Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [190]
‘Master Bailey,’ said Philippa sharply. ‘You cannot afford to displease my husband.’
‘I should hope,’ said Leonard Bailey heartily, ‘not to distress any of my fellow-men, far less my own sister’s family.’ He conveyed Madame Roset to the door, placed her outside, smiling, and closing it, turned back to Philippa. His smile broadened. ‘I saw you admiring my doublet. Do you think I could afford these buttons on a mere three hundred pounds every twelvemonth? No. I have M. de Sevigny’s bond that so long as I maintain silence about his unfortunate conception, I shall receive such a pension, and I am not ungrateful. But now I have additional sources of income. I am no longer the pauper I was when we met last in England.’
‘The fees for betraying your own sister’s family to the English?’ Philippa said.
He smiled again. ‘Partly so. I am sure, for anyone so able, the incident at Ham proved merely a temporary inconvenience to my gallant great-nephew. And I am glad to say that my payments have continued without abatement. Your husband is a man of his word. Only in the event of my breaking silence, he ruled, would it cease. A step I should not lightly take. But a step I should not now require to avoid, if I felt it necessary.… I have been waiting for you to come, my dear, ever since your impulsive husband rushed off to Flavy. I made sure Renée Jourda would tell him everything, and you would find a way of extracting it from him. But instead, you used Camille’s key?’
Philippa said, ‘Renée Jourda died before he could learn this address. How did you know he was going to Flavy?’
‘I have friends in Coulanges,’ Bailey said. ‘I knew as soon as you went to la Guiche what you would report to him, and that he would go to see Rénee Jourda. I only wish I had been there to hear that overweening self-esteem pricked at last. And what do you think now of the honourable, clean-living Scottish family you have married into? Small wonder I hear you cannot wait for a divorce.’
It was, somehow, not so desirable to stand up. Philippa found a tall velvet chair by the fireplace and sat in it, taking some time to dispose of her petticoat and overskirt and hanging sleeves with their expensive gemwork. I shall harness thee a chariot of lapis-lazuli and gold said the thin silver writing, glittering in the weak sun striking white through the window panes.
The man—the person—the shapeless vessel of envy and malevolence seated opposite her believed that Francis … Mr Crawford … had learned the truth at Flavy, and had imparted it to her. Whereas what Lymond had written was that Béatris and Gavin Crawford were now proved his parents, and Béatris’s daughter Marthe his full sister.
But Renée Jourda could not have proved such a thing to his or anyone else’s satisfaction. Béatris’s only son had died, aged ten, in the year Francis Crawford was born. And Lymond and Marthe must therefore have come of different mothers.
They were alike because the same man had fathered them.
A man whose real identity, it seemed, could not be countenanced, even for Sybilla’s sake. An irresponsible and, one supposed, irresistible man who must therefore have sired four different children, two to Béatris, the Dame de Doubtance’s unmarried daughter and two to Sybilla, already the wife of Gavin Crawford and the mother of Richard.
The daughters had been named Marthe by Béatris and Eloise by Sybilla. But the same name of Francis Crawford had been given to both the sons: to the beloved child born in this house to Sybilla, and to Béatris