Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [297]
She might have known that here, unlike the steam baths of Baden, he would not only be stripped to the waist. Powerful as a machine, his arm lifted, driving him nearer and with it in her mind rose another arm, masculine also, but with muscles quilted with fat, and a bush of grey hair in its armpit. An arm joined by straining muscles to a broad, grey-pelted chest, immovable as a lichened boulder; to a sagging diaphragm and thick, plunging legs, big-boned and ashen. And the suffocating smells: of rotted teeth and stale sweat and old age, and of the voidings of a gasping and effortful maleness.
‘She is agog to see him swimming, my Sophie,’ one of the servants was saying, ‘but I’m not bringing her. I’d have to flog myself to death all night, the bitch, to make believe I was Monseigneur.’
Philippa vomited. Retching and choking, she leaned her weight on a birch sapling and then leaving it, took two steps away from the river and was sick again.
By then, exclaiming and chattering to one another, the two grooms were with her, one of them supporting Madame while the other, on her whispered appeal, brought his horse and held it. She crouched gasping against it, unable to mount, and in the end he jumped into the saddle himself, and taking her up before him, rode off carefully with her back to the château.
She heard, as she went, her husband’s voice from the water, putting a question; and then the other groom’s, answering, as he picked up a towel to throw to him.
They would use, to him, the same, jocular reassuring tone in which they had comforted her. ‘It comes to the best of wives, Madam. You will make a fine boy, never doubt it!’
While he, listening, would enter her mind, and would know what had happened.
*
Which makes the sound, the hammer or the anvil? Which feels the concussion?
Through her had come the hurt she had feared for him; a stroke neither blunt nor diffuse but direct and most cruelly personal. Lying on her high bed in the heat, with her women quietly moving about her, she had a long afternoon and evening to ponder it: to realize what she had done, and wonder in what way she could remedy it.
For this time, he did not come to her. She knew, only because she had questioned a maidservant, that he was back in the château and that he had asked for news of her as soon as he entered, and hourly afterwards.
But he did not come nor send any message; for this time, for him, there must be no track left he could follow. Until today, his mind and body, without demands, had existed only to serve her. If even this she could no longer tolerate, then they were both indeed adrift in the wilderness he had spoken of.
Night fell, and her servants left. The sickness was over. Until the next time, when she might deal another man a blow such as that.
But no. That was impossible.
So, in the end, since there was only one thing to do, she rose slowly, and put on the night robe he had seen once before, and brushed her hair over it and walking to the door opened it.
She did not have to search. She knew from the row of blazing windows where he was, in the naked casket which was his protection: the buttress of his self-command: the place where no unseemly emotion could be exhibited, even when alone. It was one reason, she knew, why he remained there, hour after hour, when she had long since gone to bed. The other she also knew: so that he might be within reach, if she needed him.
The last time, she had found him by the fireplace. This time there was no fire when she entered, but the stifling heat of the night, and the candles.
Then she saw him, in a tall chair by one of the windows. His lids were shut, but she could never have thought him sleeping, even had she not seen the arms of his chair, and his hands on them.
She closed the door; and he said, ‘There is no need to come any further,’ and opened his eyes on her. They were shadowed as if