Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [88]
It had been like that, so Nicholas Applegarth said, when Lymond acquired it, and he had changed nothing, although Nicholas had husbanded it well. Indeed, even indoors there was little in evidence of Sevigny’s owner: a library of books which looked as if it had been used; a spinet which was newer than the rest of the furniture in the little parlour in which she found it. Nicholas Applegarth, pink-cheeked and grey-haired, moving unfussily with his stick in the long gown which disguised his infirmity had been expecting them, and made the Schiatti cousins welcome for the night, and saw to the quartering of Philippa’s escort. In the morning he took them riding round the pretty property. M. de Sevigny, he said, had rarely had free time in which to enjoy it. Although, of course, when he had his company it was sometimes quartered there.
They had been here when Jerott brought her along, all those years ago, and Alec Guthrie and Fergie Hoddim with them. Nicholas had told her of the disaster at Saint-Quentin, and the news that Alec and Fergie were missing. He told her also of the threat to Paris, and that M. le comte had been summoned there. In private, he used Lymond’s Christian name, and to avoid an implication which might wound, Philippa had to do so as well.
It was a frightening pleasure, but one she never again could be made to indulge in. She also made and doggedly kept other rules. Nicholas, the most gentle of hosts and the least given to gossip, was told that she was here with her husband’s knowledge, to search out his sister Marthe’s parentage. She asked no questions about Lymond, or his life at Sevigny. The new flame was already stronger than she could well bear. It would be folly to feed it.
She dismissed with real gratitude the handsome boys who had escorted her so competently from Lyon, and set herself to finish quickly the tasks which had drawn her to the Loire, and then to leave for the coast and a ship for the Tyne before anyone could prevent her. She wondered what Kate would say, and Lymond’s mother Sybilla. Dismissed, though with honour, from the Queen of England’s service, she could expect no Court appointment in this reign, although the next might be a different matter. Without the Queen’s sister Elizabeth, Lymond would never have reached the shores of France. He had more credit there than he knew of, and his wife probably also.
But none of that, of course, would matter to Kate or to Sybilla. Only one question mattered. When is he coming home? And the answer to that might lie here, in or beside Sevigny.
Such as it was, it did not take her long to find it. With Nicholas and his servants beside her, she rode the few miles through the forest to Blois, and presented her credentials, and had opened for her the five crooked storeys of the carved wooden house known as Doubtance, with its littered forecourt and well, where Lymond had arrived, according to Archie Abernethy, after escaping from a sickbed and a conflagration which had nearly deprived him of life.
Up these twisted stairs, the Dame de Doubtance had received and sheltered him. Here had been drawn up the horoscope which, with others, had been so unaccountably missing from her other house, now Marthe’s, in Lyon. From this gallery, perhaps, he had stood and looked over the rooftops to the dazzle of the River Loire and the flat horizon of trees beyond it.
She searched the house with Nicholas’s help, stumping painfully from one low-beamed room to another. Marthe had been right. There was nothing here but mould and rotting wood and the shadows of old paintings lingering on the powdered plaster. Philippa walked down from the top of the house and closed the shutters one by one on the antique gold of the afternoon sunshine, and the green, whining motes