Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [235]
‘You must,’ said Sybilla cooly, ‘come and overhear me again. It might endow you with sufficient of the same to sit and listen to me in the open another time.’ She made a slight, perfect curtsey to both her host and her hostess and rising, turned to the door. ‘Mr Hislop!’
‘Yes,’ said Danny, and bowing, hurried after.
Making their way in procession back through the network of streets to the river: ‘I feel,’ said Danny casually, ‘that irritating though the lady may be, she is worth helping.’
‘That is why you traced her, isn’t it? Of course she is worth helping,’ Sybilla said. ‘Perhaps Nostradamus will do it as well as anyone.’ Her voice was absent.
‘Or Philippa?’ Danny said. ‘She’s good sense incarnate.’
‘She is also,’ Sybilla said, ‘in love with Francis.’ The adverb dangled, ambiguously, in the air. ‘No. Philippa cannot help,’ her mother-in-law continued soberly. ‘Philippa herself is engaged in a battle that nothing must stop her winning.’
*
At the time she was speaking, the battle which Philippa must win had continued through two nights without sleep and a day of such stupefying abstraction that her royal employers, impatient of the sudden failure of the strongest horse in the wedding team, gave her a day’s leave from her duties.
It saved her physical health if nothing else, for the struggle was with herself; and her chief necessity was peace in which to concentrate.
Do you think that I care?
‘No. But you must excuse the hunchback, who does.’
With the emotional extravagance of a clerk of the Court of Session notifying a transumpt, Francis Crawford had placed briefly on record, for her sake, the one factor in their relationship of which she was ignorant. Then the door had been closed; and she was alone in the dark with her shock.
Restraint is the remedy. So little … Nothing had been put into words. Of course he had been confident of the scale of her love, having borne time and again the calf-love of others, men and women, and having watched them suffer because of it. Of his own, he had told her nothing. Perhaps he knew, having lived with Güzel, how short a time earthly passion lasted. She only guessed, from his words, that for him, it must have started in London.
And so he had tried to escape. And she had prevented him.
And thence had come the strains which she, as well as his friends, had so officiously set about assuaging. And the blindness which Archie knew about, and Nostradamus, and herself.
She had offered herself as his cure, and he had refused her. To overcome that refusal demanded more than a convincing protestation of life-long devotion. It demanded that she should recognize the steadfast integrity which lay behind the refusal; and destroy it.
And that she could not do. Without a tremor, Francis would bring his spoiled heritage to Catherine, the daughter of two people who in their time had indulged in every form of costly licence. But to herself, a girl of twenty, reared by Kate with wisdom and wit and endless, clear-sighted love, there was no path that pride, regard, convention, self-respect and even, she suspected, an odd, well-disguised quality of self-distrust did not block for him.
She could not be his wife. She must shut the door, as he asked her, on all the crowding memories: the words and actions each now apparent, like shot-silk, in a different colour. Her task, for which she needed all her strength and her common sense, was to protect him.
Adam came to tell her what had happened at the Hôtel d’Hercule after she had left. Believing the battle won, she went to find Catherine d’Albon.
She was alone in her chamber. Philippa sat beside her quietly and said, ‘I want you to know that Piero Strozzi brought me to the Hôtel d’Hercule the other night with a false message from M. de Sevigny. And that I went to his room, without warning him, because I was upset about some rudeness he had shown to his mother. Austin lost his head.’
‘I know,’ Catherine said. The lustrous grey eyes