Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [364]
Towards noon, the man Richard had posted came riding downhill to tell them that Mr Crawford had been sighted.
Philippa heard the bustle. A moment later the door of the music room opened.
It was not Kate, or Adam, but Archie Abernethy. Forbidding; wrinkled; authoritarian as the menagerie keeper he had once been in Saint-Germain, in Rouen, in Stamboul, in Tarnassery, he said, ‘Lord Culter and Mr Blyth are for riding over the moors now to meet him. I’ll take ye, if ye want to go with them.’
Philippa turned and looked at him. ‘You know him,’ she said.
The unwinking black eyes looked back at her. ‘There’ll be ae thing in his mind: how ye are faring. If he sees you, he will know. Forbye …
‘… Forbye,’ said Archie Abernethy gently, ‘he has been sick and will be low, I dare say; and in need of friends.’
It was what she had wondered, all through the night. He had said he did not think he could change. But he had been sound then. She said, ‘Yes. Tell them to wait. I will come with you.’
They left Sybilla at the gatehouse with Adam and Kate to keep her company and cantered up the long rising slopes: Richard and Jerott first, with Philippa and Archie following. The wind on their faces was bright and sharp and the horses’ shoulders worked, polished velours in the shallow sunshine; while Philippa’s cloak scudded like a green sail behind her, with her shining brown hair as its ensign.
*
A Marshal of France, the Voevoda of all Muscovy, is never alone.
It was a long time since he had ridden like this, with no valets, no footmen, no grooms, no harbingers at his heels, and no luggage, and no retinue of gentlemen lances. The last he had had until a moment ago, and had not been sorry to leave them.
He was tired, but not in distress, for the ride was a hag on the post; a moment to record, as the ride through France had been an act of ritual.… A free and gentle reminder of a familiar book, with the wide skies of Northumberland over him, and the wind, and the moors, yellow and brown, rising to Scotland.
Tomorrow, he would go there. Today, in Flaw Valleys, he would see Philippa again. He would learn, looking at her, how she had borne the weight of this deadly separation, and would read in her eyes the understanding which no one else living could offer him. And receive so much more: her clear, cool judgement on all that had happened since Sevigny, from the great issues down to those most desperately minor and personal.
He would see her.
He would see whether she painted her lashes in the same way; and her brown eyes could encompass the same horrendous range of expression: from freezing superiority through scathing correction to untrustworthy whimsy when she was attacking him, or tormenting him, or holding her own in violent argument.
He would see whether the sardonic, curling lips seemed as soft, and the high brow as round and sweetly polished and the slender body as lithe, with its budding sweetness now all come to ripen.
When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall
And she me caught in her arms, long and small,
Therewith all sweetly did me kiss
And softly said, ‘Dear heart …’
His horse stumbled in the tussocky ground and made him realize, then, how thoughtlessly fast he was riding … how thoughtlessly fast he was thinking.
Nothing had changed. Every passion was low, every appetite dull except one; and it seemed now that it would never leave him. They had been wise: they had taken care for each other once. How could he burden her again? How could he go to Flaw Valleys?
His mare was weary. Unlike his mount at Dieppe she obeyed him