Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [281]
From among all the faces below, intent, aghast, ‘Oh, my God!’ said Plummer suddenly. ‘Jump!’ There was just room, Blacklock judged, his face grey, for a slender man twisting round to drop between the rails to the ground. For a woman, a pregnant woman, there was none. And so the choice, as the great sword in front of him steadied and behind him, dyed with the blood from his back, the cruel, untameable child called Joleta pressed herself sobbing against the rail of the platform, was Francis Crawford’s.
Bright-eyed and colourless, his hair sea-wet with the rain, Lymond left it pitifully late: the vital decision, the last turning in the road he had chosen, thirteen months before, alone in Dragut’s quiet tent. He could live on, to fight Gabriel at the cost of this perverted child’s life; at the cost of throwing away all that Philippa had risked her life for. Or he could die, and trust that Joleta would live under Jerott’s strong arm, and would add her own damning testimony to the evidence against Graham Malett which he had now set in train. Either way, Gabriel had proved himself master indeed.
Jerott Blyth shut his eyes. Then, with all the power of Graham Malett’s great shoulders, Gabriel’s sword began its drive home.
Quick, quiet, light and unfleshed as a gull, Lymond dropped downwards and sideways, and with a thrust of his long hands, rolled between the lowest two bars of the railing to fall, a loose, undisciplined heap, into the courtyard below.
Above and behind, the sword he had escaped drove on, unhindered, into and through the heart of the girl.
No one moved. Below, a desert of shining pavement around him, Lymond lay where he had dropped. After the first unbelieving reflex, jerking back his sword arm, with the clotted blade already clearing with rain, Graham Malett stood, his back pressed against the castle wall, frozen also in stillness. Joleta screamed three times, a thin, breathy kind of scream, with her hands spread rigid, like shining, flesh-eating plants before her. Then, collapsing forward and sideways, she hit the top step with her shoulder at her brother’s feet, her rose-gold, rain-heavy hair whipping her cheek, and with a grotesque slowness tumbled from step to step, clumsily, downstairs.
She would have passed Jerott but, falling to his knees, he arrested her with his strong hands, and unfolding the tumbled clothing and putting back the silken hair, found and looked at her face. The eyes were open, and a look of surprised fury, terrifying in its malevolence, lit the dead face. As he watched, it vanished. Jerott laid down, heavy on his hand, the loveliest child in Christendom, and got to his feet. ‘She’s dead. Go inside,’ he said abruptly; and after a moment, Gabriel stirred, like a dead man himself, and moved without speaking into the castle.
Jerott turned round. Below him Adam Blacklock, his face turned away, was gripping the lower rail. Beside him, the geographer, his face unusually pale, said incomprehensibly to the vacant air, ‘It was right. What use proof, if he died? The man Gabriel was crazed. He would have killed the sister too, or she would have fallen. Is it not so?’
Blacklock, his face invisible, shook his head. The others, behind said nothing. Only their eyes, Jerott found, were turning, first one then the other towards himself. His hands shaking, his bowels water within him, Jerott said steadily, ‘Bring Mr Crawford here and take him indoors. He is still a prisoner, with charges to answer. What he has just done … is not, of course, a matter for law.’
But it was not, either, a matter that the men of St Mary’s, new to Gabriel’s demented violence, new to Joleta’s reported perfidy, could stomach. Before their officers, without hurrying, could reach the unconscious huddle in the dark rainswept courtyard that contained the lewd elegance, the hauteur, the Olympian irony of Francis Crawford, the men had got there first. And although Plummer and de Seurre and Bell and the rest used their voices, cuttingly, to promise retribution