Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [371]
*
Much later, when they had left her, she sat in her room and saw beneath her door the lights blazing from the wide oaken porch to the music room.
She did not know when they found their way there; and at first the music she heard was only tentative. A harp sang, and then someone picked out a low, gentle tune on the harpsichord. And through it all their voices murmured, talking and talking.
Then, at some point, what they learned must have been put behind them. She heard her son’s voice lilting in some mimicry, and Philippa’s laughing, and then more laughter, and their voices declaiming together. Then the harpsichord found its major habit and suddenly spoke, firmly and well, and a lute joined in, and was discarded for the guitar, cleanly executed. Then the music mounted, and altered.
Sitting still in the dark, Sybilla listened to the condition of love, transmuted into brilliant sound, rolling, surging, ringing through all the quiet house. And then her son’s voice, formally speaking:
‘So cler and so light hit wes, that joye ther was ynough. Treon ther were, ful of frut, wel thikke on everich bough. Hit was evere more dai, hi ne fonde nevere nyght; Hi ne wende fynde in no stede so moch cler light …’
In the bright room, had she seen him, he was sitting, his arms leaning on the harpsichord, looking at Philippa. He got up.
‘He wald upon his tais stand
And tak the sternis downe with his hand
And set them in a gold garland
Above his wyfis hair …
‘I love you. I love you …’
There was a broad praying stool at his side. He saw it, and smiling knelt, and held his palms up to Philippa. And she, kneeling opposite, closed them, palm to palm, with her own.
‘Camille de Doubtance, and whoever may be your master …
‘We are here. We will work together for what purpose seems to us right. We will work with calm, and with tolerance and, please God, with saving laughter.
‘We know something of men. We know of evil, and of sloth, and of self-seeking ambition. We accept it, and will use what we have of wit and good faith to overcome it.
‘And if we do not overcome it, still we are the road; we are the bridge; we are the conduit. For something have we been born. For something have we been brought here. And if we hold firm, the men who peopled our earth need not be ashamed, when the reckoning comes, to say, we worked with all we had been given; and for one another.’
He closed her hands with his own and spoke to her, holding them.
‘We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament.’
28 February 1974
EDINBURGH
THE LYMOND CHRONICLES
BY DOROTHY DUNNETT
“The finest living writer of historical fiction.”
—Washington Post Book World
THE GAME OF KINGS
Dorothy Dunnett introduces her irresistible hero Francis Crawford of Lymond, a nobleman of elastic morals and dangerous talents whose tongue is as sharp as his rapier. In 1547 Lymond returns to defend his native Scotland from the English, despite accusations of treason against him. Hunted by friend and enemy alike, he leads a company of outlaws in a desperate race to redeem his reputation.
Fiction/0-679-77743-1
QUEENS’ PLAY
Once an accused traitor, now a valued agent of Scottish diplomacy, Lymond is sent to France, where a very young Queen Mary Stuart is sorely in need of his protection. Disguised as a disreputable Irish scholar, Lymond insinuates himself into the glittering labyrinth of the French court, where every courtier is a conspirator and the art of assassination is paramount.
Fiction/0-679-77744-X
THE DISORDERLY KNIGHTS
Through machinations in England and abroad, Lymond is dispatched to Malta, to assist the Knights Hospitallers in the island’s defense against Turkish corsairs. But he shortly discovers that the greatest threat to the knights lies within their own ranks. In a narrative that sweeps from the besieged fortress of Tripoli to the steps of Edinburgh