Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [91]
It could not be easy for him, either, to turn aside from the battlefield to deal with a petty family scandal and a case of sudden infatuation. One hoped that he thought of it as infatuation: the burden of withdrawing from it would at least lie on him lightly. When she found him, talking to six other people, he had the look of a man who is trying to forget a crashing headache.
But he did not mention it, and neither did she, when they were walking together out of the château and through the disarranged grounds to the new buildings laid on the terracing. He had been once prone to headaches, and she had inquired about them, she remembered, in Lyon. He had dismissed the subject. And now, entrenched grimly in the impersonal, she could not ask him.
There were workmen everywhere, painting, plastering, wheeling barrows and carrying ladders. An incessant hammering, coming from inside the raw, glistening walls, made her nerves jump. Below, among the galleried steps which led down to the river, they had been excavating the grottos. Some were already mortared into place, with the machinery draped in tarred cloth, silently waiting for some engineer to test its hydraulics. Within the arch of one romantic cavern, half planted with foliage and fitted with descending pool beds, Lymond bent and lifted a corner of canvas. ‘What the hell do you suppose that is going to be?’
‘I think,’ said Philippa, ‘that it’s a dragon. There’s another one here with a full-blown organ in it. Would you like to play? I’ll pump the air for you.’
‘No,’ said Lymond. He turned and walked to the half-made balustrade and stood looking down on the deserted flights of steps. ‘What did Nostradamus tell you?’
Her throat hurt. Walking to the balustrade, a safe distance away from him, Philippa said, ‘He did know the Dame de Doubtance. I think he knew her better than he wants us to know, just at present. I asked him if he knew where all her horoscopes were, and he said one never asked such questions of an astrologer.’
‘So he has them,’ said Lymond.
‘I think he has. He knew a great deal about us. He says that the Lady’s sister and her family were of no consequence. And although the Dame de Doubtance herself never married, she did have one daughter, Béatris, who died unmarried also, aged thirty-one.’
‘In 1526,’ Lymond said. ‘And, one supposes, in childbirth. If she looked anything like the Dame de Doubtance it was, probably, all for the best. She was, I take it, my mother?’ He spoke as if it was of no possible consequence.
‘Master Nostradamus didn’t know,’ Philippa said. ‘He didn’t know anything more. Or if he did, he wouldn’t tell me. But I have found out something else. The Dame de Doubtance’s daughter Béatris was Marthe’s mother. The records were there at the Abbey of Notre-Dame de la Guiche, where Marthe was born and stayed to be educated. In 1524, of father unknown.’
Lymond turned and looked at her. Philippa saw, steadfastly returning his gaze, that because he was thinking, the barricade between them was for the moment forgotten. He said, ‘Then Marthe and I are probably full brother and sister. Was the Abbess in Scotland quite right? Is everyone right? Does Gavin, second Lord Crawford, proceed to sire brother Richard in his lawful connubial couch, and then move off smartly to lecher in Sevigny with the Dame de Doubtance’s daughter Béatris while Sybilla, piqued, makes her own accommodation elsewhere? Marthe is born, daughter of Gavin and Béatris, and left to the Poor Clares to bring up at la Guiche under the eye of the Dame de Doubtance, her grandmother. Two years later I am born, of the same parents, just as Sybilla, by coincidence, has also produced a bastard son, who unhappily dies. In his place, forced upon her by a vengeful husband Gavin, I am substituted. Three years later, in retaliation, Sybilla has Eloise, of whom Gavin is not the father, but blackmails