Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [42]
And, ‘He is right,’ said Gabriel later when, brusquely, de Villegagnon conveyed explanation and apology together. ‘On your integrity and mine, on the integrity of la Valette and de Lescaut and all the Knights of the French Langue—on our unshakeable faith in the Order will this outcome depend.’
*
‘It is obvious to a child,’ Grand Master Juan de Homedès was saying without moving, without turning his thin neck, his thin temples, his thin nose and eyeless socket clothed in a patch above the black and silver Aragonese beard, ‘to a bantling, that Dragut has no ill intent towards Malta and Tripoli. It is France he visits with so vast a fleet—where else? D’Aramon, the French Ambassador to Turkey, awaits them, we know, with muleloads of gold. They wintered once before at Toulon—they do it again. Your master the Constable of France is mistaken, M. le Chevalier de Villegagnon—and so are you.’
In rank as great as a Cardinal Deacon; peer to princes; ‘cousin’ to the kings of Europe and answerable only to the Pope, the 48th Grand Master of the Sovereign Order of St John and Prince of Malta was an arrogant old Spaniard, dedicated to Christ, nepotism and the Emperor Charles V. In the byways of Rome he would have been a holy old man, no better and not much worse than the rest of the College of Cardinals. On Malta he was still holy and old, but he was also a selfish and unduly vain patriarch in a post requiring a saint; and he was dangerous.
Within the thick, chaste walls of the hall, lukewarm as the sun beat down outside on the white fort of St Angelo, the thirty members of the Grand Council—Bishop, the Prior of the Church, the Piliers of the eight Langues, several Priors and Conventual Bailiffs and four Knights Grand Cross—sat at two long, parallel tables, linked at top by the desk of the Vice-Chancellor, who with two priests at his side was their Secretary.
Beside the desk, and raised above it on a dais, was the canopied throne of His Eminence Grand Master de Homedès, the red silk banner of the Order with its plain, eight-pointed Cross hung above. Every man present, including de Villegagnon, erect in the space between the double rows of knights and facing the Grand Master, wore black. And alone of all the men present, the two priests and Lymond, waiting outwith the rectangle at de Villegagnon’s back, did not qualify for the holy white Cross.
Malta and Tripoli have nothing to fear. It was all de Homedès would say. In vain de Villegagnon repeated the warning sent by the Constable de Montmorency out of the esteem and affection he bore to an illustrious Order which the Grand Master de l’Isle Adam, his uncle, had governed in most perilous times. In vain did Gabriel, with courteous good sense, remind the Grand Master that according to the Order’s own brigantine, sent to Morea, all the rumours of the Levant agreed that Dragut had armed for an attack on the knights.
Lymond, who happened to know that d’Aramon’s mission, far from welcoming the Turk to Toulon, was to return to Turkey and persuade the Sultan to relieve the Emperor Charles quietly of Bône, North Africa, could not say so. And de Villegagnon, questioned narrowly and more acidly still about the true French relations with Turkey, could only reply too coldly, too loudly, that if the Turk was acting at the instance of the French King, none knew of it; but that Bône was taken from Suleiman, over the Emperor’s pledged word and with the knights’ help, and that Malta would suffer for it.
‘Because of it,’ said the big knight, straight in his robes, his high black hat tight in his hand, ‘I have left France, abandoned my King, jettisoned my career, to range myself under the banner of this threatened Order, on this warning alone, without waiting for your Serene Highness’s citation. I can do no more to express my unshakeable belief that the warning is true.’
‘You have said, I think,’ said the Grand Master’s dry voice, in the old-fashioned Spanish he commonly