Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [313]
Philippa, her head high, did not flinch from the angry face above her. She said, ‘Do you not think he would prefer a quick death to that?’
‘Dissemble then,’ Marthe said. ‘Kiaya Khatún must have taught you something. Give him what you would have brought to please Suleiman, had he called you.’
Philippa said, ‘There is no artifice of Güzel’s that Francis does not know. What do you think it would mean to him, to find me using them?’
‘Then kill him as you are doing,’ Marthe said. ‘But it is not a quick death you are offering. Have you not learned from your sensitive swain, there in Paris? Such scruples seldom injure the owner. It is the men like Francis who will allow themselves to be dragged through the market-place before they will relinquish the code they have chosen to live by.’
She said softly, ‘If I owed what you owed to Francis I should go to bed with my farm manager, with Austin Grey, with any functioning male animal of my acquaintance until I knew I could give my husband a love so well simulated he would never question it. I would do it, because I am of his blood. And I tell you, he would do it for you.’
‘No,’ Philippa said. ‘The voice that suggests that is not to be listened to.… The Dame de Doubtance was more than an obstinate old woman, wasn’t she, Marthe? She ordained that a man of destiny should be born; and when her daughter Béatris produced only a sickly boy, turned her eyes elsewhere for the perfect match for the first Francis Crawford. She found it in Sybilla. But when Sybilla’s son came, the stars told her he was not for her grand-daughter.’
‘No,’ Marthe said. ‘It was you he was to marry. She told me. When he lay in Blois after the fire she spoke the name over and over so that his mind would remember it.’ She paused. ‘She said he was my brother.’
There was sweat on the fair skin. You should have died with the dog, the harsh voice had said, speaking through her lips in Lyon.
‘But is your half brother. Marthe, he would never have been for you,’ Philippa said. ‘Gaultier was a nonentity. She took him, and used him, and let him destroy himself. But you are her grand-daughter. Why did she tie you to us? Why did she make you her messenger? It has brought you nothing but misery.’
‘Perhaps,’ Marthe said, ‘so that there will be someone here when you have gone.’
*
She left soon after that, and Nicholas’s servant, returning with refreshments for the Countess’s guest, found the grotto empty, and the light of Jupiter’s fountain playing on empty marble, denuded of pen and of papers.
Back in the château Philippa had already locked her letters away and after calling her servants and delivering to them, quietly, a series of long and explicit orders, went to find Nicholas Applegarth in his cabinet.
To him she said, ‘I have decided to go home to England. I have some correspondence to entrust to you, which I shall explain to you shortly, and I shall also ask you to send me the money which Francis has told you about. I shall need an escort to Paris. After that, I hope to have Lord Allendale’s company.’
The kind face of Nicholas Applegarth had become very stern. ‘And Francis?’ he said.
‘It is Francis I am thinking of,’ Philippa said.
Since Bailey’s death no man had been set to guard her, for the enemy was now within, and not outside the gates of Sevigny.
The day she left, she wrote the letter that had to be written, and sent it this time with Archie as her courier. Then she set out north for Austin, and England.
Chapter 7
Trop tard, tous deux les fleurs seront perdues …
La pitié grande sera sans loing tarder
Ceux qui donoient seront contraints de prendre.
Between Sevigny and Amiens lay the better part of two hundred miles, and since he had been told not to hurry, and had besides a call to make on the way, Archie Abernethy took a week to