Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [248]
He found the chair with one hand and dropped into it. He was shivering violently. He said, ‘Can you go? And send Archie?’
She caught his wrist, intent on finding its pulse; but was defeated. The delicate lace of his cuff covered even the heel of his palm. He drew a breath and said, the rising paroxysm shuttered hard by the bone of his hand, ‘Very soon, I shall be extremely sick … which will be a very great pity. Archie knows what to do. It would help me … if you went away.’
The words followed her as she ran down the long parquet floor and returned, running still, followed by Archie. To the sense of them she paid no attention. She followed behind as, his hand on Lymond’s arm, Archie guided him, lightly touching, down the passages to his apartments. And there, it was Philippa who held him when, as he foretold, Francis Crawford was sick, quite desperately so, for a long time. Then she found and measured a potion of sorts under Archie’s directions and brought it to the high bed where Archie had already installed his master.
He lay still, sunk in pillows, his eyes heavily closed; and when he opened them as she sat beside him, she saw with a kind of angry despair that they were not clearly trained on her features. J’irai donc, maugré toy … She wondered if, afterwards, he would remember all he had said this evening.
She said, ‘Try to forgive me. But try to remember.… There is a difference between absence and death. And you are needed.’
He had no strength and no resistance left; nor any saving stock of the wit and the detachment which had been his most precious qualities all the time she had known him. His lips parted, and his eyes rested open on the place where he thought he might find her.
‘Every other woman since Eve,’ he said. ‘Except you.’
Chapter 5
Le prince Anglois Mars à son cueur de ciel
Voudra poursuivre la fortune prospere
There were then twenty days left till the wedding.
How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?
And lastly, how do you achieve all these things while (concealing your grief and your anger) you prepare a spoiled, imperious, charming fifteen-year-old girl for her wedding?
It was noted, in those first days of Easter Week, that the sardonic habit of the young comtesse de Sevigny, refreshing as ever, verged more than usual towards the acid. She had no sympathy with the heated squabble over which two demoiselles possessed the necessary rank, not to mention muscle power, to support the bride’s twelve-yard train into the Cathedral Church of Notre-Dame in Paris, although she did supervise the safe, if acrimonious, shuttling between Paris and Fontainebleau of jewels for its embroidery.
A crown was having to be made because the Scottish Commissioners, to everyone’s surprise and annoyance, had failed to bring with them the Scottish Crown Matrimonial for use at the ceremony, and refused to send for it.
Richard, tackled about this, had been extremely vague and Philippa, abandoning a private theory through sheer pressure of work, went off to a stormy rehearsal of the children’s share in the wedding banquet entertainment. The twelve wicker unicorns, wheeled but not yet caparisoned, proved only that the makers had no idea of the battering power of small, fat six-year-old princes. The de Guise and de Valois children rammed them at one another while Lord Harry de Valois, sadly and with a slow cry of boredom, fell through his, the red Fleming hair engulfed like a flue brush.
Two hundred masks from Ferrara arrived as a bride’s gift to Mary, and instead of being placed in the gift-room, got used at a private and riotous party in the rooms of the Duke of Lorraine, who could not be chastised for it as the King was cultivating him, and he claimed, pressingly, to be in love with Mistress Philippa, anyway.
The Scottish Commissioners agreed