Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [276]
When the rain stopped, visibility was better, or else they were viewing the nameless, rolling land to the north from a different angle; for Henderson, full of constant, hoarse apology and harsh breathing which angered and frightened her both, thought he recognized the terrain. He pointed out a line of march, which was just as well, as he shortly ceased to take any interest and Philippa was left, doggedly marching, with her shoes falling to pieces.
When night fell, she was still marching, steering by her own good sense and the stars. Tinkers or not, enemies or not, Philippa Somerville was going to stop the first stray cottager, the first stray pedlar, the first gypsy, the first human being on two legs she met, and beg them for help. It was her own deserved good luck, and by no means the incredible coincidence it seemed, that the first person she actually met that September night was Adam Blacklock.
She met him because he was on his way from that heart-searching meeting with Lymond at Boghall straight to the last meeting-place of the Turnbulls, of whom he intended to ask some very cogent questions indeed. And he found her because he was trained at St Mary’s to read geography with his body at night like a bat, and heard but could not interpret the stumbling step of a tired and heavily loaded horse, accompanied by the shuffling, clattering tread of a walker also tired, and short of leg, and most lamentably shod.
Adam Blacklock turned his horse from the causeway and rode gently, his hand on his sword, in the direction of the noise.
It stopped. But the tableau he saw silhouetted against the pale rocks of the hill was that of a drooping horse with a man laid across it, and beside it a slight figure which must be a woman’s. He said, pitching his voice clearly and quietly across the small, wild sounds of the night, ‘Are you in trouble? Don’t be afraid. I mean you no harm. But if you are, perhaps I may help.’
The tone was civilized, the voice kindly, the offer unimpeachable. Philippa Somerville, whom little daunted, laid her poor swollen face on the wet flanks of her mare and burst into uncontrollable tears.
*
After the whipping had gone on for quite some time, Joleta was sick, and Randy Bell, after a hesitant glance at her brother, took her to lie, exhausted, on his coat on the cold steps. At the same time Jerott Blyth, one hand on his arm, tried to make Gabriel stop.
It was necessary. Doing his caravans in the Mediterranean, Jerott had seen men flogged to death. He knew the process, stage by stage, and remembered that Lymond, too, must know it; must often have seen men die, and must have suffered flogging himself, often enough, in his days at the oars.
So, unlike most men, he must know exactly what he could bear. You had privacy, to begin with. Your back was to your chastiser. As long as you could hold your head up, pressed hard against the cold post, your agony was your own also. You braced yourself for each stroke, and in the end exorcised the pain with your voice.
Francis Crawford did not move when Gabriel raised his arm for the first stroke; only his closed lids tightened, a fraction, as it fell. Before Jerott’s fascinated eyes, the thong rose and then, curling, fell again, and then for a third time with no more effect. Lymond must, surely, be experiencing the agony—the three livid weals across his back, slowly welling with blood, testified to that. But he had, it would seem, divorced himself by some effort of will from the context.
Gabriel, perhaps, had reached some such conclusion too, but it did not suggest to him that his arm should falter. Divine as some punishing God, his fist rose and fell, and around him, released by his own violence from his own rules, the sherry-sack reappeared joyously, and sank from throat to throat, and the whole restored salon des singes,