Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [114]
She had been thinking, but at the change of tone she looked up, the long, heavy hair fallen back from her fine bones. Always kind, he took her two thin boy’s hands in his. ‘My child, they have brought your friend with them.’
There was a long silence. Then, ‘M. le Comte de Sevigny?’ the woman said, ironically; and Graham Malett smiled suddenly at the show of pride. ‘Francis Crawford, yes,’ he said.
‘Come, dear soul, to rescue the maiden from the dragon,’ said Oonagh. ‘He has been told, as we planned it, that the maiden is dead?’
‘He had already found out that you were not, before I knew he was in the camp,’ said Gabriel. ‘Nicolay and I saw him with the others being taken into one of the big pavilions to rest after the interrogation. They are all spent and some of them are ill; there has been whipping at the castle. The Moor is apparently his friend.’
‘Then what does your wisdom suggest now?’ asked Oonagh. ‘That I die forthwith?’
In the strengthening light, Gabriel’s blue gaze was extraordinarily clear. Still holding her two hands he said quietly, ‘He is here. The worst of the risks are over. He may even contrive to free you after all. There is apparently a brigantine waiting in the bay where you could be hidden until the outcome of the siege is known.’
‘You have spoken to him?’
‘He is in my tent. Nicolas and the Moor distracted the sentry and we got him away from the others in the dark.… My child, we talked of the risk to this man; we talked of his future. Now that he is here, how do you weigh these against a chance of freedom?’
Slowly, Oonagh O’Dwyer drew her hands from his; slowly she rose and walked to the far side of the tent. Behind the curtain, Galatian in the inner room slept, his mouth open, in a smell of sweat and dried blood and the oil they had used on his scars. She dropped the velvet and turned. ‘You are the man of God. I cannot compete with the saints. If you want him, do as you wish,’ she said. ‘In these airs, anyone might sicken and die in a day.’
In turn Gabriel rose, his splendid presence filling the tent; the new sun spilled through the canvas on his cropped golden head. ‘You should have been a queen,’ he said. ‘You who can maintain what is right when the man in question lies less than twenty yards from your bed.… My God is not so jealous or so harsh, my child, that he requires that of you. With our help and what he had prepared for you, surely you will escape from this camp. And when you are free, remember because of the sacrifice that was not asked of you that your future is not his.’
‘I know already that it is not,’ said Oonagh. ‘But if you are caught helping us, the Turks will kill you. I cannot accept that.’
‘I do not offer it to you,’ said Gabriel gently. ‘That is my sacrifice. Do you wish to see him?’
Lymond, whom had she been born ten years later might have been her first and only love; whom Gabriel with the rest assumed had taken her as a political pawn among the careless ranks of his mistresses, his loose-living libertine peers. And it was not so. For all their short knowledge of each other, they had been enemies, and had respected each other as enemies. Until at last for her own reasons and Ireland’s, she had set out one night to seduce him, and he had forestalled her, and taken her soul.
One night. And they had never since met until now when, freshened as best she could in the meagre water allowed her, the glossy hair burdened in veiling, her soiled robes replaced by a snow-white burnous by Gabriel, whose guards smiled at him, and whose movements to and from her tent were not questioned—until, walking steadily at the tall knight’s shoulder, she crossed the sandy gravel from her tent to his, and stepped with him into the masked light within.
It seemed at first empty of life: a travelling tent