Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [224]
‘… and whose whole man, body and soul, go always up and down, musing of mischief. What happened?’ said Philippa relentlessly.
And he answered her lightly. ‘A piece of foolishness. The mouse instead of the mountain of gold. You will be disappointed. I left the house with a headache, and a drunken fall in the street knocked me senseless. Archie conveyed me to a printer called Macé Bonhomme, and Nostradamus tended me there. Such things are not supposed to happen to leaders of armies, so nothing has been said about it.’
It tallied with what she had overheard in Marthe’s house. Philippa said, ‘Like the headaches you had in London?’
‘Fortunately,’ he said, ‘not at all of that order. They are common, according to Nostradamus, in individuals with a chronic inability to suffer reverses. He is hoping, I am sure, that someone will keep a matronly eye on me.’
And that, set beside what she knew, was a little too specious.
He had turned round, as he had in Lyon, and put his hands out of sight on the edge of the table behind him. Philippa said, ‘I should like the truth. I haven’t had it yet.’
The truth. The truth is that …
‘But I am not your business now,’ he said calmly. The train of thought vanished.
Philippa said, ‘Perhaps you are not the best judge of that.’
‘And you are?’ he said. ‘You should have let me go to Catherine.’ And then moved to sudden anger perhaps by the wine, ‘Everything I do seems to be exposed, like a bloody carcass picked over by …’
‘… jackals,’ she said. ‘You have me followed. You interfere with my affairs. I am not allowed to say to you, I am not your business.’ She paused, and then said very firmly, ‘Do you tell me? Or do I ask Nostradamus?’
‘I shall tell you,’ he said. ‘Why make an occasion out of it? I devised a somewhat arbitrary way out of my own difficulties that evening; and Archie stopped me. The headaches are an extension of the kind I had in London. At the height of each attack, I am blind.’
All the servants by now were in bed, and even the quayside must be empty. Outside the room there was no sound at all; and inside only the thud of her heart, jarring the air, the tapestries, the bedhangings; and her view of him watching her, braced a little to recoil, in case she moved towards him.
Then the innermost sense reached her of what he was saying.
In the only voice to which she had access, a reedy one, she said, ‘You tried to …? How?’
‘In the time-honoured fashion,’ he said. ‘My cuffs are too tight to gratify you with a view.’
Her eyes, wide open, remained on his: brown eyes, like Kate’s. And the curl of her nostril deepened, although she did not know it; and the line, like Kate’s across her clear brow.
Then Philippa turned and reaching the twisted marble pillars of the chimney-piece sank down before them, her back to him; her hair, fire-lined, drifting over her shoulders. She said, ‘Of course. You have always tried to escape.’
‘And I have always harmed the friends who have tried to stop me,’ Lymond said. His voice was uninflected. He added, ‘I have tried many times to warn you not to come too close to me.’
‘Naturally. Level-headed and constructive to the end,’ Philippa said, ‘in confronting all your personal problems. And now? A trifle of hemlock? You can always evade Archie.’
He said, ‘You might spare me a little. I did give you the whip of my own accord. In Lyon, I had no other means of escape. Now I have several; and responsibilities which I mean to honour. There is no need to agonize over it.’
‘And the blindness?’ Philippa said. ‘What capable plan have you devised to deal with that?’
‘Archie knows,’ he said with a weariness she could just hear. ‘And keeps me drunk, or drugged or otherwise insensate at intervals. No one else has discovered. Except, of course, Nostradamus.’
Her hands, deep in her lap, were clenched bone to bone upon each other. ‘And Nostradamus?’ she said. ‘Your involuntary nurse? What can he do?’
‘Inform you, it seems,’ Lymond said. ‘I suppose