Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [194]
If she used the flat of her hand, or her knee, or the heel of her shoe, he would throw her out, and do what the Lennoxes wanted. She got her head free then, and snapped at him. ‘If you indulge yourself now, Master Bailey, you will not have your money, for I will not send for it.’ And, as the pressure continued: ‘It’s your life you are risking,’ said Philippa clearly. ‘If you go on, I shall make it known to Mr Crawford, whatever the consequences.’
‘Ah,’ he said. He disengaged very slowly and stood breathing thickly. ‘I remember. You said there would be no divorce if he mounted you. So … is it possible? You jib because you have a maidenhead still to barter?’
‘You should take a beginner’s course in almost any well-run seraglio,’ said Philippa shortly. ‘It would adjust certain gaucheries in your language.’
He ignored that. ‘A virgin under this monarchy, and with a fortune!… I cannot believe it!’ said Leonard Bailey; and in his voice, quite plainly, was a puzzled excitement. ‘What milksop lovers have you had, that you have reached twenty without a single passage, a single conclusive joust in some antechamber, or grotto, or window embrasure? I have known no man born who could not achieve his business with a woman at court, if he felt like it.’
‘Perhaps my approach is too subtle for them,’ Philippa said. ‘Master Bailey, with ten thousand pounds, you can buy all the court ladies you want, and the window embrasures to put them in.’
He smiled. His nostrils spread, and his lips; and you could see that his mind had shifted, for the moment, from the promptings of his appetites. She waited, holding her breath, and staring at him.
‘But that would not hurt the Crawfords,’ he said. ‘No. Go home, Madame de Sevigny. Collect all the money you have. Wait. And, in my own time, I shall tell you the price. If there is one.’
She was free. She tempted fate by using no more arguments. ‘It is your life, Master Bailey,’ she said. ‘I should advise you to put off no time in safeguarding it.’
The men still stood on guard outside the door as she passed through. She supposed Bailey called them his servants. There were two more in the hall waiting, he said, to escort her over the snow to her lodging. Which was shrewd of him. For that way she could not linger and watch who left the house with the papers.
She hoped Madame Roset would be safe. She should be. He wanted to stay in that house, and she was a witness: he needed her. And there was no way of removing her, that she could think of.
He squeezed her fingers and kissed them, taking his leave, and she walked from the house with her keepers, the three sets of prints tumbling and gouging the smooth, sparkling white of the garden. The bodyguard answered no questions, but stood while the gatehouse porter, scolding, brought servants running to guide her over the swept, slippery flags of the Hôtel de Guise courtyard.
As she entered the doors she saw them still there outside, watching.
Her grace of Scotland, said Célie, had sent for her.
It was, as one had guessed, a matter of the dressmaker’s continued shortcomings. Philippa did what she could, through the raging pain in her head, to rectify it.
The headache lingered a while but did not approach, she was glad to find, a degree of virulence which might incapacitate her.
For that, you had to expose your sensibilities to attack for very much longer; and take no one into your confidence: least of all those already nearer to you than you wanted.
She was busy all day but at night found herself too tired to sleep. When she finally closed her eyes before dawn, she was awakened almost at once by the noise of somebody frantically sobbing. It was not until she felt Célie’s brusque arms around her that she realized that it was herself.
Chapter 8
Freres et seurs en divers lieux captifs
Se trouveront passer pres du monarque.
Conducted by the glittering red and blue tabards of the Lyon Court, the procession of the nine Scottish Commissioners for the Queen of Scots’ wedding wound into Paris some three days afterwards, impeccably