Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [296]
The summer days passed, ostensibly filled more and more with small and deep pleasures, and with the careful threads of those many affairs which, woven together, were to make them a fit life together. To those about them it seemed the tension was easing. To Philippa, walking with steady feet through the invisible veils of her cloud-forest, the brightness dissolved in the air, darkly filtered.
For how long can one maintain total vigilance? How long before, inattentively, one hurts, and then hurts again without meaning it? And how long, too, can strength of will last, at a pitch such as this, without destroying the structure which houses it?
She knew, from the lights in the salon, how little time he spent in his bed-chamber. She knew from Archie the length of his rides; the violence of the games he played; the prolonged hours of his hunting. Once, returning from Blois, she had found Archie, stony-faced, rubbing down the fine, chestnut Isabela in the stables and walking into the parlour had found Francis asleep there.
She would have been thankful but for the marks of total exhaustion printed under his lashes and about the hard lines of his mouth. Shocked, she moved to his chair and unthinking, found his hand and possessed it.
He opened his eyes; and the trees of the cloud-forest toppled around her. She felt the laceration of his withdrawing fingers, and saw the force of his movements and heard the thud of wood upon wood as the door was flung shut behind him. Then she knelt by the chair, still holding the warmth of his sojourn, and closed her stinging palms over her face as the tears came.
Presently, having removed all trace of distress, she went into the grand’ salle and waited.
In an hour he came to join her, the stamp of weariness stark now against a flat pallor, and walking to the window, said, ‘Will you forgive me?’
‘Why?’ said Philippa. ‘For suffering what you have suffered for three months?’ And felt the veils rend about her, for she had broken the unwritten law: it must not be uttered. It must not be uttered, or they could not bear the pain, mirrored over and over.
So he shook his head, saying nothing; and after a moment chose a chair and sat down, not so far off as usual. An affirmation: I have strength still. Do not be afraid. But Philippa said, ‘I love you so much.’
All the colour there was left his face. But he only said gently, ‘Then next time, you will remember.’
So she must give him the protection he needed and so manage herself that nothing about her, her hand, her dress, her shoulder, should ever approach him. And in such a manner that, one vainly hoped, he might be unaware of it.
For how long can one maintain total vigilance?
For how long can love last, in isolation, without sinking crushed beneath its own pressure?
After that she did not go to seek him when he went out, but waited until he was ready to come to her. The fact that he continued to go out told its own story. Some things, then, were now beyond him.
So it was by accident that, one day in mid-July, she left the gardens of Sevigny and chose the path that he had taken, down to the river.
All month the heat had persisted, so that the carp gasped in their pond and the Loire shrank in its wide rushing channel, leaving dry sand and straw at its edges.
It drew Philippa by its coolness. She did not see, until she rounded a bay, that two men she knew stood on the sand, talking. Both were servants of Francis, and she saw, from the look of their horses and the cream-tailed Isabela, loosely hobbled near by, that they had been riding hard with him. Then, far out in the river, she saw a wet yellow head in a stream of silver driving towards them, and realized what they were waiting for.
She did not want, at that moment, to speak to them. But she stood, obscured by the alders and was lost for a moment in the beauty of the moving force shearing the water; in the light on the waves and the glitter of the arching hand and arm, repeated over and over.
They were brown. He must