Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [226]
‘I had no expectations,’ Philippa said. The tears stood still on her face. ‘This is one lesson I know by heart already.’
‘You are young,’ said Lymond gently. ‘You will change. I don’t take lightly what you feel for me, but it wasn’t the kind of passion I was speaking of. You asked me a question, and I think we have come to the place where I must answer it. For one thing, you are being hurt. And for another … as you see … I seem to be losing the knack of concealing things from you.’
She said, ‘I was wrong. Don’t tell me.’
‘No. You were right,’ he said. And as the chill spread through her nerves and her flesh, he said, ‘Tant que je vive … I said too much that evening, didn’t I? It was not, of course, Güzel. Or Mariotta.’
‘Kate loves you,’ Philippa said. ‘It’s all right. She has always …’
‘Philippa, no,’ he said. He stood in an island of space, as isolated as he must have been, directing his forces in Guînes or in Calais. ‘You were right to ask, and wrong only in your conjecture. Kate is my friend. That is true. But the songs were for her daughter. And the passion, for ever. That is why we are parting.’
The words reached her, without bringing the sense any nearer. He would think her very slow: even in the middle of the night; even with undried tears bloating her eyes and her cheeks. She appeared to be on her feet, facing him. ‘But I am her daughter,’ Philippa said.
Like some obscure and difficult text, the look in his eyes was too complex to read at a distance. She said, ‘You can’t mean …?’ and then, as he did not speak, answered herself. ‘No.’
He was as pale as the sheened marble masks on the chimney-piece, but a ghost of the old self-derision pulled his mouth, as she saw, at the corner. ‘No? Then let us leave things as they are,’ he said; and moved to the table. There, he poured two glasses of wine. One he laid where she could and did take it. Bearing the other he turned and dropped into the chair he had once already occupied. He lifted the goblet. ‘To marriage,’ he said.
She stood where he had left her, the wine disregarded in her cramped fist. Kate is my friend, but the songs were for her daughter. And the passion, for ever.
This was not true. So why should he say it?
She scanned him as he leaned back, the wine in his ringed hand, watching her. He looked nearly prostrate with tiredness, but with no trace of malice about him. Yet he was trained to dissemble. He had spent an evening acting, downstairs.
‘Think, Yunitsa,’ he said abruptly.
He had called her that once before, back in London. Her legs were trembling. There was a chair just behind her. She sat in it, and tried to see where, through the years, had grown the cruelty which would inflict this upon her; or the signs which would stand witness to what he was trying to tell her.
For of course, she had begun by detesting him. Loathing the arrogant horseman, discussing a corpse in a ditch outside Boghall; the enemy who had defeated her father; who had forced his way into her mother’s house, where, a child of ten, she had baulked and betrayed him.
And he knew it, and had not retaliated. Lying drenched by the whipping-post at St Mary’s he had said, ‘You had good reason to hate me. Don’t build up another false image.’ He had not been acting, then.
That was when, discovering his quality, she had set out to redeem all the damage she had done. When, blundering, she had helped him retrieve Kuzúm, the child who now lived with her mother. At Algiers it had been her fault when, losing his temper, he had knocked her proffered cup into the ocean. She had been sixteen. He had sent her home then, or had tried to.
He had not been acting in Stamboul, when, expecting to die, he had said, ‘I am offering you my name. Then, as you choose, you may divorce me.’
That was after he had slept, drugged with opium, sharing the same great crystal bed in Topkapi, and in his nightmare had cried out the words