Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [87]
It had been painful, but only a little. It was self-inflicted pain, teamed with excitement and pleasure and an innocent awareness that one was touching the fringe of something real which might lie round the next corner. When it came, one would know what to do with it. And meanwhile, one need suffer only as much as one wanted to. It was a game.
It had been so different, her growing interest in Lymond, that she had never connected the one with the other. Brought up by Kate, she had acquired early all Kate’s maturity: the maturity which has to do with understanding other persons and, if called upon, putting those who are understood before one’s own interests. Physical maturity, although she possessed it, had never claimed her attention.
What had happened therefore was a true awakening: a clear and shadowless light revealing why, through all these years, the condition and wellbeing of one man should so have concerned her.
Subconsciously, she had divined what he might be. That night, turned upon herself and not outward to others, the elements of his identity had been delivered to her, served upon gold, as the bread and meat and wine of a festival.
For an hour, blended with all she could offer, something noble had been created which had nothing to do with the physical world. And from the turn of his throat, the warmth of his hair, the strong, slender sinews of his hands, something further; which had. Though she combed the earth and searched through the smoke of the galaxies there was no being she wanted but this, who was not and should not be for Philippa Somerville.
That her eyes were now open was no fault of his. The pity of it was that, since that evening, he knew it. So, she resolved in that moment, she must remove herself from his circle.
It was then five o’clock in the morning: one hour, though she did not know it, before the Paris courier would come thundering to the Hôtel de Gouvernement door. She rose and, taking paper, wrote a letter to tell Kate, her mother, that she was coming. Then she prepared for her journey home, and for the last service she could perform for Francis Crawford.
To return to Russia, Marthe had said, would mean death for him. Against that, she had only one shot in her quiver, and that so weak that more harm than good might well come of it. She could reach the end of the road in her probe into his history.
If it did him no service he would remain, as seemed likely, an exile for the rest of his life. If it restored to him pride in his family, he might consider working for Scotland. And that, thought Philippa a little bleakly, for an Englishwoman would have to be monument enough.
*
Once, a schoolgirl in Jerott Blyth’s company, Philippa had travelled up the Cisse valley to Sevigny. Riding again through the mild verdant hills, the fruiting valleys, the wide, dreamlike forests, she wondered what had prompted Francis, all those years since, to buy it. Nicholas Applegarth, maimed ex-comrade of God-knew-what battles, had managed it for him, as a Frenchman by naturalization. Now, with the dual nationality granted him, Francis Crawford was master of this and of all the other property with which she had heard the King had endowed him. The farms, the thatched houses, the villages she was passing must be his. She could feel the Schiatti nephews, gallant escorts, surveying the orchards and vineyards and assessing their value. Then they came to the gatehouse, and the avenue of trees from which, under the archangel wings of the beeches, one could see the spired blue turrets and white walls of Sevigny.
It was not, like Chaumont over the river, a stronghold. Sevigny was Italian, and built by Italians as a pleasure house, its walls decorated by bricks, by mouldings of shells, of angels, of foliage; by dormer windows whose interlaced stonework rose to embroider the sky among the slender