Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [304]
‘There he is. Take him,’ said Gabriel’s voice, ringing, hoarse with emotion, out of the darkness. ‘Take him, in Christ’s name, with his hands red yet again in another man’s blood.’ And suddenly, with a hiss of drawn steel, the trampling feet of an army seemed to converge on Lymond; and the High Street, the booths, the Stinkand Raw and the dark graveyard leading down to the Cowgate were all peopled with soldiers.
Jerott waited just long enough to see Lymond jump to his feet, white and lithe, his sword out, and to be glad that he himself was not in the party which was to arrest Francis Crawford here and now. Instead, Jerott turned, and facing the doorway, his black eyes alight, he struck with his sword the first blade that fell into the lamplight while at his back Lymond crossed Buccleuch’s body with a bound and, striking through the rotten back of the booth with blade and shoulder, burst through into the jostling darkness beyond.
Jerott held them at bay for a matter of seconds. Then he was thrust aside as Maccullo was, his cry unnoticed, as d’Oisel’s Frenchmen poured after, shouting. His cloak half-pulled from his shoulders, the young knight straddled Buccleuch’s helpless body, buffeted on all sides, and strained to see, through the milling bodies, whether Lymond was through, while using the flat of his blade viciously to keep the trampling feet clear and to protect himself from rough hands.
He saw Bute Herald, caught in the swirling tide, suddenly reach a decision and, fighting his way through to where Jerott had left the horses, untie one and set off down Conn’s Close, with two or three men at his stirrups. The boy must have come back from the Tolbooth with a sergeant and some men. The Kerrs, if the Kerrs had been responsible, would not get far. Then Jerott himself turned to follow Lymond and the French to where the shouting was loudest; and there came the sound of snapping timber as the booths crashed; and smashed glass as men reeled back into the little windows of the lower lands. So the Chevalier Blyth came face to face with a massive shadow standing silent in the gaping back of the stall: the shadow of a tall man whose white plume stirred in the night air and whose cuirass glinted bright, like his own, under the long black robe, starred on the shoulder, of a Grand Cross of the Order of St John.
‘My poor lad,’ said Sir Graham Reid Malett gently. ‘You wear your robes, who have broken every vow of chivalry the Order requires. You have chosen to follow that headstrong and lonely young man, and no prayers can save you now.… Are you listening?’ For behind them, swirling up the Lawnmarket where every window was crowded and every stair laden with people, the noise of night-blinded pursuit had reached a screaming crescendo. ‘I doubt,’ said Graham Malett gravely, ‘if he will reach the Tolbooth prison alive.’
Then for the first time, Jerott truly believed all that he had learned of Graham Malett: would have believed it even had he not seen, a spark in Gabriel’s hand, the dagger he had brought to use. Afterwards he knew he owed his life to the burgher watch and the law men from the Tolbooth, who stumbling just then into the wrecked Luckenbooth, shone their lanterns on the old man who lay at their feet, and then summoned the monks from the Maison Dieu at the head of Bell’s Wynd to carry the heavy, disfigured body into their quiet chapel.
But by then Jerott had gone, fighting through the throng to reach its wild and disputing centre, aware all the time of the tall magnificent man moving smiling behind in his wake. How many of Gabriel’s men lay ahead? Of course, Gabriel would make it his business to see that Lymond did not reach the Tolbooth alive. But Francis Crawford