Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [53]
It was so all night and beyond, on that sultry voyage when, like drunkards, their only refuge day and night was the unmade pallet below the galliot’s decks. But long before that, she knew that this had happened many times before; that Galatian de Césel was not a chaste nor a timid nor a fatherly knight, but a knight whose desperate hunger no religion could quiet.
Towards the end of the long journey spent, so much of it, in Galatian’s clasp, Oonagh knew also that she was pregnant; and not by this monkish lover. A thick, black-headed Irish hog-child lay in her belly, to grow in dark and silence under the warm sun of Malta and ruin her new life.
Defying, for once, the furious fatalism that was part of her nature, she did what she could about that, but only made herself ill. She arrived at Gozo hardly seeing it, and was installed in the white-walled chamber off Galatian’s room where, racked by more absences than she could bear, she realized that to keep him she must be well, and beautiful, and stirring to his easy flesh. For what he gave her so intemperately, she could not now do without.
Her pretence succeeded. For a month, inexhaustible, he stayed with her, and she hid that she was sick. Until last week when handling her, blindly ripe to his kindling, he became aware, as no monk should have been aware, of her sunken face and the first soft engorgement of her breast against his.
He had not risked his soul with a curse but freeing himself, had rolled from her bed. ‘You can’t blame your Irish bastard on me!’ he had exclaimed loudly and clearly at her door, and she heard it repeated, with open laughter, through the house and then the streets of the citadel.
But that day she had nothing left but a desire for oblivion. She had lain still on her bed, and after a while—after an age—after the whole afternoon had gone by, he had flung open the door, driven, as she had known he would be, by the pulse that they shared. But from then to now, he had used her often uncourted as Cormac had done; and she had not known until much later that he was burying not only his fever; but the knowledge of the fate approaching them all. She learned soon enough. They were to be sacrificed victims of Islâm, offered up by the knights to save their own skins; and de Césel, in his warm refuge, was afraid.
The knights, in their holy convent at Birgu, knew she was there. She had seen some of them: Jerott Blyth, who had been kind on Messina and to whom she had talked, stupid with sun and luxury, of Lymond.
At Birgu where they had first landed, she had seen the Grand Master, ancient and one-eyed, and the battle-scarred older man they called la Valette, and had heard of the quiet man with the beautiful voice and the guinea-gold hair, Graham Malett; and she had thought, fleetingly, that there was a man she could trust. Then the news came, as news always did, flying the short miles from St Angelo to the north and across the brief, teeming channel to Gozo, that the Chevalier de Villegagnon had come from France with warning of the Turkish armada, and that a Scotsman called de Lymond was at his side.
Then she had remembered her unwise talk with Jerott Blyth, and indolence and self-loathing burst into anger against this casual, indifferent man passing by, like some damned bailiff, to inspect the finished transaction. She was going to hell, it seemed, her own way; and she wanted none of Francis Crawford’s cutting rebukes.
When later she heard that Jerott, who knew them both, had been on the boat they had glimpsed crossing that day from Cape Passero, she had written Lymond not to come. It would, she thought a little hysterically, be the last straw to be quixotically rescued by force from threatened Gozo, while her protector perished and the knights, in all their chaste ardours, found themselves saddled with a loose woman; and a pregnant loose woman at that.
Muffled through the thick walls of the house, the Rhodes clock on the battlements behind struck the quarter, as it had in all the long years of the knights’ wandering since Rhodes.