Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [204]
‘If you were a dear, good little wife, Janet,’ had said Lymond, ‘you’d fall into a mortal decline that day, or at least hide his boots.’
‘Francis Crawford, are ye daft! What ever kept a Scott from a fight? Women? Boots? If yon one were deid, he’d spend his time in Heaven sclimming up and down the Pearly Gates peppering Kerrs.’
‘There is a sweeping assumption in that,’ had said Lymond deprecatingly, ‘which we needn’t go into. Janet, if he hears we shall be there he’ll cause a war for the hell of it. Let’s make it all a beautiful surprise.’
‘Oh, Dod, no bother about that,’ said Janet grimly. ‘That’s what we’re used to in these parts. Beautiful surprises.’
*
On the way south through the Cheviots, it was cooler, and on the higher reaches of the hills larks purred and trilled high in the summer sky, and the wind rustled the dried grass like the sea. Then they dropped into the pass of Redesdale and thence down green Tyneside towards Hexham. Then, a few miles off the town, they turned aside to Kate Somerville’s rolling fields.
She had hoped, profoundly, that Lymond would come, ever since the breath-stopping day when the Nixon family with their servants and children had come flying wild-eyed in at the gates, bearing a silent Philippa, white of face, with a bruise the size of a fair-token on the side of her jaw.
Much later, when the Nixons were packed off to bed and she had Philippa to herself in her arms, she got the story, and the tears had come. Then Kate, in spite of her understanding, had felt anger, for again Lymond had embroiled them, willy-nilly, in his private affairs.
Philippa had been through enough: the corpse in the ditch outside Boghall; the fire which had nearly trapped them at home; and now trapped again in a blood-feud, to be rescued in such a fashion as this.
Knowing Philippa, she could in theory see how essential that rough handling had been; and his letter of brief apology had further explained. But in her heart she ached for them both.
So, when she saw the blue and silver colours of Crawford with the engrailed bordure of the second son, Kate Somerville fled from the window and, strolling into the garden where Philippa was pouring soapy water on to her roses and intoning prayers for the greenfly, dispatched the child on some quest to the village. Then she returned, with no time, as fate always decreed, to tidy her blown parcel of mouse-coloured hair or change the gown she had bottled raspberries in, before her visitors had come, and her late husband’s man Charles had seen to the comfort of the horses, Abernethy and the men at arms in that order, and Lymond was standing in the rebuilt music room, avoiding the virginals, avoiding the lute, avoiding all the instruments she and Gideon had once loved to play, and which Lymond had played in other circumstances, waiting till she should come.
He had not seen her. Soft-footed at the open door, she paused a moment, considering the delicacy which in such matters seldom failed, and was yet coupled with such wilful brutality. She studied his back. Had he changed? Perhaps his hair, bleached by stronger suns, was paler; perhaps, pacing from window to window, he had matured into a spare and harder frame. But he was trim as a cat, immaculate, although Charles said they had been on the move for three days, and in an hour must take the road back again.
Then, sensing she was there, Lymond turned, with the elastic smile and excessive charm which it was his habit to use, to provoke her to arid and more arid flights of sarcastic wit. ‘Kate, my dear? Haven’t your raspberries been marvellous this year? Come and be licked; I haven’t dined yet,’ he said.
Kate looked down at her stained gown. ‘I know. I ought to leave it to the maids,’ she said. Then, taking his hands as he came to her, she turned him round until the light from the big windows fell, inevasibly, full on his face.
There was a little pause. ‘Your stains are showing