Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [148]
Philippa said, ‘Why should Bailey come to France? You left him content with his pension in England. Is he hoping to wring more money from Sybilla than you are paying him? Or could he possibly mean to hint something of all this to Richard?’
‘Not if he wants to live,’ Lymond said. ‘I don’t imagine he knew for a moment that Richard and Sybilla were coming here. In any case, neither one of them could afford what I pay to him. No … I think he is here by chance, and thought he saw some way to harm me. If Grey hadn’t shown me the letter, he would have been quite secure. I expect he has left France by now. But I think you should continue to take precautions. Why are you still here?’
He had not, unfortunately, lost sufficient hold of his faculties. Philippa said, ‘The Queen wants me to stay until April. I’m going to have to meet Sybilla. I wish you would tell me the truth. For example, you have said nothing to me about headaches.’
She withstood, for what seemed a long time, an unforeseen scrutiny. At length, ‘Who told you?’ said Lymond.
‘Adam. When he came to the Séjour du Roi.’ Marthe was not going to be at the Hôtel de Ville this afternoon. She had not seen or spoken to Marthe since the day the news of Calais arrived, and she had betrayed herself. But then, neither had Lymond.
‘I see,’ said Lymond. ‘I regret I didn’t edify you with an account of them, but they seemed to have vanished. Apart, that is, from the normal rewards of intemperance.’
‘And at Flavy?’ Philippa said. Don’t let him browbeat you, she had said to Austin.
He drew an impolite long suffering breath, she saw, to do exactly that. Then he said crisply, ‘I learned only one other thing at Flavy, and that is of no possible consequence. Isabelle Roset was Renée Jourda’s widowed sister, and she kept house for Sybilla and her master somewhere in Paris. The child Francis Crawford was born there. And so far as I am concerned and you are concerned, Philippa, that ends the matter.’
They had nearly arrived at the end of their unproductive journey. Philippa thought, Poor Austin. And said, drawing a long breath herself, ‘And who was the master? The father of Sybilla’s baby?’
‘She died before she could say. A beneficent occurrence for everybody. Here we are,’ Lymond said. And looking at him, and not at the Place de la Grève, Philippa knew that she could expect him to say nothing further.
What he had told her up to a point, she had no doubt was the literal truth. What he had not told her, but everything else about him made very obvious was that where once he had been uncertain, now he knew the name of Sybilla’s lover.
Chapter 2
Le trop bon temps, trop de bonté royale
Fais et deffais, prompt, subit, negligence.
She was afterwards to remember it as the most disoriented day, from moment to moment, that she had ever passed in her life.
In it, she spent nine continuous hours in her husband’s company. Hours which, had they been offered her on her arrival from Lyon, she would have found the sense and the fortitude to forgo. Hours which he perhaps would have spared her had he not believed, because he wanted to believe, that her passing attachment to him after five months must surely have faded.
He was not to know, his strung-up nerves doctored with alcohol, that disaster upon glorious disaster was about to befall the City of Paris’s Antique Triumph for the Heroes of Calais; or to guess what was to follow it. He had no premonition even when the curving line of royal carriages drew up on the gentle riverside slope of the Grève and rested there closed in the downpour while the City Fathers waited civilly ranked, their plumes and satins and erminetails buffeted like furzy wrack in the cataract.
In time, the rainstorm