Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [284]
‘Don’t be silly,’ said Jerott Blyth shortly. ‘He’s only human, Sir Graham, like the rest of us. You can’t turn and rend in a moment a girl you’ve adored all your life. Lymond should have told Gabriel, somehow, what his sister had become. Instead, he pushed her back in the gutter.’
‘But Sir Graham knew what his sister was,’ said Philippa perseveringly. And as Jerott swung round, impatient and scornful, she went doggedly on. ‘He sent her the drugs that brought on her miscarriage. Ask Lord Culter. He told her, once when I was at his home, he hoped she’d thrown away the box her brother had sent her that had brought her seasickness on. Trotty spoke of a box, too. She had been shown it, when Joleta thought she was dying, and recognized what the drug was.’
‘You’re obsessed by the thing,’ said Jerott roundly, but not without kindness. ‘Look, think of something else. Whoever is to blame in the whole bloody mess, it’s not Graham Malett.’
Then they reached Midculter and found that elegant residence in a state of unusual confusion; for someone, on an early errand to the stables, had found half their valuable horses cut loose, and two grooms clubbed to death.
The grooms had been Joleta’s. Impressed into silence by this piece of information, Jerott led his cavalcade with increased urgency from gatehouse to castle, and once inside the door, de Nicolay and Philippa at his back, met and withstood with difficulty the shock of Madame Donati’s onrush. ‘Mistress Joleta? Why have you returned? Is she with Sir Graham safely? Madness! Madness!’ said Evangelista Donati harshly. ‘To travel with the baby so near!’
Behind were the stairs, and at the top of the stairs, her small spine erect, her face firmly controlled, stood Sybilla. Jerott pushed past the agitated Venetian and climbing, came to rest a step or two below Lymond’s mother.
‘I did not think,’ said Sybilla without moving, ‘that you would cross this threshold again?’
‘I am wiser,’ said Jerott, in a subdued voice. He had forgotten to prepare for this interview, coming on the heels, it must seem to her, of the visit he had made in her absence, screaming at Madame Donati and riding, raging, with the weeping Joleta, back to St Mary’s.
‘What do you say?’ said the duenna’s sharp voice at his elbow. ‘Where is Joleta? What has happened?’
‘The stairs,’ said a definite Somerville voice from below them, ‘are no place for emotion. You could get a nasty fall. It’s Philippa, Lady Culter. May we come up?’
And Sybilla, a little spark of humour back in her eyes, said, ‘My goodness, the woman of sense is with us again. Of course. Come up. And M. de Nicolay, isn’t it? We have met at Court. David, wine in the hall, please.…’ And she led the way up.
But before the wine came, Jerott Blyth took his stance by the windows, his thick, Indian-black hair flung back out of his eyes, his beaked, flaring nose jutting into the air, and said uncompromisingly, ‘Joleta is dead.’
Evangelista Donati, her hands folded genteelly in her lap, opened her prim mouth and screamed.
‘How?’ said Lady Culter shortly; and as the screaming went on, drowning Jerott’s reply, she rose, administered a sudden, painful slap on the side of the dariolette’s face, and sat down in the suddenly restored silence. ‘Did she lose the child?’
Jerott found, enraged, that his voice had lost half its power. At the second attempt he said, scrapingly, ‘There was a … struggle at St Mary’s in the courtyard. She … was killed.’
‘Killed!’ Sybilla’s voice, unusually high, clashed with Evangelista Donati’s ‘Killed! But who has killed her?’
‘I’m sorry … it was Sir Graham,’ Jerott said, and Sybilla’s hands dropped to her lap.
Into absolute silence, ‘Killed her? Sir Graham? But this is the last thing he would do,’ said Joleta’s governess slowly. ‘She is not dead! This is a falsehood! A falsehood to frighten me into.…’
She broke off herself, on that rising note, as Nicolas de Nicolay said, ‘It is true, Signora. We had discovered,