Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [347]
‘I thought he was dead,’ Philippa said. ‘You see, I released him to do as he wished.’
‘I see,’ said Kate slowly. She sat down, the butter forgotten. ‘And this is why you are waiting?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa.
Kate said, ‘Philippa. What frightened you? Why couldn’t this be a complete marriage?’
But Philippa’s eyes, the candid brown eyes she would have trusted to tell the truth, however unpalatable, would not look at her, and her daughter turned her head, shaking it. Then Kate said, equally gently, ‘Then why hold to the marriage, my darling? Why not obtain your divorce and release him and yourself in that way?’
The silence this time continued for a very long time, so that she could hear the new kitchen maid break a bowl, and the puppy bark, and the high, clear piping of Kuzúm’s voice, speaking to Adam. Then Philippa said, ‘Because the grounds for the divorce were to be lack of consummation.’
And then she turned her face so that her dark circled eyes locked with Kate’s and Kate, pale herself, was wise enough this time not to ask any more.
After that, the only really unbearable incident happened in the third week, when Philippa had begun to join them, very quietly, in the main part of the house and to stop the habit, so disconcerting both in herself and Adam, of thinking and speaking primarily in an idiomatic French which drove Kate to irritable despair.
By then, also, she had begun occasionally to entertain Austin, if only, Kate thought, to show some helpless return for the gifts of sweetmeats and flowers, of fruit and music and little, bound books which arrived daily and, it seemed, sometimes hourly from the next valley.
Only that night he excelled himself, and sent musicians.
Kate, more than warned by the barking of all the dogs far up the road, had already sent her steward to investigate and then dispatched a swift, conciliatory message round all the servants’ quarters before tapping on her daughter’s door and saying, ‘Philippa? Don’t undress in front of the candles: there’s an oboe in the flowerbed.’
In fact, there were also two recorders, a rebec and a cittern, sadly flattening her marigolds; and something else that made Kate, peering unseen out of the window in company with her daughter, moan with silent apprehension. ‘You remember the hombull bee who handyld the home pype, for ham fyngers wer small? He’s sent a cremorne, darling. The dogs will never stand for it.’
‘I think we should send them away,’ Philippa said. Her hand, from the first moment, had detained her mother and had not released her since.
‘I think so too,’ said Kate. ‘After the first offering, anyway. Open the casement and lean out, glowing. All they want to do is report to Austin that you listened to them without apparently having a seizure.’ Adam tapped on the door, made an inquiry and, reassured, returned to his room. To a chorus of resonant barking, the instruments proceeded to adjust themselves into tune. A billy-goat, alarmed, aroused his harem, and distantly a muffled lowing broke out.
Philippa said, ‘Oh dear. It must have cost a fortune. Did Gideon ever do this to you?’
Kate thought. ‘No, but I did it to him. He hadn’t called to see me for a week, so I sent eight bell ringers to serenade him at cock-crow and his mother’s parrot dropped dead, quoting Luther.’
‘What did it say?’ Philippa said. Sitting on the sill, with her long brown hair falling over her night robe, she looked, in the darkness, like the daughter who had come back from Turkey: calm and smiling and soignée.
‘Music is a fair and lovely gift of God, and deserves to be extolled as the mistress and governess of the feelings of the human heart,’ said Kate, surprised. The sound of Philippa laughing mingled with the first notes of the consort below, the cremorne snoring manfully among the rest of its brethren:
Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera
Pour nulle vivante, tant soit elle bonne ou saige
Forte et puissante, riche de hault lignaige
Mon chois est fait, aultre ne se fera.
‘No!’ said Philippa.