Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [245]
She paused and waited, judging her moment. Lymond said, ‘I see. Then, since nothing has changed, it must be for a very good reason.’
‘If nothing had changed,’ Philippa said, ‘I shouldn’t be here.’
‘Ah,’ Lymond said. He added dryly, ‘It would sometimes help if Archie’s nervous system were less directly attuned to the elephant world.’
Philippa said, ‘Perhaps. Sybilla also has asked that you should be taken to see a doctor.’
‘So many setters,’ he said. ‘I thought we understood one another. I thought it was agreed we go our separate ways.’
He had not asked her to sit. She chose one of the velvet chairs and watched herself in his eyes as she seated herself in it. Her skirts, dove-grey for Lent, lay ruched and arrowed about her, and her hair was dressed high and tight-caught with ribbons, save where it lay coiled on her cheek. Pleated cambric covered her shoulders and rose to a high buttoned collar, against which her earrings caught and drifted and swung. She said, ‘In the Hôtel d’Hercule, you asked me to make a sacrifice. I am not prepared to see it thrown in the gutter.’
She studied him. Slowly, prudently, one must mount this attack. The world was full of men and women who had tried to bring down Francis Crawford, but none with the advantage she had. And he was tired: more tired, she thought, than on the night she had gone to his room; and his nerves must be bruised, as hers were, with the interminable stress of their meetings.
But as yet, his voice answering her was quite composed. ‘For a Somerville, that sounds a little dramatic. Absence is absence, whatever causes it. It is no more or less an affront to you. I did say, as I remember, that I would try to do what you wished me to do. And that you must forgive me if I failed.’
He remained standing. Like herself, he was still in court dress: elegant, close-fitting, impeccable in every detail; and crossed by the black sash of his Order which Austin Grey had torn to the ground.
Philippa said, ‘And are you failing? Why?’
He said, ‘Because an encounter like this, Philippa, doesn’t make it easy to do anything else.’ Then he paused and said a little flatly, ‘Also, I have been watching you.… I did not mean to hurt you so much.’
‘I know,’ she said. Sitting perfectly still, her hands laid together in her silk lap, she let her eyes speak for her and saw his darken, waiting. She said, ‘I thought, too, that it would be kinder to let you think me afflicted with calf-love, or an adolescent devotion, but of course this is not so.’ She heard her own voice tremble and stilled it, smiling with her lips only. ‘Before God, you are my soul; and till death and beyond, will remain so.’
She saw him catch his breath. One second passed; then two; then three. Then he leaned back his hand and, touching the chair, let himself smoothly into it. He said, ‘Then you don’t know, Philippa, what I am.’
‘I know what you think you are,’ Philippa said.
‘But not what I am. Will you let me tell you?’ he said. And when she nodded, laid his flawless hands on the table and, turning over and over the silk marker lying there, began to speak levelly.
Told in a measured voice, hesitating sometimes; resuming always undemonstratively, it was the story, without colour and virtually without explanation, of all that was ugly in his past. Much of it, as she had said, Philippa already knew. Now she heard also the rest. She heard what happened on his last visit to France; what happened in Scotland; in Djerba; in Russia. She learned the truth about Oonagh O’Dwyer, and Joleta Malett, and of the great courtesan called Güzel. She learned—and did not know she was the first person to be told of it—of the sweet summer’s dell north of Hexham where, sick of tragedy and despairing of all the future, he had tried to taunt Richard into knifing him.
And that, in turn, had been after the death of Christian Stewart, who was blind and who for his sake had ridden to her death over the great Roman ditch by Flaw Valleys,