Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [262]
Long before dawn, Philippa Somerville, after a sleepless night, rose from her temporary bed in the Bishop’s Palace on the quayside behind Notre-Dame Cathedral, dressed in cloth of silver and proceeded with the other demoiselles of honour to the long task of preparing their mistress for her wedding. She too, like the magistrates of Paris, was unaware of anything which might impede the ceremony.
She remembered, certainly, Richard Crawford returning grim-faced from his brother’s house, and the conference of Commissioners which had taken place behind locked doors with, one could hear, a good deal of dissent and even some shouting. What she remembered more clearly, however, was the childish and debasing restrictions Culter and Austin had suddenly placed on her liberty: the withdrawal of Célie and her replacement by a silent woman named, ridiculously, Euphemia, who dogged her every movement and slept in her chamber.
These measures were to protect her, she was told, against Lymond. They also made sure, although no one said so, that she was unable to make any indecorous movements towards Lymond herself. Richard had not spared her an account of the woman who had shared Lymond’s bedroom the previous night. He had also taken time, with a slow and bitter reluctance, to place before her the truth of his brother’s habit of life, as an outlaw in Scotland, and as a mignon of France six years before, practising all the sensual arts.
She knew it all, since Lymond himself had told her: the reckless degradation for whatever motives, whose stain, like the mud of Paris, was indelible. Sybilla had not been in the room while Richard had talked of his brother. Throughout, ever since Austin’s outburst, Sybilla had said achingly little. Only from her stillness and the searching blue gaze which followed and rested on her constantly did Philippa guess that only now was she coming to realize, as perhaps few others did, the full dimensions of the doomed relationship between Philippa and her son Francis.
For that, she had to thank Austin, who against all probability was fighting, where Catherine d’Albon had simply withdrawn. And withdrawn sorely hurt, as Philippa knew, although with a pride which would let her smile when Philippa went to see her and say, ‘I showed you your face in the mirror. It was not only the face of one who loves, but the face of one whose love is returned. I should rather, Philippa, marry where there is no love than marry and find love turn to jealousy. Don’t be sorry. This is a better way than any other.’
And for her, perhaps it was. An heiress finds no shortage of suitors. Since rumour had carried abroad her own rupture with Austin, the four days before the wedding and coming annulment had been made feverishly miserable by the suffocating attentions of all those she had drawn within her circle and especially those, such as the Schiatti cousins, to whom she owed an obligation.
And worse than this, day by day, was the fact that no word reached her from Leonard Bailey; that perhaps no message would ever reach her. Perhaps he had chosen instead to favour John Elder and the Lennoxes, not herself, with the proof of Sybilla’s infidelity. Perhaps he had already sent Elder the papers and Elder was moving, smiling and chatting about the royal household, awaiting only his moment to reveal them.
Daily, in those four days of chaos and ritual, she had seen Francis distantly, acting his rôle; and daily had noted the changes in him. The message from Leonard Bailey had become, by that Sunday morning, the most important thing in Philippa’s life; the most feared and the most hoped for.
There are two things you desire, the astrologers had once told Francis Crawford. The first you will have. The second you shall never have, nor would it be just that you should.
It might not be just. But this wish at least she might fulfil for him.
*
The Commissioners for Scotland, chosen by Scotland to decorate the marriage and fortify it with Scottish authority, dressed in the Hôtel de l’Ange and left early