Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [50]
At a taper halfway up the stairs, being human, Jerott bent his handsome black head and read, quickly and surreptitiously, the note Gabriel had given him. It was inscribed inside to the Comte de Sevigny, which was acid enough in itself. As for the note, it said merely:
Do not come. I do not wish to see you. There is no danger I face greater than the miseries I have passed. If you believe any share of the blame may be yours, then serve me now at least by leaving me in peace.
There was no signature, but the thick, forceful writing was a woman’s.
Presenting this missive a little later to Lymond, Jerott Blyth to his own surprise found himself incapable of a straight lie. When the other man, having glanced at the note, said, ‘Oonagh O’Dwyer. How did this come to you?’ the knight told him.
Lymond’s fair brows rose. For the first time it occurred to Jerott that he would be an uncomfortable enemy to make. Then suddenly the other man laughed and said, ‘Gabriel’s thoughtfulness is unending. Or did he think I would suspect him of writing it himself? Recruiting ardour could do no more.’ And then the whole thing was overlaid and forgotten in the morning news from St Angelo.
The Calabrians had revolted. Two hundred young men from the mountains of Italy, sitting sullenly in the straw of their stifling hostel, refused blankly to embark and fight the battles of the Order of St John in Tripoli. The Chevalier de Villegagnon brought the news, grimly, and Gabriel himself went to speak to them. For a moment only, the storm of complaint was quieted; but before he left, all Birgu heard the calls of ‘sacrifice!’ and the blare of country voices, hotly renewed.
When he did leave, Graham Malett took the captain of the Viceroy’s bucolic army with him, direct to the Grand Master. There it all poured out as the young Italian, sweating with heat and stress, defended his men. They were shepherd boys and labourers. They had never seen a gun, held a sword in their fists. They didn’t see, said the captain, a rising querulousness fighting through the deference, why they should go where the knights wouldn’t go, to defend the knights’ property and die in the knights’ place.
Benign and barren of sympathy as the limestone of Malta, the one-eyed Aragonese face of the Grand Master de Homedès studied the young man. Tripoli, said the Grand Master, speaking in honour of the situation in appalling Spanish-Italian, was perfectly secure without his poor two hundred Calabrians. Did the captain really think the Order would abandon one of their own Marshals, their knights and their soldiers, in a fortress which could not defend itself? The Viceroy’s army was simply required to travel to Tripoli because the Viceroy himself had commanded it; and the Grand Master was content, as the captain himself should be (if he wished to keep his post), to carry out the Viceroy’s orders.
That worked for precisely five minutes, or as long as the captain took to get outside the audience chamber and face his men. The next moment, his Serene Highness was startled to see the doors of his chamber burst open before he had so much as left his chair of eminence, and three distracted men hurl themselves to their knees by his dais. Bathed in hysterical tears, the deputation begged his Highness to have pity on them and not to send them to butchery which, they pointed out with surprising cogency through their sobs, was what their ineptitude would mean to everyone they fought alongside, as well as themselves.
Then the guards got them out, and the Grand Master nearly succeeded in solving the problem by having the ensign in and promising him the command if he persuaded the two hundred to sail, when the captain, scenting treachery, got himself admitted again, the tears dried on his cheeks, and declared himself ready to march with his men if the Grand Master would send with them some of his knights, ‘to teach and comfort us,’ he ended with pathos.
‘And so?’ said the Chevalier de Villegagnon sharply when Gabriel, returning, called them together to convey the news.
‘Tripoli