Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [382]
She said, ‘I’ve come for advice. Alex Home is on his way to North Berwick, and that great fool Kilmirren has joined him, and maybe Knollys and Malloch as well. It doesn’t sound right. I don’t like it. I jalouse Adorne and Nicol and the rest of them could do with some help.’
They heard her out, and then sent for their horses. She thought, to begin with, that it was just going to be the men of the Land—Tobie and John and Andro and Moriz and Archie of Berecrofts, with maybe the doctor, Andreas. But then, at the last minute some news came, and suddenly there were others as well: the Earl of Huntly, for example, with a lot of his men, and others who had lands south of the Forth as well as in the north-east. And merchants and agents who had dealings with Adorne and Nicholas, like Dob Cochrane and Henry Cant, and Sir Jock Ross and Tom Yare.
It worried Bel, for you couldn’t go by informers, and to attack Whitekirk would destroy all their plans. But they said they weren’t going near Whitekirk: they would just make sure the Priory was all right.
She saw them off, and then went in with Clémence to sit beside Robin and wait. She thought about Malloch, and she thought about Knollys, former Rector of Whitsome, which was halfway between Chirnside and Upsettlington. Will Knollys and one David Ramsay had both been Procurators for the Priory of North Berwick, in the days when the Prioress was a Ramsay. And Jordan de St Pol had gone off with the same princely warrior-monk Knollys, whose bastard son Robert had married the cousin of young Johnnie Ramsay whom Darnley, they said, had saved with some reluctance at Lauder. Knollys, a former chaplain to Hearty James, Earl of Buchan, who was now in Dunbar, supporting Albany.
She thought about it all for some time, and then, presently, sent to tell Bonne that she was staying the night in the Canongate, and would see her tomorrow. It was then more than six hours after noon, and pitch dark.
IMMURED IN THE Cistercian Priory of St Mary of North Berwick under the rule of two Prioresses, Katelinje Sersanders would, under normal circumstances, have devoted her first week or so to observing, with joy, the silent power struggle between the two ladies: the dainty steel femininity of the resident, Elizabeth Forman, in opposition to the commanding personality of Euphemia Graham, her elderly semi-royal cuckoo from Eccles. The Master and chaplain, she gathered, had both promptly absconded to quieter foundations, and the nuns on each side, much reduced, had been in some disarray until a modus vivendi was found and the house settled down to a régime remarkably close to that of a double-sex monastery. Jordan, who was not effusive with Kathi, nevertheless showed from time to time that he, too, appreciated the joke. He was teaching Margaret to draw.
Under normal circumstances, the Priory of North Berwick was not a bad place in which to pass a few weeks in January. In size second only to Haddington, it reared its bulky components on the slopes between the sea and the freakish volcanic cone of North Berwick Law. Snow seldom reclined on the hill or the undulating descent to the shore: the salty east wind, fresh in summer and devastating in winter, saw to that. But inside the mellow red-ochre buildings, warmed by the great fires, the inmates entertained one another and praised God with a reassuring regularity.
Mick Crackbene was also still there, although he lived with the lay officers and servants in the service buildings, and only came to the conventual table on invitation. Much of the rest of the time, he was working outside, repairing something, or labouring on something for the nuns. Often he would take Rankin or Margaret with him, but his most constant companion was Jordan. The solid friendship between the lad of nearly fourteen and the taciturn Scandinavian warmed her heart, for Jordan’s sake,