Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [282]
The last of the torches by then had gone out. In the dim light from the castle windows and from the lanterns kept alight at the gatehouse and on the far walls, Jerott checked with his colleagues that no drunken reveller remained, asleep in the mud, to be found raving in the morning.
By his orders, Randy Bell had gone indoors to Gabriel; and two of his fellow-knights, their hands gentle, had faced the task of lifting Joleta and carrying her indoors to his bed. The debris in the great hall, also by his orders, was being cleared. No one went near the dark post in the centre of the courtyard or looked at the man bound there. After a sharp exchange, Adam Blacklock had walked off, grimly, in the opposite direction. So Jerott, by his own design, was alone when at last, his eyes sunk in his head, every nerve throbbing with tiredness, he walked slowly across to the post.
The rain had stopped. In the castle, only two or three lights now remained to beribbon the cobbles. Far off you could hear, under many roofs, the thinning rumble of tired men’s talk.
In the courtyard the silence was absolute. He tried to conjecture how much blood Lymond had lost, between the flogging, the rough handling, the fall. They had been careful to break none of his limbs and he had fallen loosely; he had fainted, Jerott thought, before he touched ground.
Randy would have to care for him: he might not like that. And they would have to guard him from Gabriel. If Graham Malett had wanted him dead before, how must he feel now? They would have to guard him, too, from his men. Except that, by morning, they would want to think of very little but their headaches. They would hardly remember, he hoped, that they had left Lymond here, in the rain.
That had been a good point Adam Blacklock had raised: that old Trotty Luckup’s death should be looked into. He would question Philippa. Better, he would take her to Midculter with him and see Joleta’s two grooms. Philippa was all right. He had sent indoors half a dozen times since it was all over to see how she was. She had fallen asleep, steaming, before the big fire, and someone kindly had replaced her wet cloak with a dry one and had wrapped a rug about her. She had not wakened. He wondered, briefly, in passing why Nicolas de Nicolay had insisted on staying at her side, but decided that Frenchmen were odd, and this one could be trusted.
Walking slowly in the dark, Jerott Blyth thought, at last, of all his stirring hopes when he had rediscovered Francis Crawford in Sicily. And after, at Birgu and Mdina. And then the brilliant, shadowed affinity they had nearly found in the arsenal at Tripoli. And lastly, in watching Lymond fashion this force.
Gabriel had hoped to catch and tame this exceptional spirit. Gabriel instead had been reduced to killing it with his bare hands. Jerott wondered, flatly, if he were a worse Christian than Gabriel, or a less exacting one.
The post was here. He braced himself, putting one scarred hand on its cross-branch and groping forward with the other for the man chained there in the dark.
His fingers met nothing. He moved closer, running quick hands over the wood, then on the ground, in case by some fantasy the links had broken and the prisoner in his weakness dropped to the earth.
The ground was empty. The whipping-post was vacant. And, when he ran for a lantern and looked, the chains which should have secured Lymond, above and below, were all unbolted, neatly, from their place in the wood, leaving the padlocks intact.
But that was half an hour’s work. No man in the whole of St Mary’s had