Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [21]
‘Joleta!’ said Richard again. ‘Here is Kate Somerville. She’ll look after you.’ And as the bundle in his man’s arms drew level, he reached out and gently turned back its hood so that Kate had her first good look at the contents.
A flood of rose-gold hair lay heaped over the wool, and within it two sea-blue eyes, bright with heat, lit a face disarmingly tinged with green. It smiled. Kate, finding her mouth slightly open, shut it again; and then grinned and said, ‘Excuse the bovine admiration. We consider ourselves lucky in these regions if there’s an eye on either side of the nose, and a mouth underneath it.’
Joleta’s voice, which had become very light, said, ‘You forget. I belong to these parts. Or very near them.’
‘You do?’ Kate Somerville said. ‘Then they either broke the mould, or gave it to someone to chew. Come along. You can have the Crawfords’ room. The house is yours.’ And Richard knew that, whatever her manner of saying it, she meant precisely that.
‘Well,’ said Kate to her daughter when at the end of that first day they were alone together at last, with Richard on his way home and the governess asleep in her charge’s room. ‘And what do you think of God’s gift from Malta to the Crawfords?’
‘I think Lord Culter doesn’t want, her at his own home,’ said Philippa with accustomed unexpectedness.
Kate, thinking of six possible answers at once, said, ‘Well, she can’t go to Jimmy Sandilands, can she? He wouldn’t have her anyway: she’d tell her brother far too much about what his lordship’s doing with the Order’s property in Scotland. And where else can she …?’
‘Lord Culter’s mother may want her,’ said Philippa. ‘Even though his lordship doesn’t. Or she could go to Tom Erskine’s.’ She waited, and said, ‘You think Lymond will come back from France soon, don’t you? I don’t think it matters. Joleta will hate him.’
‘Oh, Philippa,’ said Kate, annoyed. ‘He forgot his party manners once, when you were a child, and you’d think he was Beelzebub’s brother. They’ll get on perfectly well when they meet. Besides, he has someone he fancies in France.’
Incautious answer. It was only because it was running in her head—Francis and an Irishwoman, Richard had said: a woman called Oonagh O’Dwyer who had been mistress of some Irish princeling, and whom Francis had filched from her lover. Oonagh O’Dwyer, and beautiful.…
‘Someone!’ said Philippa hoarsely. ‘Why, everywhere he goes he has hundreds and hundreds of—’
‘—critics who are not old enough to learn tolerance. Oh, do learn tolerance, infant,’ said Kate sadly. ‘Or how are you to put up with your cross old mother when you’re as old as me?’
For a day or two after that, Joleta Malett lay perfectly still, eating whatever she was brought and discarding it instantly. Only Madame Donati, brewing little morsels over the bedroom fire, seemed able to nourish her at all; and Joleta was happy, obviously, when her governess was there, although she managed a few words always for Kate, and a shadow of a grin for Philippa. Then Evangelista Donati, her impervious good manners unaffected by day and night nursing in the first heat of June, came to Kate and asked if she knew of any woman in the district versed in herbal remedies.
‘They all are,’ said Kate with the utmost goodwill. ‘Although if you want one of the real fewmets-in-rosewater school, the half-Egyptians are best. But really,’ she said, studying the pale, aristocratic face, ‘my own physician knows better. You still won’t let me send for him?’
But, as always when pressed, Madame Donati retreated into icy politeness. ‘Thank you, no. It is nothing. It will pass. If it does not, then we shall send for him. But Sir Graham has a superstition, you understand?’ Across the wintry face passed a slight smile. ‘Sir Graham does not care that the child should be seen by men. And she does not wish it. An instinct of innocence, Mistress Somerville.’
‘Still,’ said Kate, ‘it won’t do her much good to perish, however modestly unsurveyed. What do you suppose a herb woman