade conducted by the Culter family solo in a band of dissentients, but I am with you.’
‘Reasonably well put,’ said Fergie Hoddim, ‘You could add that the