Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [184]
And even then, talking because she could not help it, the other girl kept all the qualities of intelligence and instinctive good manners which made her the right choice for this marriage. And observing, Philippa saw as in a mirror all her own deepest emotions reflected as once, in this many-sided glass, there must have been reflected the feelings of those other women … of Christian Stewart … of Güzel Kiaya Khátún … of Oonagh, the mother of his child.
It reminded her, in humility, that she was less to him than any of them. So that she was glad that this accomplished and lovely woman would be the one to whom, at last, he proposed to tie himself, by a deliberate contract which his own code of conduct made it unlikely that he would ever evade. Which promised some happiness for them both. And which, if it did nothing else, would stop him from going to Russia.
She wondered if Madame la Maréchale de St André had passed on the advice she had given her, and whether with a marriage offer in her hand, Catherine would feel secure enough to ignore it. On the other hand, Mr Crawford himself might feel free now to pay court in earnest. And if he did it was unlikely, thought Philippa phlegmatically, that Catherine d’Albon would succeed in resisting him.
Before she left, Catherine kissed her for the first time, and holding her hands said, ‘You, too, will be free: whom will you marry? Whoever it may be, you must try not to leave us. We need you, Philippa.’
Which was generous, but one had to be practical. So Philippa said, ‘It’s probably as well, or the Vicar of Rome would re-open hostilities. You know I should like to stay, but it poses certain delicate problems of protocol as M. de Sevigny’s family will be the first, I’m afraid, to point out.’ She smiled. ‘Lord Allendale also has other ideas. I am visiting him at the Hôtel d’Hercule this evening.’
‘When you know what you want, tell me,’ Catherine said. And kissed her a second time.
She returned it with warmth, but no candour. She knew her desire and had just killed it; dispatching it like Ninachetuen upon a scented scaffold of flowers with aromatic fires lit underneath. There was no reason why anyone but herself should burn on them.
*
She spent an hour with Austin, in a small suite of rooms within the vast, marbled mansion over the river that a grateful crown had bestowed on her husband.
She had been there already, with Adam. The rooms were guarded, but not stringently so, and Austin was attended by his own men, and allowed visitors. The negotiations for his ransom and freedom had, it seemed, progressed not at all through Lymond’s absence. Of what had occurred on the night of the banquet Austin had never spoken, nor had Marthe been mentioned.
All that had ever concerned him had been her welfare. Used to the habit of banter, conditioned to the attacking wit of Kate’s carping tongue, she had never drunk at this well: known the peace of a deep and loving solicitude, offered with a delicacy which hardly made itself known.
She had not so far been permitted to visit his uncle Lord Grey, held in La Rochefoucauld’s house elsewhere in Paris. From other sources however she had learned enough of what happened at Guînes to explain Austin’s pallor, and the sleeplessness of which he did not complain. He had watched his country brought low: he had shared his uncle’s despairing surrender: he was the captive of a man whom he had seen in his most outrageous and despicable moments and whose callousness towards Kate and herself she supposed he would never condone.
But he did not discuss Francis Crawford. He brought no slightest form of bias to the long exchanges in which she learned all she had yearned to know; about the harvest and their friends and their neighbours; about the skirmishing on the Border, and what rumour said of the Dowager, and what he knew of Mary Tudor’s wellbeing, and all