Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [254]
John said suddenly, ‘They have important salmon rights in the north. Peterculter, and the rest. Free of customs, as well.’
‘Because presumably the money goes to the Grand Master at Rhodes,’ Nicholas said. He had been close to having this conversation once with Adorne, but had backed off. He had not been sure how John le Grant felt.
The engineer said, ‘All right, you bastard.’ Yare looked at him.
Nicholas said, ‘You don’t need to.’
‘Like hell I don’t,’ said the engineer. He looked at Yare. ‘He wants to talk about the Knights of St John, and he knows I’m connected with them. We’re Grants from Aberdeenshire, my family. Bailies, a lot of them, for the Knights. One of them was Administrator for all the Order’s land-holdings in Scotland—and maybe you can guess how much that is. Twenty-eight properties in these parts alone, Duns and Hutton and Whitsome and Chirnside among them. It was a franchise. The holder managed the property and collected and pocketed all the returns, in exchange for a flat annual payment to Rhodes. It used to be four hundred florins, banked in Paris. I don’t know what it is now. You’d need to ask the Preceptor, who has of course taken the vows of poverty, obedience, and chastity, but has four big sons to my knowledge, and sits among the barons in Parliament as my lord of St John, and trades in England with his big fancy ships. I suppose Will Knollys is the richest man in Scotland, but the loss of his fine house in Berwick is going to be a dead nuisance to the poor man. I like him. Is that what you wanted to know?’
‘Yes,’ said Nicholas. ‘Why do you like him?’
‘For his cheek,’ John le Grant said. ‘Also because it’s a huge job, and he’s one of the few men with the brains to do it all. And also because, although you know you can’t trust him, he’s probably doing the Crown much more good than an honest, stupid man might.’
‘Tom?’ said Nicholas. Yare, to his amusement, was gazing at John beatifically.
‘D’ye know,’ said Tom Yare. ‘That’s exactly what I’ve always felt, and I’ve never kent how to express it. Would it be unhealthy to write it all down?’
‘Yes,’ said Nicholas.
He didn’t ask many more questions. He had what he wanted to know: what John and Tom Yare might do, if someone, somewhere, some time ceased to like William Knollys.
HE WAS SLEEPING, later that night, when Yare flung open the door and shook his shoulder. Tom’s face in the darkness was as red as a beacon. His face was as red as the window, which glared with the red of a beacon which, copying its light to another, would leap from crest to crest to crest to the north, waking Scotland.
The beacon that warned, as Tom Yare was trying to tell him, that the whole English fleet was at sea, and was out there, blind eyes in the moonlight, sweeping north to the Forth.
Chapter 32
Thir folk suld be first on the seye, for quhy
Throw waik spreit of thaim that has the cur
Schippis ar tynt, mor than with stormys stur.
OF THE THREE English flotillas in the water that spring, it was the main fleet of three thousand men under their fifty-year-old commander John, Lord Howard, which took this, the first pre-emptive move by King Edward in the war against Scotland. The ships were loaded with bombards and handguns specially augmented from the artillery caches in Calais, of which Howard had once been deputy-governor. Lord Howard sailed on the Mary Howard, his flagship; and the fleet included the Antony, once owned by the late Admiral Henry van Borselen of Veere, which ten years before had brought the King from his exile in Bruges. The Anthony it was named after, of course, was now a wealthy pensioner