Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [318]
Some of this, in his dry, accented voice, d’Oisel was already saying. ‘You chose to fight your duel with Graham Malett here, in this land. You drew this great and ruinous power from Malta and brought its real nature to light.… Many lives have been lost, many souls disillusioned; many in rejecting Gabriel will also now reject all Gabriel professed. I do not say,’ said the King of France’s General, his long face shadowed in the failing candles, ‘that you could have prevented Graham Malett from following you, or that if you had asked for help earlier you would have met with anything but disbelief. But this nucleus force, so brilliantly organized for quick expansion, was the weapon Malett would have used in the end against all of us, and possibly, too, against Malta.’
‘But he failed to use it,’ said Lymond quietly. ‘Because although we have men of religion among us, we use also other yardsticks of thought. I said once, I think, that the best thing the Order could do would be to offer the Osmanlis free passage and thereby force the warring countries of Christendom to unite. Had they not been smothered under the easy blanket of their vows, the Order should have learned that there is one thing more important by far than uniform piety … peace.’
‘All right,’ said Jerott suddenly. ‘But for what do you substitute the great ideals, the discipline of the Church? Every army follows something. You know your own power. In a month you will have all the men of St Mary’s in your hand. Is hero-worship any better? And what if the next leader they follow is Gabriel or his like?’
‘There will be no successor,’ said Lymond abruptly. ‘That is the sine qua non. When I can no longer control it, St Mary’s disappears. I have made every possible provision; in the officers I have chosen, and in the financial arrangements I have made. Only if the company had gone to France as part of a national army could Gabriel have afforded to have armed and maintained it, and even then, a good third would, I believe, have rejected him and stayed behind.… It was dangerous.
‘Of course it was dangerous. I thought, I believe, to repay a debt by giving my own land for a few months the security it had lacked for forty years.… But we are still infants, where emotion finds outlet in force and force is met by emotion, and people cannot conceive of themselves even yet as nations instead of as families … and certainly not as a brotherhood of nations, when even sister religions bring their armies against one another.… Take heart,’ said Lymond at last, with cold, exhausted irony. ‘I shall convey them abroad.’
D’Oisel watched him. ‘You could, if you wished, stand at the Queen Mother’s right hand.’ And Jerott, hearing, wondered if he guessed why Francis Crawford had been sent to Malta by Montmorency of France: to remove him, perhaps for all time, from the influence of the de Guises. Lymond had put his life, for that short space, at the disposal of the Knights of St John—his life, but nothing else. He had chosen a different destiny. And that, now, had brought him the offer that the Constable, long ago, had foreseen.
Lymond shook his head. The blood he had lost, the long bouts of alternate violence and strain, the patience and self-control he had had to bring, now, to this deliberate and studied examination in the midst of dizziness and physical pain and all the devastating reaction of the news he had just received had, together, brought him at last to the end of the long night. He said, ‘No.… We are not, either, a royal tool. If you are short of violent and persevering men to fight your battles in France … send the Kerrs. Jerott … the men should get back to their quarters. I shall join you all