Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [317]
‘Did you think,’ said Graham Malett, ‘this great enterprise of my life could be pinched out by a halfpenny pedlar of arrows? Go seek your son. You won’t find him. Nor will Cormac O’Connor, who claims Oonagh as his wife … and any child of hers as his son … is it not a matter for wit?’
The vessel had come to rest. Lymond stirred, and Gabriel, smiling, turned and using both hands, drew from the broken altar the long, shining blade of his sword. ‘You won’t find him,’ he said, ‘because he is going to have a new master. He will know the whipping-post, sweetheart, as you never knew it. He will learn to carry my filth, and when it pleases me, to sleep in my bed. It will teach you,’ said Gabriel, and holding the sword, he began walking, slowly, towards the shadows by the Lady Steps and the door. ‘It will teach you to remember Graham Malett.’
There must have been a horse waiting outside. There was, they found afterwards, a ship riding close in Leith roads. And because the French King’s Lieutenant in Scotland did not want trouble with the French King or the Order; and because he suspected that Lymond’s presence in Scotland might be an embarrassment to him, the order to pursue did not come as readily as it might, and Graham Malett caught both the horse and the ship.
Lymond had pulled himself to one knee, Philippa’s frightened face at his shoulder, when the men of St Mary’s realized that Graham Malett was being allowed to escape and, like sand sucked by the tide, they began to pour through the pillared vaults of the church to where the French still held their barrier firm.
Of those in the front, Jerott was the first to act. His white face blazing, he knocked up the sword-arm of the Frenchman standing before him and had begun to run forward, three men, sword in hand, flinging themselves on his heels, when Lymond, swaying, got to his feet and seizing Jerott as he passed, swung him round and held him to face the surging, shouting throng.
‘Stop!’ His voice, using all he knew of science to give weight to its weakness, cut through the uproar. ‘Stop, you cob-headed fools. Are you an army or a rabble, brawling here with your allies?’ He paused, and when Philippa suddenly took his arm, he did not shake it off. ‘You had a leader who betrayed you. He has answered to me, on behalf of all of you, for that. For the rest, the law, in M. d’Oisel’s hands, will act … is acting.’
Behind him, at last, their captain leading, d’Oisel’s troops were deploying, sword in hand, from the church. D’Oisel himself, his orders given, waited on in the choir. He waited until, under Lymond’s tongue, the impulse to violence died and his men came to a halt, uncertainly, eyeing each other and their officers, and those among them who had chosen Graham Malett to lead.
‘I am indebted,’ said M. d’Oisel abruptly. ‘And dumbfounded. I had thought it would be the work of many months to get these men once more under control.’
Lymond’s face was totally without colour. ‘You owe me nothing,’ he said. ‘Your duty, as you saw it, was to let Graham Malett escape. These men of St Mary’s know him now as a blaspheming impostor. If your men and mine had met in that race, Graham Malett’s death would have cost more than any one man is worth.… Let him go. I, too, have taken precautions. We may not stop him, but we may manage to keep track of him somehow.… We must.’
‘All the more I salute your most praiseworthy discipline. It is a warning though, is it not,’ said M. d’Oisel crisply, ‘of what might happen to such a tool as St Mary’s in the wrong hands?’
Something—what?—thought Jerott, about these words was familiar. Then he remembered. Long ago, in Malta, Lymond had said something of the sort to Graham Malett, speaking of the condition of the Order. ‘You are now what every sect potentially becomes when it loses leadership. A tool.’ He had recognized and taunted them with the weakness of the Order; but then in creating St Mary’s, had he not