Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [244]
‘If Madge Mumblecrust comes down those stairs once again for a morsel of fowl’s liver with ginger, or pressed meats with almond-milk, I shall retire to a little wicker house in the forest and cast spells which will sink Venice into the sea for ever, and Madame Donati with it. The Church,’ said Sybilla definitely, ‘should excommunicate girls who do not replace lids on sticky jars and wash their hair every day with the best towels.’
‘She’s getting on your nerves,’ said Richard perceptively. ‘Why doesn’t she come down and go out? It’s a month since she immured herself up there. She’ll make herself ill.’
Sybilla sat down. If her laughter was a shade hysterical, at least it was laughter. When she had recovered, she said, ‘Yes. Well. She doesn’t want to be seen, my dear.’
‘Why not?’ said Richard. He thought of Joleta as he had last seen her a month ago, when the child had first become noticeable, and Sybilla, grimly, had broken the news to him. Robed in white, her shining hair tumbling over her arms, by some magic the girl had kept intact that untouched, miraculous grace. In all those weeks she had said nothing that was not gentle about his brother Francis. And when Sybilla had questioned her, her own face stiff and pale, Joleta had answered simply, without recriminations. Only, when Lady Culter’s anger for a moment showed through, the girl’s eyes had filled with tears.
Then she had made them all promise to say nothing to Graham Malett until Francis had been told. But then Francis had been told, and had done nothing about it. So, ‘Why doesn’t she want to be seen?’ said Richard irritably. ‘In three months, everyone will know anyway.’ Then, at the expression on his mother’s face, he put down abruptly the boot he had just hauled off, and crossing the polished floor to her softly, knelt at her feet. ‘Look … It is just possible to understand it, even if you can’t forgive. She has a beauty that—that—Any man would want to do just what he did. The difference is that, being Francis and owning no rule and no master, he did it. And because she loves him, she gave him the chance.’
‘Owning no master. That’s the trouble, isn’t it?’ said Sybilla suddenly. In her lap, her hands, so like her younger son’s, were pressed together, white and hard. ‘He looked for one, I would guess, in Malta.’
‘He found one,’ said Richard quietly. ‘But he cannot acknowledge it.’ He smiled at her, and rising to his feet, put out his hands and drew her to hers. ‘If he walked in just now and asked Joleta to marry him, what would you do?’
‘Faint,’ said Sybilla succinctly.
*
Later, in the balm of the open air, Richard was watching his ploughing, the oxen straining in the broad fields under the clouds of seagulls, the glistening, fresh brown earth slow-surging from the coulter, when the low drum of hooves in the clear air told of two horsemen coming from the east. A moment later, someone in a distant field raised a shout of greeting, and he saw the felt and leather helms of his trenchers bob and turn. Someone they all knew, someone belonging to the castle.… Francis, his yellow head bare, and the big, silent Spanish Moor behind him. Lord Culter wondered, his muscles aching already in anticipation of the ordeal ahead, what gay solution Lymond would produce to this problem. Adoption … abortion … or marriage, perhaps? Waiting, hard-eyed, for him by the roadside, ‘You’re a little late?’ Richard said to his brother.
Lymond’s face, so like Sybilla’s, brightened into untrustworthy joy. ‘Glory be, she’s had a miscarriage!’ he said. At which Richard, following silently on foot up to the castle, knew that they were about to have a particularly disagreeable afternoon.
The hall, with its painted roof and elegant carvings and its sad, bovine picture of the second Lord Culter, Sybilla’s husband, was filled with sunshine when the Dowager entered at Richard