The Disorderly Knights
Page 4
Nor was she alone. On one side, the ladies of Oxnam shouted curses, their mouths pale cavities inside red, painted lips. On the other, the lady of Cessford flung a stone. And behind, jumping and shrieking, were surely the comeliest lassies of Bonjedworth and Ancrum, Lanton and Bedrule, their bosoms veiled in sunlight but their voices unsheathed. What among the English had been disjointed talk turned instantly into babble. Sir Ralph Bullmer and his cousin shouted into it, silenced it, and wheeling, led their troops up the hill.
For a moment longer, the furious figures at the top skirled defiance; then they clung together, gown to gown, like silenced bells as the drumming hoofbeats approached. Then someone knelt; others sprang aside; some broke away and vanished altogether beyond the rise of the hill.
Useless panic, for where could they go? What farmer, in the shadow of Roxburgh, would defy the English and take them in? What farmer’s wife would succour the flesh with whom she and her husband were three?
Sir Ralph Bullmer said to Sir Oliver Wyllstrop, ‘Why d’you think they were met at Hough Isa’s, Olly?’
Sir Oliver, trotting on, shook his head. ‘If you ask the men to shoot, I fear they won’t obey.’
In armour, no one can shrug, but the captain of Roxburgh castle laughed hollowly inside his helmet. ‘So long as they die, I’m not going to watch how they do it.’ An unoiled joint at his knee began to sob and he swore sulkily. There was a very sweet armful indeed, like a young cornfield in sunlit green silk, standing alone on one side of the hilltop, her pale face bathed in run mascara and tears. In the same moment she must have seen Sir Ralph too. She hesitated, turned to run, and then instead, trembling like a driven ship with her buffeting robes, stretched out a supplicating arm.
Five cannon, hitherto concealed on the hillside by heaped grass and Hough Isa’s petticoats, fired promptly as one, blowing four hundred pounds of stone shot like an open hopper downhill through the packed men and horses of the English garrison of Roxburgh, killing one third outright with their eyes glistening still. Then, as the falcons’ thunder deadened the ears, the tatters of Sir Ralph Bullmer’s force saw the smoke lift and several kneeling ladies, their headgear knocked awry, touch a match to their hackbuts and fire. To one side of the guns, a broad-built wench with a beard let off a crossbow, and from just behind her a flock of arrows arched through smoke and shot and fell, thinly slitting, among the petrified troops. Then the five falcons fired again, and those English who could, ran like stoats.
Sir Ralph Bullmer, from pride and a burst girth strap, was the last to go. Bleeding from a scratch on his cheek, he recovered as the slipped saddle fell, kicked it free and bareback hugged his horse with his thighs and turned its head.
A light hand on his arm stopped him short. Below, her floating gown filthy, the girl of the hilltop beseeched him, her eyes anxious cisterns of blue. For the merest second, Sir Ralph Bullmer studied her. Her hands were empty and her thin dress innocent of weapons. ‘All right. You’ll tell me what it’s all about, or I’ll know why,’ said Sir Ralph Bullmer hastily, and swung her behind him.
The horse careered down the hillside after his men. From behind, the arrows still fell although the firing had stopped. For the moment, it seemed, no one pursued. The girl behind him laid her cheek on his neck and began unlacing his armour. He knocked her hand away and then grabbed his reins as the horse danced, nearly out of control. The fingers stole round again. His cuirass was half off. The more intelligent of his men had slowed a little and turned to await him; still there seemed to be no pursuit.
He knocked the girl’s hand away again and kicked out behind with his mailed foot, then floundered as, saddleless, he nearly lost his own seat. Melting behind him, the girl’s limbs were untouched. She unfastened all the straps round his middle and undid his shirt; his swipe met thin air. Inward to his sweating body ran streams of cold air, through all the loosened flanges of plate metal. Clanking cuirass on thigh-piece, Sir Ralph Bullmer on his horse flew across the gentle valley of Teviot like a well-plenished tinker’s curse, and did not know until he pulled up, dismounted, and his breeches fell down, that there was no one behind him by then.
Soon after that, a half-naked gentleman in breech hose knocked at a door in Upper Nisbet, requisitioned a jerkin and a pony with great charm, and went whistling on his way to Jedburgh, where by arrangement a second cousin of Will Scott’s was to look after the homeless Hough Isa and shelter the ambushing marksmen, if need be, on the first stage of their journey back home.
Not long after Bullmer with his survivors had got back to the English fortress at Roxburgh, Will Scott and his men arrived at the tall wooden house of his cousin, peeled off their kirtles and bonnets and crowded into the kitchen where already Hough Isa and her two genuine friends were at the cooking pots. Then, having settled his men, Sir William dressed in his own clothes and took his two unlooked-for observers, Thomas Master of Erskine and Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon, upstairs to the small room to talk.
They spoke in French. It was not that the Chevalier’s English was lacking, but simply that he mistrusted, that day, what he heard. That a Roxburgh deserter had warned Will Scott of the impending English raid on the ladies—that he understood. That this might be made an excuse to ambush the garrison—this again was clear. Wise also to have the five cannon dragged from Jedburgh—instant annihilation of superior numbers was thus made quite possible. And certainly, the sight of the ladies had brought the Englishmen half up the hill and within easy range, while the falcons were hidden by skirts. But, the Chevalier de Villegagnon had pointed out, they had been unable to ride pursuing the English, had not even tried to conceal mounted men behind that small hill, who could sweep over and kill …?
‘Aye,’ had said Will Scott on the battlefield, as they loaded the English wounded in carts and searched the dead for their money and weapons. ‘Well, ye see, I got orders from the old Queen not to meddle. If I lost a man through defending a whore, she said she’d see me in jail for a year. So I made sure when the English came on,’ said Will Scott simply, ‘that my lads’d be after better sport than killing.’
‘And what will the Queen Dowager say,’ said Tom Erskine drily, ‘if Crawford of Lymond is lost?’
‘He’ll be back at Jedburgh to meet us, you’ll see,’ said Scott a little quickly. And the Chevalier de Villegagnon, shrewdly observing, chose that moment to say, ‘Will it please you to speak French?’ and added rapidly, ‘I understood on joining you that M. of Lymond had left the ambush altogether?’
Tom Erskine answered. ‘He was in front with the ladies. He gave the signal to fire.’
‘But he has not returned? Which was he?’
‘The one in green that rode off with Ralph Bullmer,’ said Will Scott; and without waiting for Tom’s smooth translation added, ‘And if Ralph Bullmer’s still alive to tell of it, I’ll wager he’d rather he wasn’t.’
They were at their soup when Lymond arrived. A voice cut through the uproar below and Will Scott missed his mouth and got to his feet dripping; then sat down and wiped off his chin. Then the door opened on the tenuous girl in the green dress, now in staid brown hose under a tunic, the blond hair visibly short.
He was carrying a bowl of soup. As he kicked shut the door to the stairs, Scott spoke with reverberating gusto. ‘Francis! What in God’s name have you done with Sir Ralph?’
‘Bullmer?’ The voice was pleasant, the air one of mild surprise. ‘I undressed him, I believe. Cousin Oily had a grin like a viaduct.’ Francis Crawford laid down his soup and, without sitting, said to de Villegagnon, ‘What would you have done, sir?’
M. de Villegagnon, Knight of the Order of St John, answered in French, one meaty shoulder negligently to the wall. ‘Was Monsieur armed?’ he asked.
‘No.’ Lymond used the same tongue. ‘Or the captain would not have admitted me to his horse.’
There was a pause. ‘Where there is a simple man,’ said the Chevalier thoughtfully, ‘the apt punishment is sometimes not death but shame.’
‘But Sir Ralph Bullmer, from what I hear, is not a fool.’ M. de Villegagnon could flatter as well.
‘Luckily, or he would have charged us. As it was, Nell of Cessford was the only person they hurt—’
‘They killed her,’ broke in Tom Erskine bluntly.
The eyes of the man Lymond and Sir William Scott met. Lymond said nothing. M. de Villegagnon, watching, saw the young knight flush; then Erskine, who in his own country preferred forthrightness to finesse said, ‘She was a Kerr. Francis told you not to let Hough Isa bring her.’
Will Scott said angrily, ‘Will the Kerrs take revenge for their whores as well?’
‘Let us hope,’ said Lymond, ‘that they will look on you as her would-be protector, and that Grizel never hears of it with a blunt instrument to hand. If someone would introduce me to M. de Villegagnon I could sit down.…’
*
Late that night with Tom Erskine (they drew spills for it) quietly asleep on the camp bed, and Will Scott’s red head buried in his saddle while his soft palate buzzed and rattled with his dreams, Nicholas Durand de Villegagnon rose, and crossing the small crowded room the four shared, noiselessly paused at the hearth. In the glimmering red of the fire, the only light in the room, his height seemed inhuman, his bulk measureless, his silence uncanny, like the nesting owl with raked eyeballs pat to her claws. ‘This play acting today, it entertains you?’ he said.
In the depths of the carved chair where he had chosen to sleep, Lymond’s breathing did not change, nor in the toneless flood of red light did his face alter. He said briefly, ‘It served its purpose. We are not all children of destiny.’
The solid body of the French knight was motionless also. ‘I have heard a man whose lover has been killed speak like that,’ he said.
Lymond’s voice repeated drily, ‘A man?’ and in the buried red light, the Chevalier’s face creased, as if he smiled. ‘Perhaps not,’ he said. ‘But my premise remains. Not for all of us, the common dynastic toil. You, for example, have all the comfort you need at home and need seek no gentler company.’
‘I am a great respecter of comfort,’ said Lymond, and at the edge on his voice the Chevalier began to be satisfied. ‘I meant merely,’ he said, speaking always softly, ‘that having none of the duties of an older brother, I saw a noble future before you at the Queen Dowager’s side.’
‘… And men of religion are not,’ stated Lymond, as if he had not spoken. ‘Furthermore, at each of the Queen Dowager’s many sides, she already has a brother de Guise.’
Beside Lymond’s chair stood a rush stool, warm from the fire. De Villegagnon bent and sat on it, his broad back to the dark room, and began at leisure to untie his fine shirt. He said, ‘I know, of course, that a good many Scotsmen fear to become provincials of France. The Queen Dowager is not the Regent for her daughter, and yet she and the French Ambassador seem to make all the decisions that matter. Also, she and the King of France are of the Old Religion, and those of you who lean towards the reformed church would deliver Scotland to her old enemy England, with earth and stone and the clappers of her mills, rather than risk religious martyrdom with France.’
‘You flatter us,’ said Francis Crawford; and leaning forward to grasp the long poker, lifted the structure of the fire. Heat and light, silently refreshed, enveloped them both. Lymond, sinking back in his place, was smiling. He said, ‘If you look, you may find Crusading consciences here, but not among the families that count. The Douglases and the Kerrs and the rest favour England because their land is near the Border and open to English attack, or else because under English rule they might have a chance of second-hand power.’
‘And the Crawfords?’ asked the Frenchman.
There was a second’s pause. ‘My brother, like Tom Erskine there, and the Scotts, happens to believe that until she has a strong Crown of her own, this nation will recover as well under French supervision as any other. We are too weak in manpower to be independent, even if our ruling families could combine and agree. And we are too poor to employ mercenary soldiers. France, after all, who can pay, puts the finest engineers and fortification experts, the best soldiers and seamen’—Lymond bowed gravely to the seated Chevalier—‘at our disposal for nothing, along with the money to pay them.’
‘And you?’ asked de Villegagnon at last. ‘If the Turk offered to protect Scotland on the same or better terms, would you accept them?’
The other man looked up, amused. ‘We have accepted them, have we not?’ And as de Villegagnon, caught unawares, was momentarily silent, for the secret alliance between France and the Commander of the Faithful was not yet common knowledge, Lymond went on murmuring. ‘Tell me: as Knights of St John who are also honoured servants of the kingdom of France—do you and Leone Strozzi, for example, fail to find this alliance between France and Turkey troublesome? Or do you have all the comforts you need at Fontainebleau?’
The ensuing silence was abrupt. Then the Chevalier de Villegagnon, always in an undertone, gave a laugh. ‘A hit. My answer is that the Franco-Turkish alliance is a paper one, to preserve France from the threat of the Emperor Charles V. The Knights of Malta are international. Whatever their allegiance by birth, their first duty is to Malta and the Bishop of Rome. We have all taken the same vows, soldiers and priests, of chastity, poverty and obedience, and have dedicated ourselves to the victory of the Christian world over the infidel.’
‘To fight with a pure mind for the supreme and true King,’ quoted Lymond. It was impossible to tell what he thought.
‘If I made you leader today of fifteen hundred mercenaries, for whom or for what would you fight?’ asked the Chevalier de Villegagnon suddenly. He was ready to wait for his answer. He only became slowly aware that the man in the chair was shaking with silent laughter.
‘Not another! By the Blessed Gerard, father of the poor and the pilgrims, not another!’ said Francis Crawford on a shattered breath. ‘Is Europe desperate for second-hand captains, direct from the fripperers, that every courier seems bent on seducing me with a new-matched set of ethics? … If I had fifteen hundred soldiers, and tried to use them either for or against the Queen Mother, there would be civil war in Scotland in a week, and no Scots left to talk of it in another.’
‘Then you must needs use them elsewhere,’ said the Chevalier blandly. ‘You are not a fledgeling. Where does your manhood suggest?’
‘My manhood suggests,’ said Lymond thoughtfully, ‘that I should like to meet Sir Graham Reid Malett’s sister Joleta, but not necessarily with fifteen hundred mercenary soldiers at my back.’
For a long moment, the knight stared at the Scotsman. In the end, slowly he rose, pulled off his creased shirt and stood dangling it, rosy-lit with the fire. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Yes, my good sir. What you require in this life is a meeting with Gabriel and his sister.’ And strolling off, he rolled himself in a cloak, settled into a corner, and in five minutes was asleep.
*
The house was quite still and the fire had gone out when Dandy Kerr of the Hirsell and twenty men hammered down the steep cobbles of Jedburgh and erupted into the lower room of Will Scott’s cousin’s house, to avenge the exposure to fatality if not shame of Nell of Cessford on the hill above Crailing.
They jumped off their horses as the town watch came running, broke the door and strode among the recumbent bodies, slashing and stabbing for some time before they noticed that these were merely bran sacks. Attempting then to run upstairs, they met sweet as a kiss with a torrent of Scotts, sword in hand, coming down. In the midst of them, yelling as loud as the rest, were Sir William Scott, Francis Crawford, Thomas Erskine and the Chevalier de Villegagnon.
The rout was spectacular, all the way uphill past the Abbey and out on to the glades and
moors and little hills that rolled between Jedburgh and Cessford. At the ford across Oxnam Water, with the trees thick with summer life on either high bank, the remaining Kerrs turned at bay, and in the ensuing water battle, with peach-coloured mud up to the hocks, the horses splashed and drenched the mounted and the fallen, birds called and roe-deer fled, and swords rose and fell merrily until Dandy Kerr and his men, disengaging finally, shot off to Cessford Castle with the larger part of his company intact, which was more than could be said of his stock.
Lymond, grabbing Will Scott’s arm in a hurry, prevented pursuit. ‘Dammit, remember. We’re supposed to be the injured party. I told you Peter Cranston would warn us to avoid an offence to the Almighty in spilling blood on a prostitute’s grave.’
‘The small gentleman with the wounded shoulder?’ asked M. de Villegagnon sympathetically.
Tom Erskine answered, breathless with laughter. ‘Francis asked him to stand watch this evening on the Cessford road, and he’s very anxious to save Francis from sin.’
‘A risk which does not unduly trouble M. Crawford himself,’ said the Chevalier pointedly. ‘He regards boredom, I observe, as the One and Mighty Enemy of his soul. And will succeed in conquering it, I am sure—if he survives the experience.’
III
Joleta
(Flaw Valleys, May 1551)
ALMOST two years had passed, and peace had been declared between England and Scotland, before the Chevalier de Villegagnon met a Crawford again.
For part of this period, Francis Crawford of Lymond had been living in France, repelling boredom with considerable success among those serving the child Queen Mary of Scotland at the French Court. He was there while the Queen Dowager of Scotland came to visit her daughter; and he was still there when his brother Richard, Lord Culter, came to serve the child Queen in his turn, and thankfully, in due course, left the French Court once more for home.
Boats for Scotland, in these days of brisk piracy, of offended Flemings and outraged English and well-armed Spaniards, were not frequent or cheap. At Dieppe, Lord Culter, a quiet but effective traveller, made a number of calls, and then sat back and played backgammon until word reached him, one day at his inn, that a French galley was leaving for Scotland that night.