Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [106]
‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lymond said gently. He paused and then said, ‘I may not even be the child who was born that day. Did you hear if he lived? You and Isabelle were asked to sign a paper about him.’
She stared in his direction. ‘He was too young to travel. But he must have lived. There was a son named Francis Crawford reared at Midculter. Isabelle told me.’
‘But not Mistress Sybilla’s,’ Lymond said. It seemed as if it had all been going on for a very long time. He kept his voice level, and patient, and drained of all shade of emotion. ‘It seems likely that the baby you saw in Paris died just after birth. I have seen the death certificate. Then she adopted me as her son, and brought me up by the same name. It makes no difference. There is only one thing that none of us knows. We do not know who bought the Paris house for Mistress Sybilla. We do not know the name of the father of the baby son born to her there. But you did, did you not? It was on the paper you signed.’
‘Of course,’ she said. ‘I knew him. He came to see her in the convent. That, you know, was how they met. His house was near by. Ah, pretty, pretty the pair they made!’ She strained towards him. ‘You don’t hold it against her?’
Lymond said slowly, ‘I told you. I was born of a different mother.’
‘But with the same name?’ Her uncomprehending face remained fixed on his, and then slowly cleared. ‘Of course. Then you are Béatris’s child, by the same father.’
And she spoke in the same flat and querulous voice, the name he had borne in his mind like a slave-brand through most of the long, solitary years of his life.
It was of no importance. Birth did not matter: heredity was merely a hurdle; one was what one made of oneself: that and no other. Ask one more question, and there would be nothing left to ask, ever, that mattered to him.
But he did not ask it. Instead, he became aware that, sitting opposite him, Renée Jourda had been gripped by a sudden excitement. She said, ‘You say you are not a son of Mistress Sybilla’s? Then you did not come here to kill me?’
Because of the headache, or because of the state of his thoughts he did not analyse that as quickly as he should have done. He said, ‘Of course not. Why should you think I would? To keep my parentage secret?’ And then, as his brain took hold, he said, ‘Madame Jourda, did someone tell you this? You knew my name. Were you expecting me?’
She sat very still. And now the fire did not renew the illusion of youth but lit, without pity, the blank face of age and fatigue and helpless futility. Renée Jourda said, ‘They said they would kill me if I warned you.’
‘The Spaniards,’ Lymond said; and she did not contradict him. He bent, and lifted his sword and walking quickly and quietly, made his way to the window. It was not her fault. But he should have remembered that pigeons do not fly for no reason.
The yard was empty, but the bolt of the barn door was not driven home, as he had left it.
He left the window as quietly as he had reached it. ‘I’m sorry. Goodbye, Madame Jourda,’ said Lymond; and unlocking the door, walked out, sword in hand, into the sunshine.
No one rushed on him; no one fired; no one shouted. He continued to move unhurriedly across the strewn yard until he reached the barn door, and if he paused there, it was just for an instant. Then he pulled the door open and walked inside without hesitation.
‘Christ, that was quick,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘If you needed a woman as much as that, I could have got you a pair at the Trois Têtes in Calais. Now we’ve come all this way, are you going to let us all in to see her?’
He was there, grinning as he lolled in his peasant clothes on the rack of dry boughs, Lymond’s discarded hat crammed on his dyed Italian curls. Beside him, less at ease, was Daniel Hislop. And standing about in the sodden straw were half a dozen of Hislop’s men from Péronne.
Piero Strozzi said, ‘I know. It is bad