Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [48]
Shame and anger ran tingling over her skin and sank into her stomach, twisting all her tired organs. Like beads on a rosary, small encounters turned and winked in her memory. Occasions where he had seemed grateful, or pleased, or approving and where the moment of rapport had vanished. Before, clearly, the underlings could become over-excited. Reasonably, he had had enough of torrid devotion. All he wanted now were experienced people to go to bed with, like Madame la Maréchale and Güzel and Oonagh O’Dwyer, who had borne his son and then perished.
She understood all that perfectly. The wounding thing was that he should not think her capable of simple goodwill with no overtones of childish infatuation. She remembered, chilled, his nervousness, and Marthe’s, when she had questioned his reasons for requiring a divorce in the first place. The possibility that she would hold him to this marriage must have haunted him since the day it was contracted. She needn’t fear, after all, that he would be nasty to Austin Grey, or to anyone else who came courting her. He was more likely, she thought sourly, to encourage them warmly to compromise her.
Transmitted by some freak of the fog, Lymond’s voice said, apparently in her ear, ‘If you call out, I shall kill you, my child. Did you imagine I should not know you another time?’
Where there had been one person, there were now two; and no longer in the dark but hazily lit in the swimming glow from the rue de Chalamon archway. And it was a child Lymond had caught: a muscular ten-year-old in bare feet and tunic who kicked and twisted and bit in the expert, impervious grasp as Lymond drew him into the tunnel, and darkness.
Following hurriedly, Philippa cannoned into them before she could stop herself. The child wrenched himself free. He was two paces away when Lymond’s hand, sweeping round, caught him a blow on the jaw that jarred him back to the wall again, staggering. He began to slide down, his tousled head lolling.
Before he reached sitting-position, Lymond had unbuckled his belt and turning him round, had lashed the boy’s arms hard together. Then he rose, the weight of his foot on his captive, and pulling a thin package from the child’s tunic, tossed it over to Philippa.
The fog lapped and coiled in the indirect light from the archway. She opened the package.
In it were some steel darts and a blow-pipe. ‘I recognized him in Marthe’s kitchen,’ he said. ‘He tried to kill me on the bridge yesterday. If you had attended to a simple request to stay in a doorway, I should not have needed to hit him.’
‘I thought,’ said Philippa curtly, ‘that you might need your poniard. Was this why you sent the horses first as a decoy? You knew that the boy would send word when you were leaving?’
‘It seemed likely,’ said Lymond. ‘Then I asked Jerott to lock the kitchen door so that the child couldn’t betray the change of plan to whoever is paying him. One hopes that it isn’t Jerott who is paying him. Or Marthe, of course.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Philippa.
‘You overrate me,’ said Lymond. ‘So does Danny Hislop. He thought I didn’t like manhandling children as a matter of conscience. You! What are you called, you?’ He had switched to French again.
The boy had recovered. He sat, his bound hands against the bridge wall, and blasphemed. Lymond picked up his sword from where he had laid it and poised it, with great care, across the tendons of the child’s ankle. ‘There is a lady here,’ he said. ‘Do you understand? We do not wish to know why Abaddon in the bottommost pit will be receiving you. We wish to know who paid you to try and kill us.’
‘You will find out,’ said the child. He was sitting very still under the blade. Even so, a hairline of blood showed on the bare flesh and then was concealed by the fog-wreaths, drifting pallidly into the darkness.
‘Do you think so?’ said Lymond. ‘My horsemen were expecting an attack. Perhaps your friends are all dead. Who will pay you then?’
‘The