Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [29]
It was, Philippa supposed with a groan, her punishment for involving him in her private obsessions. She refrained, with no difficulty, from grasping his sleek, grogram arm and marched forward instead, out of the tunnel and into the Gaultier courtyard.
*
So Jerott Blyth, waiting for Lymond, saw a young woman emerge just ahead of him, preceded by a puff of chypre and an aura of extreme self-possession. He priced her gown automatically and then shifted his attention to the tinted face under the ostrich feather. The brown eyes, the decided nose, the curled lips belonged to no one whose parents he knew.
She was smiling at him, and he answered the smile because, indeed, she was exquisite, while at the same time he was aware, his anger rising, of Francis Crawford standing behind her, sardonically watching. He had invited Lymond alone to his home, out of bitter pride, for one purpose. If Lymond then chose to bring with him some empty-headed young nobleman’s daughter, it was quite deliberate, and in tune with his conduct outside the Hôtel de Ville the previous morning.
Lymond had stopped by the orange trees at the entrance. Jerott made no attempt to walk forward. But the girl came straight towards him and, taking his hand, leaned up and kissed his cheek, smiling. Behind him, his wife Marthe’s voice said, ‘Don’t you recognize her? It’s Philippa Somerville.’
And of course, if you looked into those enlarged, reassuring dark eyes, it was the undersized bride of sixteen you had last seen dispatched home from Volos. So how in God’s name did the girl come to be in Lyon?
Marthe knew. The edge on her voice told him that, and her lack of surprise. And there was more to it than that. Marthe knew, and had invited Philippa to come at the same time as Lymond.
Jerott’s right hand jerked and then remained still, trapped under Philippa’s tranquil fingers. She leaned up and kissed him on the other cheek. ‘We’ve been working on this for days. Did we succeed in surprising you?’
‘You’ve certainly frightenened him silly,’ said Lymond. ‘If you open your fingers, he’ll drop like an egg to the paving.’ He came forward, and as Philippa retreated, took Jerott lightly by the shoulders. ‘You will have to surfer the same from me,’ he said. ‘It is a forfeit we exact from all bridegrooms.’
It had never happened before. Jerott received the swift, insubstantial embrace and then found that Lymond, stepping back, was looking at him with amiable satisfaction. Marthe said, ‘If you will all do it again, the servants will give you a round of applause. The practice is to kiss the bride, Francis. You may come, if you wish, and shake hands with the bridegroom.’
Lymond turned to the woman he now called his step-sister and Philippa, her skin chilled to goose-flesh, watched them together.
They were so alike: pretty as jonquils with their white skin and blue eyes and pale perfumed heads, gilding the gloom of the courtyard. From the archaic stone lips of a wall-fountain a ceaseless jet fell to its basin. The trill of water braided the silence. Then Lymond, his eyes on the other identical eyes, turned out the palms of his hands, yielding and empty. ‘I have no more than you have,’ he said to his sister.
Marthe said, ‘My dear, you have all the Dame de Doubtance’s fortune,’ and Jerott turned on her sharply.
‘He offered you it all, and you refused it.’
Marthe laughed, and Philippa’s hands curled inside their elaborate gloves. Whatever Lymond and his sibling were talking about, it was not money. Perhaps Marthe had saved him once from the degradation of his own addiction, but there was something different in her eyes now: contempt; defensiveness. And what Lymond had just divined: a subtle envy. Philippa said, looking round her, ‘The house hasn’t changed.’
It was bigger, indeed, than she remembered it. Gabled buildings with strange angled roofs totally enclosed the courtyard in