To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [248]
Miraculously, the third time was spared him since the lady of Veere, standing up, ordered her lord to take his party elsewhere, for the sake of the little ones. Robin looked at her in a fervour of gratitude, and then dashed off to serve as he might.
He was not needed for long. Already the golf seemed to be palling. They listened to Henry when, boyishly shy, he asked if they might not ride to the dunes and shoot rabbits. He added, thoughtfully, that he was sure Robin too would enjoy it, despite not, of course, having a weapon.
Robin agreed. He hoped that Henry was as accurate with a crossbow as he was with the other kind. He proposed to do his very best to keep behind Henry. He didn’t know whether to be glad or not when he saw that monseigneur’s step-daughter Catherine had left the child in order to ride to the beach with her sweetheart. He felt alone, and not alone. He was a person, as he had been in Iceland, riding up between Katla and Hekla. He was monseigneur’s representative.
Soon after that, he saw that Henry was missing. He wheeled his horse and, ignoring a peremptory shout, spurred back the way he had come. He did not realise, then, that the girl Catherine had turned to come after him, or that it was Paul van Borselen who had shouted.
Later, he pieced together what had occurred at the castle. Later, he could imagine how Henry, arriving back, had abandoned his horse and, making for the discarded kolfs and the balls, had lured Jodi into following, tap tap tapping the wood, making it bounce out of sight through the garden. Through the garden, the park and the fields until the castle was well out of sight. Then he invented a game. Jodi trotted, and his cousin bounced the ball after him.
The laughing gulls must have had the best view: the three-year-old chuckling and stopping; the ball thudding up to his feet; Jodi bending to seize it and then, reminded, staggering on, frothing with laughter. And stopping. And watching the ball bounce again, while lissom Henry, big cousin Henry, pretended to be unable to catch him. While behind the child, nearer and nearer, was the ditch, the deep drainage ditch of the flatlands.
By the time Robin saw them, far in the distance, the ball was no longer trickling to the child’s feet but bumping against him; gently at first, with a little rebound, and then harder, so that Jordan cried out and turned, tears of surprise in his eyes. And then big cousin Henry, instead of comforting him, took out another ball from his sleeve and, dropping it, drew back his club. Jordan watched him perplexed, without moving. Then some hint of what was happening must have reached him, for as Henry bore down on the ball, the child turned and staggeringly ran.
Robin heard the crack of the ball and Jordan’s scream. He saw the ball chop in the air, a speck in the distance, and the white, fixed stare of Henry behind it. He heard the rap as the ball fell, then the crack as the club again caught it. The double sound, repeated over and over, reached through the quiet like the cluck of a bird, or a man alone, tapping a hammer. Only, ragged and faint as the wail of a leveret, there came too the cries of the child whom the ball was pursuing.
A single hard shot would have felled Jordan and killed him at once. That was not Henry’s aim. Henry was deliberately whipping him on to fall and drown in the gutter behind him.
Then Robin shouted. Behind him, unexpectedly, he heard other cries, and the thud of other horses from his own hunting-party overhauling him. A deep voice roared: that of Wolfaert van Borselen.
Henry’s face lifted, white as a shell. Briefly, he hesitated. Then he drew a great breath and, racing forward, stopped at the ball, and raised his club as a hunting-cat