Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [363]
Lord Wharton, who rarely took leave, agreed crisply. And within the hour, his young aide had left Berwick.
*
To go to Flaw Valleys had been far from Lymond’s intention. But the file of men escorting him there could not, being English, cross the Border, and he was tired; and he had to rest somewhere. So, after his initial protests Francis Crawford ceased planning, and rode north and west from the cold prison he had stayed in to Kate’s pretty manor near Hexham.
He thought, in his self-deception, that Philippa would not mind, since he was so weary; and today his love, like hers, was of the mind only.
He did not look to see if anyone followed him.
Chapter 12
L’oeuvre ancienne se parachevera.
In Flaw Valleys itself few people slept easily the night before Lymond was expected. After losing his temper all day, Jerott was sent striding off to bed by Sybilla, who then retired, looking suddenly weary. Richard stayed an hour or so longer, and then in his turn climbed the stairs, followed by Adam. Archie had made himself scarce from the outset.
Kate walked round with her lamp, testing locks. Upstairs, she stopped by Philippa’s door and laid her warm cheek for a moment against it. But there was no sound inside; and after an interval she touched the timber in sombre caress and then left it. Philippa heard her but did not speak, or rise from the windowseat.
She had been there since Lord Wharton’s messenger had come to tell them that Francis was coming. She had retreated there stage by stage since the first good-humoured reports had come in from Newcastle: did Mistress Somerville know they had caught a French ship, with two Scottish nobles on board her? And then Jerott arriving, grim-faced, with Sybilla: Richard was in Berwick being held to ransom; and Francis had been taken, no one knew where, into England. Then the messages from Richard himself, and the delay while they located Lord Wharton. Then Richard, in person, with the laconic news that Francis had been found, and they were to wait for him.
‘Unless matters change, you should not meet,’ Sybilla had said to her son’s wife, reflectively, as if it were a slight affair, and open to contingency.
The last time she, Philippa, and Francis had met was on the night of a summer thunderstorm, when she had flung the dark curtains across the eight blazing windows at Sevigny.
How could it begin again: the anguish of touch and withdrawal; of unspoken words and unanswered silences; of absence and sleeplessness and unending suffering?
Adam knew it: she had seen the look in his eyes when Sybilla came back with that quiet pronouncement: ‘I made him promise to live, and to come back to Scotland.’
She thought even Jerott knew it; although she had heard what occurred at the Authie, and knew that it was Jerott’s hand which had drawn him from the water, as Sybilla’s from the fire.
Fire, and water. Where had she heard that before?
So, he was coming. And if there was a way out for them both, it was for her to find it. And alone: since the night on her voyage to England he had not tried to reach her. But that, of course, would be because of his promise.
Towards dawn, she left the casement over the gentle garden where the oboe had stood; and lying still on her bed listened, and watched, but heard and saw nothing.
*
The next morning she kept to the music room. From there you could see clear down to the gatehouse, and to the moors lifting beyond, bleached under the pallid blue sky of November. On the first rise, a planting of firs, straddled like peacocks, bore under its plumes the pale lilac bloom of new woodsmoke.
Philippa stared at it. Today a single man would ride over the fall of the moor. She would not be at the gatehouse this time, intent on his betrayal; although perhaps Kate would stand here again, watching, unable to avert what was coming.
There was a book of music propped on the harpsichord. Her mother had been here, then, with Adam. It was easy to see why, from lending a man’s