Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [275]
‘Do you wonder,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay’s accented voice quietly at Jerott’s elbow, ‘do you wonder, perhaps, why M. Crawford chose to come back at all?’
‘Wait,’ said Jerott, without listening. Gabriel’s voice, it seemed to him, had gone unaccountably flat, and the big man, his guinea-gold hair bright in the torchlight, was looking, not at Lymond’s face pressed to the wood but below: below the long throat, starkly lit by the torches, the collarbones outlined in gold and smudged black, the chest exposed where the shirt had been torn back to the shoulders, above the strong, leaved rib-cage and the hollow diaphragm, black and brilliant by turn as his disarranged breathing for the moment defied control.
Cut into the fine skin of the breast, the new scar sharp and black in the light, was a crude attempt at an Eight-Sided Cross. Jerott did not know its history, although Adam Blacklock might have told him, and Lymond’s own family at Midculter certainly could. He only knew, as some of them did, that Lymond had borne the mark, whatever it was, since the day of the Hot Trodd and Will Scott’s death.
It was perhaps the reminder of that occasion, and of Lymond’s drunken débâcle, that made Graham Malett’s gentle face change in the torch-light; made him draw himself up, as he seldom did, to his great height and stretching his hand, take himself from its hook the strong, knotted thong Lymond was accustomed to use, in time of need, on the backs of his men.
‘Pray,’ said Graham Malett to the man chained alone in the dark night before his own house, his own men in a shrinking, shuffling ring of bright faces around. ‘And repent. For we are here, a small sort of knights and squires, to bring you in your vilety to fear God and greet pain as His mentor. Let us taste,’ said Gabriel, his white teeth suddenly clenched, ‘this lewd elegance, this hauteur, this Olympian irony now.’
And from his great height, his forearms ridged through his sleeves, he brought down the whip.
XV
Death of an Illusion
(St Mary’s, September 1552)
IT seemed almost certain that Cheese-wame Henderson was dead. He had not replied for a long time when Philippa spoke to him, and when she prodded him as he lay, doubled forward on her horse’s neck, he did not move any more. It would have been sensible to have shouldered him in a respectful way down to the ground and then mounted herself, for her shoes had fallen apart and she was walking among the papery bracken and wiry heather of these trackless Scottish hills in her bare feet. But if he proved not to be dead, Philippa didn’t think that, without his help, she could ever get him back on to the mare. And unless she got them both food and shelter soon, she felt she would probably die herself. And Kate would not approve of that.
At the thought of it, a watery grin crossed Philippa’s white, swollen face and she stopped again, as she often did, to rest herself and the horse, but mainly to check a childish wandering in her thoughts, and to remind herself sternly of her plans and her duties.
She had got herself lost on leaving Wauchope Forest: that she knew. Long before now she should have met some kind of cabin or keep: even the homes of thieves like the Turnbulls who infested the district. But she had met no one, and the sun had appeared briefly and gone early, leaving a grey noon that had deepened, with unbelievable ill luck, into fog. In the end she had simply sat down, and although Cheese-wame was very weak, she had got him dismounted and he had started a fire, and they had eaten the last of the food.
They had stayed by the fire in the dank gloom until the heavy moisture that beaded her hair and sparkled in Cheese-wame’s brown beard turned imperceptibly to rain, and she got Cheese-wame somehow, with his help, on to the mare, which was fresher, and through the clearing mists to a belt of trees, dimly seen in the distance.
She was walking then,