Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [303]
The three men, the Grand Prior’s train of twelve men-at-arms riding behind them, swept up to and through the Bow gates, and cantering up the steep slopes to Castle Hill, deployed down the street. Paris, they found in their turn, had departed. Leaving Sandilands to rouse the Tolbooth, puzzled, angry and a little afraid, Lymond, followed by Jerott, set off down the wide Lawnmarket to call on Buccleuch.
They passed the Luckenbooths as Robert Kerr entered them, with the three men at his back, searching for Wat Scott of Buccleuch; searching and hearing presently the sound of growling distress; the low whining breath that might be a dog’s, but which proved to be the high heart of Buccleuch, stirring in his blood, whispering for help and for vengeance. Then, as Lymond’s hoofbeats grew fainter, with Jerott’s, down the long hill, Robert Kerr drew his sword and entered the booth.
With sword and dagger the three men with Kerr finished the work begun by John Hume, three and four times over, plying blade over blade until the mess of clothed flesh in the stall was indistinguishable from the filth round about. Then pulling from the hacked body the bloody remnants of cloth, with its familiar jewelled clasps, chipped and dulled over with use, the grey chopped hair pressed in the folds, they too made for Conn’s Close in the dark, running.
Few people in Edinburgh in that hour and year would have cared to stop a party of men hastening past the Mercat Cross in the dark, one bearing a bundle of rags. Adam Maccullo, Bute Herald, on his way from Holyrood to Castle Hill was the exception. As the light from his bearer’s lantern fell first on two horsemen riding swiftly downhill, and then on the men who, emerging from the Booth Raw, slipped quickly downstreet to Conn’s Close, he called out at once, ‘What’s the matter?’
Only John Pakok, Coldenknowes’s man, had the hardihood to reply. ‘There’s a lad fallen,’ he remarked, and walked on, whistling, after the others down the sharp descent to the Cowgate.
But already Maccullo’s lantern and the sound of the voices had brought Lymond back, in a wide arc, from the Tron by Buccleuch’s deserted house. Jerott, following, found Lymond dismounted and running, with Maccullo at his side, towards the dark, jostling booths, their paint blistered, their dirty ribbons fingering the air under the jerking light of the lamp. Swinging in turn off his horse, Jerott tied both loosely to the stone pillars of the nearest arcade and was moving quickly after the two men when Maccullo cried out.
Now, cautiously, lights glimmered in the high lands above the booths and the church; shutters creaked back, and candlelight on first one high balcony, then another, glinted on the brass rail and the peering flesh of the owners, craning above. Then Maccullo’s boy, without the lantern, came running out of the Booth Raw and turned up towards the Tolbooth as if all the ghosts in the graveyard were after him, and Jerott, arriving at last, nearly fell over the herald, standing mute at the broken door of a booth where, the lantern light rimming his hair, Lymond silently knelt. Beside him, in the dirt, lay the disjointed carcass, wet, warm, grossly squandered like soft fruit, which for the better part of seventy years had answered the heroic spirit of Walter Scott of Buccleuch.
Jerott saw that Maccullo had recognized Lymond: was staring at him as he knelt, his hand uncertainly on his sword-belt. Lymond himself paid no attention, and although the line between