Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [181]
‘What are you doing here?’
If there was an answer, Adam Blacklock couldn’t hear it. Behind him, Jerott’s light breathing went evenly on. Blacklock waited until Lymond’s door silently closed, then shut his own with equal sound-lessness and went back to bed.
*
Had he been quite sober and quite fresh, Lymond would probably not have spoken at all. As it was, he had the presence of mind to shut his door, and leaning back on it, to gaze across the small tavern bedchamber at his unsolicited guest.
Seated in dogged discomfort by the hearth, her riding cloak clutched sweatily about her, her hair falling sheer to her knees and the colour itself of the flames, Joleta Malett was waiting. Lymond’s icy blue stare fell on her; Lymond’s blurred voice snapped, ‘What are you doing here?’ and great, clear aquamarine tears sprang into her eyes and fell sparkling down her pink baby skin. With a kind of strangled grunt, she put the back of one wrist to her nose, and scrabbling frantically in her skirts with the other hand, gave a real sob of anguish. ‘My handkerchief!’
Lymond stayed where he was. ‘I haven’t got one,’ he said. ‘Blow your nose on your bloody sleeve. I won’t look. I suppose everyone in Lennox and district knows that you’re here?’
The lorn apricot head shook. ‘Luke and Martin came with me yesterday. I’ve got a room in another wing. Lady Culter and Madame Donati think I’m with Jenny.’ She gave another sob, and cut it off. ‘You’ve been hours.’
‘My apologies, of course,’ said Lymond politely. ‘But I wasn’t aware that I had invited you. How did you know I was coming?’
Wrapped modestly in her furry cloak, in the appalling heat of the room, she could look beautiful even when sniffing. ‘Graham said that Thompson was waiting for you, and that you were in the south and would be sure to come soon. So I came to wait for you.’
‘In the belief that no one would notice an unescorted female of good family putting up at a shore tavern with two grooms. You may as well divest your modest attractions of their outer wrapping. My hot young blood can stand it. And your reputation has presumably gone anyway. You came to wait for me. Why?’
Slowly, Joleta took off her cloak. Underneath, her dress was a young green: a web-like wool finely gathered under her breasts and covering her soft arms down to the wrists. Her little, sparkling teeth whose sibilants frosted her every phrase were sunk in her lip. Taking off her cloak was an effort, socially as well as physically: her golden skin was deep pink.
Lymond made no effort to help. Only, as the fur fell to the ground and she sat in her meadowland of green, twisting her hands, he drew a long, quiet breath and expelled it before he repeated, ‘Why?’
‘To say I’m sorry.’ Her chin, so like Gabriel’s, was up; her eyes, so like Gabriel’s, were pleadingly, defiantly, on him. ‘I’m sorry about Kevin. I’m s-sorry about losing my temper. I don’t want you to hate me.’
Lymond shifted his position, fractionally, against the door. ‘Sir Graham doesn’t want me to hate you.’
She flushed again, and then paled, so that the ginger freckles contoured all the exquisite face. ‘I know. But this isn’t to please Graham. And you must know Graham wouldn’t let me do this.’
‘Why ever not?’ said Lymond ironically. ‘You’re perfectly safe; it’s only your reputation that’s ruined. I be lightly drunken, as the man said, and have but little appetite to meat.’
Tears stood in her eyes but did not, this time, spill over. She stood up. ‘You don’t forgive me.’
‘No, I don’t,’ said Francis Crawford lightly. ‘I dislike you, Joleta.’
There was a moment of complete and cataclysmic surprise. Then the tears, unregarded, fell from Joleta’s immense, open eyes, her jaw dropped and she said, ‘But you can’t dislike me!’
Laughter, remotely, stirred in the cool blue eyes. ‘Well, that was genuine, anyway,’ he said.