Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [155]
Acolyte. But Philippa was a child no longer: he had known that since that single evening in Lyon. The severe, clear-skinned profile turned towards Francis might have belonged to any great lady. The brown and brilliant gaze only quizzed him at intervals: she seemed able, Jerott saw, to sense by instinct the course of his fantasy; and as with Lymond, what she was doing at present occupied all her awareness. Then Francis surged to his feet, leaving his robe, and launched into Jason’s querulous tour de force, fractured by interruptions and a mounting fury of incoherent resentment, and finally disintegrating in chaos.
Against her will, Marthe was laughing. Danny sobbed. Adam, his head in his hands, was also weeping with laughter. But Jerott, his attention already caught, watched Philippa Somerville, her gaze on her husband, come to her senses.
He knew how it turned you to water, that unguessed-at well of delight under the bitter intelligence. In his life with Marthe they had found it perhaps as many times as he could count on one hand: never more. When it came, you felt as Philippa looked, her soul in her eyes.
As he watched, she bent her head and crossing her hands, slid them along her forearms to still them. Oh God, thought Jerott. Don’t let it happen. She doesn’t deserve the torment. The lifetime of waiting, in return for a handful of moments of ecstasy. And standing behind him, always, the ghosts of his other, experienced women. The thoughts he did not share. The knowledge that one had his total friendship but never the key to the innermost door.… And there was an innermost door, which Marthe did not have, and had never had, although his hopes of that, and that alone, had been his reason for marrying her.
Adam was looking at him. Stupid with too much wine and too much emotion Jerott turned his head, and so caught, without warning, the expression on Austin Grey’s face. Then, as he watched, the polite mask replaced the scorn, the hurt anger; and Marthe, still laughing, was prompting Philippa and Philippa, obedient, was rising: ‘I beg your pardon. The honestest woolgatherer that ever came to us. What am I? Minerva?… Voyant ainsi, ô Roy, dans ma main docte et forte …’
Lymond put an egg in her hand. ‘La mer des cronicques et mirouer hystorial de France. For God’s sake don’t squeeze it,’ he said. ‘We’ve passed that bit: we’re into the Masque. What do you want to be, Victory, Virtue or Mnemosyne? It doesn’t matter. Dance! Music! Are you men or sedentary blubbers?’
And it did become a dance, of a kind, with Adam seizing a lute, and Lymond seizing Marthe, and Danny and Jerott seizing each other and Austin, because she pulled him out, laughing, partnering Philippa in a storm of blown eggs filled with scent which should have been thrown at the Masque but which had been appropriated, it was to be supposed, by the Queen’s cousin and the Voevoda of Russia, lying under the table.…
If Lymond had not for once let himself drink, it might not have happened. He might have found means, changing places in a hysterical vuelta, to escape spinning Philippa as the others were doing. But he didn’t avoid it, although he barely touched her. His hands had already left hers when Marthe, cannoning into them, flung Philippa bodily into his arms and then, with her strong, craftsman’s fingers held her locked there. ‘Come. Be merry. Kiss her,’ said Marthe.
Lymond burst her grip, dragging her palm through the links of his shoulder-chain. She howled with the pain of it and turned on him like a pole-cat, her hand gushing scarlet.
‘Has she the pox?’ exclaimed Marthe. ‘You’ll seek out strumpets, fumble with courtiers, fornicate with either parent of the heiress you are supposed to be marrying, but to embrace your wife sickens you?’
The music stopped in the room;