Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [402]
‘She’ll bring help,’ Julius said. But his eyes gleamed.
Nicholas turned. ‘Will you?’ he said.
‘No,’ said Kathi. ‘If something is worth buying, it is worth the fullest extent of its price.’ Then she said, ‘But his arm?’
‘If he can lay hands on a bow, he can manage a sword,’ Nicholas said. He looked at her, and she left, to go to her children.
OUTSIDE, IN THE rest of St Mary’s, an army of four hundred picked men were brought in from the cold and settled under the roofs of the huddled buildings and halls of the Priory. They came from Edinburgh and its surroundings, and represented all the great families loyal to the King, and owing friendship to Anselm Adorne and his companion who, together with a Genoese bishop, had offered their lives on the King’s business, and whom (they had heard) a renegade troop proposed to attack. They arrived in time to catch the brutes on the run, and pursued and cut down more than a few, before their leaders called the hunt off. Then, turning back to the Priory, the men from Edinburgh had learned for the first time of the death of Cortachy, and how it had been done. At that, their wrath had been so great that Huntly had had to use threats and brute force to prevent them from issuing all over again to chase and kill the whole band. Cold anger was better than hot, and would help make the most of this weapon that Albany’s rash friends had provided. Time enough for retribution after that.
Meanwhile, silent and sobered, the Sinclairs and Prestons, the Arbuthnotts and Gordons and Ogilvies, the sea captains and merchants and the burgesses found themselves quarters for what was left of the night, and the seven men from the Floory Land went to seek Nicholas, and found Jordan and Crackbene. Soon, they were installed in the single big day-room with pallets. Nicholas, it seemed, had gone to do something, and Julius and Kathi had disappeared.
Tobie said, ‘They’ll be in the chapel.’ They had been carrying the dead there, with Camulio’s help. Huntly had given his own cloak to cover Adorne, and Andreas, from the moment he came, had not left him. Tobie hadn’t yet been to the chapel, or brought himself to visit Fat Father Jordan in the infirmary, although Wodman had gone. Tobie, like the rest of them, wanted to see Nicholas, and was worried about Kathi. Then he thought to ask where the children were.
Kathi had placed them in one of the cellars, but they weren’t there now. Presumably, they would all be together, Kathi and Margaret and Rankin, possibly in the kitchen, or the dormitory, or somewhere else warm. A small party set off and split up to find them—Kathi’s brother Sersanders, and the children’s grandfather Archie of Berecrofts, and Father Moriz and Tobie and Jordan. It was bright inside the buildings and cloisters, where the lamps had all been renewed, but dark outside the garth. It was a little while before Father Moriz called something, and the searchers all went to look.
He was outside, upon that stretch of ground between the Priory and the walls, where the row of barred cellar windows threw their scalloped light on the snow. One of the bars of one of the windows was missing, leaving a very small gap, but one large enough for a child. And outside, and not far away, were two children lying together, one protecting the other, in a turmoil of hoof-marks. The boy, lying below, was unconscious. The girl, her arms stretched around him, was dead.
• • •
LEAVING NICHOLAS, KATHI ran. She had been away for half an hour instead of a few minutes. Outside, she could hear voices and horsemen: it was hard to tell what was happening. She wondered at first whether to go to the cellars, but decided that the archer would have brought out the children by now. Margaret and Rankin had lived here for more than two weeks; they knew all the nuns and, with Tobie about, they would be in the best possible hands. She would find them. And then she would go to her uncle.