Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [269]
Her voice faltered then, and broke; but her eyes, staring distended at Gabriel’s stunned face, were perfectly dry. ‘You said that of Francis Crawford,’ she said, her voice shaking. ‘He came. And I learned to love him, oh yes. And he taught me to comfort him in my bed for the holy power of his love for me that did him such violence when we prayed.…’
Joleta dragged herself forward and, freeing one childish arm from her cloak, she brought it unavailingly, like a thin flail, across her brother’s smooth cheek. Gabriel did not move. ‘That is for my maidenhood,’ she said. ‘Do you want him still for brother? I have asked him to marry me—there is all the sum of my pride. He laughs and says the landscape has lost its novelty. Look, Graham. He planted his bastard on me, those days at Midculter; but that is all he troubled to do.’
She dropped her cloak. Twisted over her pathetic girth, her night-smock was grimy with travel and sweat. Bodily she looked worn and ill and abused. But her face, despite the stains of fatigue, had kept all its pure beauty. The skin was lovelier than Jerott had ever seen it; her fine brows and long lashes and thin, shapely nose added to the poignancy of what lay below.
Never shifting his eyes as she talked, Gabriel swayed once, and Jerott thought he would faint. But then, he stayed silent, listening, although every few moments he would draw a long, shuddering breath, as if in the intervals the machine of his body had lapsed, and the lungs refused their office. At the end he said, his voice low, ‘You are very tired. But I am glad you came. You know there is nothing to fear now. I am here.’ He put out his hand, tentatively, and laid it on her thin arm. ‘Come and sleep.’
Concentrated completely on Joleta he was ignoring, Jerott saw, the noise of comment mounting around them; and for Joleta, it did not seem to exist. In the hot, crowded room, thick with the raw fumes of wine and humanity, their emotions at loose, enlarged and played upon by alcohol and adulation both, every man there felt, as Jerott did, the shock and outrage at Joleta’s pitiful tale. Like some helpless audience at a play, they heard Joleta say, with the same obsessive clarity, ‘Where is he? He should see your nephew, shouldn’t he?’ And suddenly breaking out again, with tears of anger for the first time streaming down her damp skin: ‘He hates you! Won’t you realize it? That’s why he has done this! He hates you and all you stand for! And you thought you could convert him!’ And, standing in her dirty gown, she laughed and sobbed at once, her hands hanging loose.
It was Jerott who, seeing that Gabriel dared not touch her, picked up her cloak and held her, wrapped again, against his travel-stained shoulder. Gabriel said, the magnificent voice uncertain, ‘I didn’t hope to … convert him. That would have been too officious. Joleta … Joleta, I only wanted him to worship you as I did. With that light in his life, he would have achieved nothing but good.’
‘His achievements are obvious,’ said Joleta bitterly. ‘Where is he?’
‘We shall go before he comes,’ said Gabriel quickly. ‘I was leaving anyway. We need only go a little earlier than I thought. Grizel Scott will take us in.’
With the girl’s weight heavy on his arm, ‘She can’t travel,’ said Jerott flatly. ‘And for God’s sake, you’re not going to let Lymond turn her out? Or turn you out, for that matter.’
Slurred still, but intelligible, Lancelot Plummer’s voice intruded. ‘So this is his little pastime—our fireball Count who’s so finicky about other gentlemen’s manners. I don’t think,’ said the architect with precise loathing, ‘that I care to continue in his unedifying company. De Seurre?’
‘He’ll find a few to his own taste, no doubt,’ said Michel de Seurre abruptly, called from sleep, like the rest, by a silent des Roches.