Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [246]
Philippa remembered, far off in her childhood, a red-haired girl being carried, dust-covered and bloody, into Flaw Valleys and laid in the bed with the yellow silk curtains. She remembered Kate’s face as Lymond stood by the bed. As the girl died, he had made music for her.
‘That was when …’ Philippa said. There were unshed tears, swelling and pricking under her lashes. But she did not let them fall. In this circus, she was not the victim.
‘That was when you were ten years old,’ Lymond said. ‘And I was an outlaw and an excommunicate, a mercenary and a vagabond already. She died because of me. If I lose my sight, it will only be a kind of rude justice. By releasing you from the net, I pay my debt to her, and to Oonagh and to all the others who died.’
He stopped. His eyes saw the marker, twisted and wrung in his hands, and opening them, he laid it gently down on the marble. Then he lifted his head for the first time and looked at her.
‘And I, then, am the son of Abraham?’ Philippa said. ‘To pay your debts; to salve your pride; to protect your honour, I am to be sacrificed?’
The lash caught him disarmed. He swept his fists from the table and then was still. Then he said, ‘Did you not hear?’
‘I heard you. It makes no difference.’
‘And if it becomes known who my father is?’ He could not keep the bitterness, this time, from his voice.
‘What is Kuzúm?’ Philippa said. ‘He is himself. You told me that, once. Embrace whatever stigma you like. My life and birth are both blameless and I am being punished because of your scruples.’
He said, ‘Would you rather I had none?’
‘No,’ Philippa said. ‘But I think you must find the grace to forgo them. Otherwise I pay for your sins and you escape, as always.’ She looked at him, her brown eyes very open and level. ‘I will give you to Catherine. I will not give you to a hole in the ground. I am going to hold you, Francis, to your marriage.’
It was the first time in all the months since Lyon that she had called him by his name. A flame showed, sudden and blue in the depths of his eyes, and then died. The pulse, beating above his drawn brows, told her all at once that he had a headache. ‘There is no way you could hold me,’ he said.
The wind sighed a little, softly wailing, in the roof windows. The candles burned, repeated over and over in the glazed grilles. The long, empty room filled with the scents of cypress wood and leather and ink harboured them without taking sides, without intrusion, as had the meadow grass on that other occasion when, out of anger, not love, his brother had set out to smash his defences.
‘Of course: never against your will,’ Philippa said. She rose. Her robe rustled. She moved round the chair and spread her skirts on the arm of it, a little nearer than before to the table. She said, ‘Then tell me that what you feel for me is an infatuation. That you object to being tied. That, like poor Jane Shore’s lover, you find yourself more amorous of my body than curious of my soul? Then I should agree with you. That I should want to be spared.’
A trickle of wax, occasioned by the draught of her movement, ran like an escaping spirit down the stem of a candle and there stiffened, extinguished as an unwanted emotion. Lymond drew an uneven breath. ‘What is temptation, if not that?’
‘Then tell me,’ Philippa said. ‘And make me believe it.’
It was a moment before he replied. Then the shut mouth curled, in something not quite a smile. ‘Gould bydeth ever bright … It would be a pity to cloud it,’ he said. ‘That is one blasphemy I cannot bring myself to commit. I love you, Philippa, in every way known to man.’
She kept her hands still, and her head; and her buttoned collar hid her throat when she swallowed. She said, ‘But you love your vanity more.’
It stung him to his feet; and it seemed a long interval before he removed his gaze and walking across to the bookshelves turned in their shadow, his head gilt against the lustrous bindings. He said, ‘Choose your darts better. That means Put me first, Philippa. And I don’t believe you would ask it.