Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [165]
For the man in the doorway was indeed the image, older, a little heavier, a little greyer than one had last seen him, of the son she had lost; of the older brother who had drowned at Boulogne. But still with the pleasant grey eyes and broad, big-boned face, little lined; and the fine brown hair, straight and thick and easily displaced, as now, when something had moved him.
It was Richard, alive. The guiding hand at one’s pony; the voice at one’s porridge bowl; the splendid athlete one watched from one’s books in the cold tower window, while outside in the sunshine he rode at the ring, threw his spears, matched his sword with the master-at-arms. The brother who had cared for him, a grown man in illness, and defended him against calumny, and who at length, heartbroken at his defection, had turned his back on him a year ago in Scotland.
Richard, alive. Francis Crawford drew a long, long breath and then stopped it, as the oddity of Sybilla’s cry came to him.
‘God in heaven … Richard,’ she had said. Not in gladness, or amazement. But in anger.
He turned.
If she had been white before, now she was the colour of ashes. He cried out, ‘Oh, can you not stop? Can you not stop even now?’ He halted. And then, his voice still not his own, he said, ‘You let me think he was dead.’
Behind him, Richard said, ‘You found out she was alone. That was clever. And still infirm, after the shipwreck.’
His voice was closer. Neither Lymond nor Sybilla looked at him. Lymond said, ‘You knew Richard would never let you leave Scotland. You did all that, in order to learn …’
‘I am paying my price now, don’t you think?’ Sybilla said very quietly.
He had even forgotten Richard, until at that moment a hand gripped his arm and he was jerked painfully back from the table. ‘Will you persecute her yet, in front of me?’ his brother said. ‘Stand there. I have something to say to you.’
Then Sybilla turned to him at last and said, her voice very tired, ‘He thought you were drowned. He came to offer his help.’
‘He lost no time,’ Richard said. ‘The King’s representatives, I was told, would not arrive until Sunday. He lost no time in making sure of Midculter and even, I hear, of Mariotta.’
‘You misheard,’ Sybilla said. ‘Francis merely undertook to return to Scotland should Mariotta require him.’
Now, when delicacy was no longer profitable, she could use his name. The pain beating in his brows was beyond belief. He wanted only to go while he was still master of himself; before this primitive desire to devastate them both should overpower him. He took a breath.
‘It has all been a misunderstanding. You will allow me to take my leave. I shall see you on Sunday,’ he said. He had ridden through the night, without rest and without sleep, for this. It ought, surely, to give someone a moment of wry amusement. He understood—but then he had always understood—how Richard had felt at Philorth.
Richard said, ‘But you will be back, before Sunday. It took you how long … ten minutes? to persuade Sybilla to hand you Midculter and leave Scotland. What will you not achieve next time? You should be relieved. A lifetime of desertion, and you are still her favourite son.’
‘Be quiet, both of you,’ Sybilla said. It was the tone with which she had quelled them, squabbling, over the years and which even now could make Richard hesitate, and look at her, and fall silent. She said, ‘The fault is mine. I allowed Francis to continue to think you were dead. And I offered to leave Scotland, if he would come home again. If your eavesdropping allowed it, you must have heard him refuse me.’
Neither son had ever blasphemed in her presence before. But Lymond did so now, and caused her to break off abruptly as Richard said, ‘I don’t believe you. You knew I was alive. Why should you suggest exiling yourself?’
‘To see what I would say,’ Lymond said and smiling, destroyed all his own controls as they looked at him. ‘She had no intention of going. But if you hadn’t come in, who knows what she would have learned? Who knows what I should have learned? There is no