Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [305]
Escape to what? To Gabriel’s assassins, les enfants de la Mate, as Lymond ironically called them? ‘Other courtesy than death thou shalt not have,’ Graham Malett had once said. Here, in the emotion of the chase and Buccleuch’s slaughter by a hand still unknown, Gabriel had his most effective chance of encompassing what he wished.
It was then that Jerott realized that he, and Graham Malett a few yards behind him, were being carried past both Stinkand Raw, church and Tolbooth, and that the crowd, swirling round the west corner of the tall prison, had debouched along the graveyard path beyond, spilling among the grey tombstones, flickering in the manifold lantern-beams and stumbling among the grey buttresses of the side and back of St Giles. It remained, and was thickest, before the wide steps leading up to the south porch of the church. Pushing and thrusting, Jerott Blyth reached those steps. D’Oisel stood at the top, his lieutenant beside him, and an officer of the city guard, his face red with worry. Crichton, the Provost of St Giles, was not there, but you could see two or three frieze cassocks, and the cloth of gold and blue velvet of the Deacon, clearly quick to assume office. With a little help from the French men-at-arms and the city officers, the crowd stayed, swaying and jostling, at the foot of the steps.
Then behind him, clear among a thousand others, Jerott felt the presence he was waiting for. Patient, undisturbed, a little amused, Graham Malett moved to his side, and laid his fine hand on Jerott’s shoulder. ‘Sanctuary,’ he observed amiably in his rich voice. ‘The foolish young man has sought sanctuary. The church will shelter him, of course, for as long as he cares to remain. But unless he means to die there, he must know that one day he will emerge, and the shackles will close.… Poor, foolhardy creature. Shall we go in, you and I,’ said Gabriel, the pressure of his hand increased suddenly on the fine tendons of Jerott’s strong neck. ‘Shall we go in and guide his soul to take the true, the selfless course?’
His hand dropped. And side by side, their robes airy behind them, the two Knights of St John of Jerusalem climbed the wide steps, between the clustering lamps, and entered the great church of St Giles.
*
From more than forty altars the long, white tapers pricked to life with their small flame the dim treasures of jewels and paintings, of silver-gilt and delicate, hand-sewn fabric and queer, painted faces that graced the aisles and chapels of the long two hundred foot nave, and lent their bouquet of light and incense to the rows of thick stone pillars that upheld the groined stone arches, far above.
Entering the murmuring silence of the church; leaving behind, thinly removed, the raucous excitement of the crowd; dismissing from his mind that circle of craning, avid faces at the south porch, Jerott Blyth walked with the man he once worshipped, past the carved font where he himself had been christened, and turning his back on the seven chapels of the west corner and their scattered, kneeling supplicants, he paced with Gabriel up the stone floor of the nave, past the Norman door, past the chapel where hung the Blue Blanket under which the citizens fought for their city, past the great stone pillars with their coats of arms and their altars, past the aisles and the altars of St Duthac and St Mungo, St Christopher and St Peter, St Columba and St Sebastian—the altars maintained by the skinners, the surgeons, the masons, the wrights, the shearers, the bonnet-makers and all the great of the past with a great achievement to be thankful for, or a great sin for which to atone.
They passed the organ, and the fine carved stalls for the prebendaries in the choir, where the officers of the church, the chaplains in their robes and the men and women who had come solely to pray and were caught up in the night’s strange events stood aside, in