Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [295]
But Janet was satisfied.
*
And so the time drew to a close, and at St Mary’s Gabriel received and dispatched messengers, and played chess smiling with M. d’Oisel, and watched, with the French Ambassador, while the cream of his men, confident in training and skill, outpaced their French custodians in every exercise of the jousting ground and the butts. For M. d’Oisel was being allowed to discover what kind of weapon Sir Graham had sheathed at the asking, and how smoothly it fitted his hand.
And all the time Jerott Blyth stood at Gabriel’s side. Resisting the easy course, Jerott had come back to justify at last all the Order had given him, when he had nothing to give in return but a past to be buried. He had told Lymond what he intended to do. He meant to save Graham Malett: to give Gabriel the chance no one had given his sister. And yet, to keep his implicit promise to Lymond, he must do it without betraying what he knew, or how close the hounds were at Gabriel’s heels.
It was not possible. It could never have been possible, although Jerott kept his word and in their prayers together, in the long discussions he forced on all the great issues of religion and ethics, he gave no sign that Graham Malett’s own spiritual welfare was his concern.
But by the same token, nothing he could do carried weight. Looking at Gabriel’s unclouded face, that could so easily darken with pain at mention of Joleta or of Lymond, Jerott found it incredible that any man could maintain such a pretence; could kneel, his arm round Jerott’s shoulders in chapel, and pray for Francis Crawford’s black soul. And that such a man, asked to countermand the order to track Lymond by bloodhound, could say quietly, ‘Jerott … have you not learned that the flesh and its ills are less than nothing? His crimes against my sister, the bitter effects of a shameless ambition … these mean disorders of the soul far more desperate than any harm his body might suffer. He is sick’ said Graham Malett gently, and pressed Jerott’s shoulder. ‘Don’t deny him the healing he needs.’
Then, gazing up into those candid eyes, He is sick, thought Jerott Blyth grimly. And I have denied him the healing he needs. But in body only, Sir Graham. There is nothing wrong with Francis Crawford’s sense of the major moralities, and a good deal that is admirable. Whereas.…
Whereas in Gabriel, he recognized, sickeningly at last, a power for evil, effortlessly sustained, which could come only from a mind totally warped.
Against this, no living Knight of the Order could hope to succeed. To plead, to reveal what he knew, would merely allow Malett to flee and would place the fate of all Malett’s future victims at his, Jerott’s door. He had been wrong, and Lymond right. The task of returning Graham Malett to the light of grace was the dream of a fool.
Jerott did not go back to Lymond. Only, after two or three days of brutal self-examination, he found out Nicolas de Nicolay who had returned to St Mary’s, secure in his famous name and led by his native, long-whiskered curiosity to watch the duel end. And Nicolas de Nicolay, spry on a keg in a corner of the brewery, watching the big vats toil and ream, turned and said with satisfaction on his gnome-like face, ‘Ah: the cow turned back into Io again. You have come to ask me, I hope, about Malta. I have much about Malta to tell you. And of Tripoli. Come. Let us walk.’
And so, walking head bent over an empty Scottish moor, with the young, cold wind of October running fresh through his cloak, Jerott Blyth was taken back to the blue misty seas and brazen skies and the hot powdery walls, cream-pink against both, of his convent in Malta, and heard the story of Dragut’s attack as Francis Crawford and de Nicolay had pieced it together.
It was the story, when you thought of it, of a cold-blooded pursuit of power without absolute parallel. There was in Graham Malett none of the dynastical ambition that had made the House of Guise great, and that had made of the Queen Dowager