Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [236]
‘Except to Austin,’ said Philippa lightly. Her own eyes, concerned, were watching the bent head. After a moment she said, ‘Catherine?’
The needle flashed once, twice, and then was pushed firmly home. Catherine took her sewing and rose, and lifted from the wall a small looking-glass. Then, reversing it between her long fingers, she held it so that Philippa saw, reflected there, her own perplexed face.
‘I know,’ Catherine said, ‘that the encounter happened by accident, and that you did not intend to be thoughtless. But since it happened, have you watched the change in your eyes?’
Philippa flushed. She felt the blood rise in her skin, and lifting both hands, took the mirror from Catherine’s hold and laid it, face down on the cushion. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said.
‘You don’t hear, either, when we speak to you; and the children think you have a fever. The rest of us believe it is an affair of the heart.’
‘How embarrassing,’ Philippa said. Her eyes and her voice were both steady.
‘But you have not called on Austin Grey,’ Catherine said. She paused, and then said, ‘It is Francis, isn’t it?’
She had made this girl her friend. And Lymond, knowing all that he did, had asked her to be his wife and still meant to make her so. Philippa smiled, wryly, and said, ‘Yes. I’m glad you didn’t notice before. He wants his divorce, and the marriage with you. It won’t matter. I shall be in England, with Austin probably.’
‘I noticed,’ said Catherine slowly. ‘He has always encouraged the friendship between Lord Allendale and yourself.’
‘I told Austin a long time ago,’ Philippa said, ‘that I loved Francis Crawford, but that there was never any question of our marriage being completed, or of his being interested in anything but ending it as quickly as possible. If, after Easter, Austin, still wants to marry me, I have said I will listen to him.’
‘I see,’ Catherine said. She picked the glass from the cushion and resting it on her knee, looked at herself consideringly in it. Then, laying her arms on top, she gazed, smiling a little, at Philippa. ‘And one word with your husband and you revive like a garden of flowers. Why … I wish I knew why he does not want to keep you?’
‘Look in your mirror again,’ Philippa said. And felt sick, while she said it. And wondered, then, how often Francis must have felt this same deadly loathing.
You told yourself that it was a convention: a marriage between two worldly people whose amorous inclinations could without harm lead in opposite directions. But the truth was that this girl loved Francis Crawford with something which might approach, for all he knew, the passion he talked of. What makes an unsuitable marriage?
This, she thought as she left Catherine’s chamber. One-sided love, where each side hurts and is hurt, like Jerott and Marthe … Gavin and Sybilla.
As her love was not. This love which, it had been decided for her, was to die as the child killed by the mutes at Topkapi had died, for the sake of the greater good.
To make that other decision in Turkey he had sacrificed everything: the integrity of his body and the sanctity of his spoken vow; and had been strong enough, in sort, to recover.
Now he demanded an equal sacrifice of her, as well as of himself.
But no. Her thoughts better schooled, she reminded herself. The smothering of an adolescent attachment was all he believed he was asking of her. The self-control which for eleven months had kept his own desires in perfect concealment also made nonsense of her fears for Catherine.
He was not Jerott or Gavin. Catherine would not be allowed to suffer. And in the calm of such a marriage he might find the relief he had himself suggested: a cure which, storm-ridden with remorse and self-loathing, no union with herself could ever offer.
He was right. He had already trodden this path and found it barred: he knew the landscape and was already, in his pain, accustomed to it. It was she, blinded by the brightness of the