Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [163]
Then he saw the mourning-clothes and remembered, stricken, what the sight of her, after so very long, had thrust from his mind. He said, without kneeling, without approaching; discarding every preliminary, ‘I have heard what happened. I am extremely sorry. If you tell me how I may help in Richard’s place, I shall do what I can.’
At the sound of his voice, her hand moved; but otherwise there was no change in her composure. He had said to Philippa that he did not foresee any unpleasantness, and of course this was true.
The candles shimmered. Sybilla laid down her cards and said, ‘You look cold. There is a chair by the brazier, if you have time to sit.’ And when he had done so, she said, ‘You can’t have wanted to come. I am grateful that you did. You have heard then.… Do you know how many died?’
Her voice was quieter than he had expected, but quite even. And, like his, eschewing all that was personal. She had not even addressed him by name. He said, ‘I know only that Richard was drowned. And the servants who could not swim.’
Sybilla said, ‘We lost twenty-five men and women from Midculter. I think you knew them all. They were buried at Boulogne. I brought back such relics as were washed ashore, to give to their families. You could help with that, if you mean what you say.’
‘I mean what I say,’ he said steadily. She had taken the cards again, and was shuffling them with great deliberation. He released his breath and added, ‘Then you have written to Midculter?’
‘Yes,’ said Sybilla. The candlelight, flaring, caught a sudden spark in her eyes which were bright, he now saw, with unreleased tears. She said, in the same low, even voice, ‘Is there anything I should add?’
He rose abruptly and walked to a sturdy hutch-table by the wall, with her eternal sewing ranged neatly upon it, with her spectacles. Beside it, also familiar, was a copper kettle he recalled from Midculter. He turned, his hand on the wood, and said, ‘I think you know I have no wish to come back to Scotland. I must stay, in any case, until after the royal wedding: the Legate is to dissolve my own marriage. After that, I am free. What I want you to tell me … honestly … is this: am I needed at Midculter?’
‘Honestly?’ she repeated; and though her tears did not fall, her soft lips twisted a little in derision, or perhaps in self-derision. Then seeing, no doubt, the look on his face she said quietly, ‘That is a question Richard’s wife could answer better than I can.’
Their words moved from difficulty to difficulty, as if clearing thorns in an overgrown garden. He kept, among everything else, ludicrously forgetting to breathe. He said, ‘Then I shall ask Mariotta. I owe the Culter family a debt.’
And that was too near the bone: he saw her hands, lightly clasped now, whiten to bloodlessness on the table. Then she said, ‘You must know that if you do, Mariotta will summon you for my sake, as well as her own. How then will you reach a decision?’
Behind the careful words lay the question to which he must, for his own sake, find an answer. He also required, but did not intend, to sit down again. The pause which developed was therefore extended by a number of factors and ended by Lymond himself saying, ‘It will depend, I suppose, on the condition in which I find both Midculter and Scotland. I had hoped to go back to Russia.’
Upon which, unexpectedly, Sybilla said, ‘Perhaps I deserve no candid answers, but I should like to have one. Would you still go back to Russia if Kiaya Khátún were not there?’
The elegant, desiccated body of a gazelle hound for some reason came into his mind. He had forgotten, even, that she would know of Güzel’s existence. ‘Yes. I should still go back,’ he said.
There were no tears in her eyes now but he could see, his own eyes grown used to the light, the fine seams of age beneath her lashes and on her brow and by the soft corners of her mouth. She had always been a woman of ravishing prettiness. ‘And,’ she said, ‘if I were not there, would you go back to Midculter?’
The room became a mosaic;