Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [291]
It might have been Mr Blyth’s good luck, but he was doing nothing about it. Instead, gasping still, he was looking at Francis Crawford, lying still at the foot of the table, his skin flushed, his lids heavy, his lips cracked with fever.
Jerott shifted his feet. Archie Abernethy swore, and, sponge in hand, dropped beside the man Jerott had felled so handily, while Jerott uneasily drew back. He said angrily, ‘He chose to fight. Did he think I’d come crawling back, overcome by remorse?’
‘The charitable assumption,’ said Alec Guthrie’s grating voice, ‘is that he didn’t intend his friends to be hurt in his quarrel. Also, he had reason to believe he could teach you a suitable lesson with a raging temperature and all four limbs paralysed. He was wrong, that’s all.… Are you going, or do we have to kick you out?’
‘He’ll be mad,’ said Archie in a low voice. Under his careful hands, Lymond made a sudden, wordless sound, and his closed eyes tightened.
‘But on the other hand,’ said Guthrie coolly, ‘he’ll be in no condition to put his madness into effect. I’m sure Mr Blyth is right. To add remorse to Mr Blyth’s present burdens would, I am sure, be intolerable. Let’s keep it simple. Get out.’
For a moment more, Jerott Blyth hesitated. Then, his face grim, he rose to his feet, retrieved his weapon, and went.
Shrewd, competent, hard-headed professionals that they were, neither Guthrie nor Archie Abernethy had anticipated anything like the storm that broke upon them when Lymond came to his senses at last to find Blyth had gone. Swaying with weakness, Francis Crawford described to the two silent men exactly what they had done. And even Guthrie, sustaining those flaming blue eyes, recognized the time had come to be silent, listening, and to hope merely not to be dismissed.
But in the end they were of course dismissed, totally and finally, to go, in More’s bitter words, to kill up the clergy and sell priests’ heads as cheap as sheeps’ heads, three for a penny, buy who would. It was Abernethy who spoke as the tirade ended and Lymond turned aside to the wall, shaking with foolish exhaustion.
‘Oh, ye’ve a temper,’ said Archie consideringly. ‘And ye had a rare old time losing it, and ye were like enough justified at that. But take a thought, too. Are ye to accuse Graham Malett in the law courts from the flat o’ a bier-claith, or on two sticks like a wife wi’ Arthretica? If ye’re tae walk upright like the fine, testy gentleman ye are, ye’ll need some nursing, I’d say. So I fear Guthrie and I had best bide.’
He was prepared, philosophically, for a savage response. In fact, dropped from abrupt necessity among the tumbled rugs of his pallet, Francis Crawford sat with rock-like obstinacy and shivered, while from above, Alec Guthrie’s harsh voice went on gently, ‘Archie’s right. My dear lad, you need all the help you can get; don’t cast it off. We were wrong to let Blyth go. I admit it. But he knows now what he risks. I think he’ll come back to you. I think they’ll all come back to you. But you and Gabriel stand opposed in all this sorry battle. Not one of us can take your place.’
Lymond turned. His eyes were brilliant with fever. He was smiling. ‘Why should they come back? They’re not all simple-minded. If I could let Joleta die, what fool is still going to trust me? Who is going to separate cowardice from moral expediency when even I, looking back, can’t now be sure …? That is what has driven Blyth away. Nothing but that.’
‘That’s nonsense,’ said Guthrie sharply. ‘There was no possible guarantee that the case against Gabriel would be complete on your death. It was far more likely to lose all its impetus. If you had never run up those steps, Joleta would have died at Gabriel’s hands just the same. It was opportunism—pure, brilliant opportunism to force you to do what you did, and undermine all the doubts the Somerville lassie had sown. Nobody would have been more stunned or more contemptuous than Gabriel if you had stood firm.…’
The grating voice hesitated. Guthrie said kindly, ‘As you said … we are not all simple-minded. What you have