Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [279]
It was an uneasy encounter. Francis Crawford, his hand gripping de Nicolay’s shoulder, met Jerott’s bright black eyes with very little expression, and Jerott said thickly. ‘You’ve heard? According to the girl, Joleta is … is.…’
‘She is, too,’ Blacklock said briefly. ‘I saw her at Dumbarton.’ And he added a small, carefully chosen epithet.
‘Oh, God, don’t waste time on her,’ said Lymond wearily. ‘Don’t you suppose she’s going to get all, and more than she deserves?’
And shaking off Blacklock’s helping hand, with sudden impatience, he limped quickly and crookedly to where Gabriel, moving at last, was walking clear through the pressed-back, murmuring crowd, to where his sister stood on the steps.
On the stairs, the profiled triangle leading up to the great doors of St Mary’s, Graham Malett and his sister Joleta stood quite alone. Whatever leering glances the soaked grotesques capering still in the courtyard might cast up to the staircase, none of Gabriel’s brothers-in-arms wished to intrude on this, his pitiless disillusionment.
Quick as the flooding water in the darkening courtyard, the word had gone round. It was true, what Lymond had hinted. The Somerville girl, whose dislike of Crawford was notorious, had come barefoot from Hexham to tell it. The pure and lovely Joleta, lodestone of Gabriel’s life, was a wanton, self-willed and careless as a young animal. What he had worshipped was defiled. What he had cherished had secretly mocked at him. No wonder that, in the light from St Mary’s big doors, he seemed to grow in height, to stiffen and harden in anguish, the water running unregarded down his broad shoulders, soaking his wide sleeves, his long tunic, the hose of his strong, beautifully-turned legs.
Graham Malett lifted his heavy, leonine head till the rain beat on his throat, and his closed lids, and his wet, ruddy gold hair. Then, his throat pulsing, his chest swollen with air, he gave a great cry; a wordless call from the heart that stopped them all, half-sobered, half-limp with convulsive fatigue, where they stood. Standing there, his clenched hands outflung, his eyes slowly opening on his sister, ‘I would have given you my heart to eat,’ said Gabriel’s low, carrying voice. ‘And you have paid me in filth. Go inside. Go.’
Soaked through cloak and night-smock, hollow-cheeked with fatigue, braced against the nameless bulk she was carrying, Joleta stared back, dark rings under her eyes. The straight, sodden mass of her hair, coiled dripping round one thin shoulder, showed like some delicate cast the perfect shape of her head, the lovely line of jaw and neck. She said, harshly and suddenly, in a voice no one there recognized, ‘No! I prefer to stay here.’
There was a pause. Then Graham Malett said softly, ‘You are untouchable. No one here would presume to interfere between us.’
‘One man would,’ said Joleta. In her bloodless face her eyes were as Jerott had seen them once, at Boghall, screaming from the floor at Lymond: wild with anger and a kind of unstable excitement. ‘Shall I speak to him, Graham? Shall I ask him for my brother’s living heart for my Morgengab? I would let him whip me, Graham. That would be only fair, wouldn’t it?’ And as Gabriel, his face suddenly quiet, made a small movement towards her, Joleta said, ‘Take care, Knight of the Ass. Knight of the Ass, stuffed with cotton and shown in a cage with two monkeys, St John and St Andrew.’ She laughed, and still watching him, began to climb, sideways, the steps above them that led to the big doors. ‘It is great sport, in Francis Crawford’s yoke,’ she said, and laughed again. Graham Malett began to climb after her.
Below, Adam Blacklock released a long breath and took another. ‘She’s crazed. She’ll drive him to attack her.’
‘She merely warns him,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay, in prosaic voice, ‘that if he harms her, she has it in her power to betray him. She does it with unwise violence, I think. It is possibly her nature.’
Jerott