Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [360]
Cy gist qui pendant qu’il vivoit
Fit tout mestier de gueserie
Il soufloit, predisoit, rimoit
Et cultivoit Philosophie …
‘What is your name, M. le comte de Sevigny?’
‘Patience,’ said Francis Crawford. He had postponed total humiliation, with regret, by backing two paces and leaning his shoulders against a tall cupboard.
‘It is as good, I suppose, as any other,’ Margaret said. ‘And what name would you have me give your mother? I hired Mr Bailey—did you know?—to trace her mistake and identify it for me.’
‘And did he?’ he said.
‘I didn’t think of trying your methods. If I had that information,’ Margaret said, ‘what would you pay me to keep it secret?’
She had held back, deliberately, until she had nothing to fear from him. He said, the words soft in his dry throat, ‘What do you want?’
‘Beg,’ she said.
He could barely stand upright. But he gave, in spite of himself, a short hoot of laughter, ‘Oh Christ, Margaret,’ he said. ‘That’s old King Henry, my dear. That’s ten whole years out of date.’
She stood up. ‘You won’t?’
‘No. I won’t. I won’t bend my knee, or kiss your charming shoes either. I may possibly fall flat on my face, but that will be quite inadvertent.’
‘You will stand there and let me refer to Madame la putaine your mother? You will watch while I call my sergeant in to listen while I brand you bastard?’
‘No,’ said Lymond. One could, as he had proved, concentrate the willpower. One could lease five minutes’ strength, or perhaps less, and hold it until now, when she was standing smiling, her beautiful hair aureoled by the fire.
It took three long, silent strides to reach her; and one hand to seize her dress and another her hair.
The gown ripped, as he had meant it to, through the bodice and the embroidered chemise under, until she was bare to the waistline.
The hair came away in his hand, leaving beneath it an unkempt, strong-smelling nest. The head, prematurely grey, of a forty-three year old woman who stood, her painted neck blotched by his hands, too vain to shriek out in protest.
So he summoned help for her, walking erratically to the door and opening it gently, so that the four men leaning outside stood and stared at him, and then at what they saw past his shoulder, as their prisoner stepped aside and encouraged them cordially to enter.
There was a certain satisfaction in it, but that was all, for they did not kill him outright: merely returned him after another crude beating to his tower room. His only conscious thought, as he struck the floor and rolled over, was that this time, ripped though it was, they had left him his shirt.
He was collecting the strength to lift his limbs from the stone when the man with the broken nose entered, grinning, and shot a pailful of icy water over his head and body. Then they left him, and did not come back.
When you die, Margaret Lennox had said to him once, When you die—and I shall be there—it will be an experience which no man has savoured.
Ironic that now, without food, without water, without warmth, one should watch the day give way to night and the night give way to day, knowing that the gift Philippa had left him, which Sybilla had taken away, might be returned him in the end at this woman’s hands, who wished him nothing but mischief.
He did not want to live. As the condition of life does, so the condition of death should depend on one’s choice. The wise man lives as long as he ought, not as long as he can. Democrites fell on his sword; Aruntius killed himself to fly both the past and the future; Crates said that love would be cured by hunger, if not by time; and whoever disliked these two remedies, by a rope.
All these were barred to him because of the vow he had made to Sybilla. Because of it, he could not resign himself to what, easy or difficult, was coming; but instead had to turn again to his lessons: the long, bitter schooling thrust at him, for no purpose, throughout