Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
‘We are gathered here today,’ said Lymond quietly, his beautiful hands lying interlaced and still on the table, ‘for the purpose of destroying Sir Graham Reid Malett.’
*
For more than two months now, through the best part of the summer, ever since the meeting at the Hadden Stank, Kate Somerville had kept her daughter Philippa at home; and if she moved abroad at all, had attached to her the largest, thickest manservant she possessed.
Nothing had happened, except that Philippa had won three pairs of boots and a man’s saddle at dice, and had earned the respect of all their neighbours’ children, who were not unnaturally convinced that the child must be heiress to a fortune at least. If Kate herself chafed at never being able to arrange a simple outing without their feminine privacy being encroached on, she said nothing to Philippa, and if Philippa was beginning to be impressed, despite herself, by the fact that her practical mother thought it worth while following Francis Crawford’s directions, however odd, to the letter, she said nothing at all.
She might have done nothing either if Sue Bligh of Bamburgh hadn’t gone to market at Hexham to spend her regular allowance from Wat Kerr, and the handsome danger money she had got since Hadden Stank from Wat Scott of Buccleuch, and retailed, slightly overtaken in liquor, the latest gossip from the north.
It came to Kate’s ears, carried lovingly, the very next day, and after breaking two flower pots and coughing herself silly trying to spread sawdust up the garden alleys in a gale, Mistress Somerville marched indoors and said to her imprisoned daughter, ‘You’re going to look a grand sight following Joleta up the aisle with Cheese-wame Henderson here in full armour in your wake.’ And as Philippa, naturally, looked astonished, her mother said with irritation, ‘It’s hardly surprising, is it? Francis Crawford is marrying Joleta, they say. She’ll want you there, I expect. You are the only creature of her own sex and age she has troubled to consort with.’
There was a long pause. ‘When?’ said Philippa carefully, at length.
‘Rumour doesn’t say.’
‘Why?’
Kate Somerville turned her head slowly and looked her daughter in the eye. ‘That is an odd question. Am I mistaken, or do I remember you informing Sir Graham Malett in London that it would be wonderful if Lymond and his sister faced life, hand in hand together? We were all sobbingly moved.’
‘Yes. But,’ said Philippa, moving quickly to essentials, ‘didn’t Sir Graham say they didn’t take to one another?’ And with the clear, perfidious gaze that Kate could recognize with her eyes shut, the girl added, ‘Unless she’s converted him. Has she?’
‘No,’ said Kate. And after a moment, with reluctance, ‘In fact, it’s the other way round.’
There was no need to spell things out with Philippa. She got rather pale, which Kate was sorry to see, and then said, endearingly, ‘I didn’t guess or I wouldn’t have forced you to tell me. He has to marry her?’
Kate Somerville, who had been playing with Philippa’s pigtails, dropped the long brown ropes suddenly and turned the girl gently to face her. ‘Why did you say that?’
‘What?’ It had seemed, to Philippa, the height of tact. She flushed. ‘What do you mean?’
‘You said,’ said Kate slowly, ‘so he has to marry her. Surely it isn’t Lymond you pity?’
Philippe’s face, already red, burned to a deeper scarlet. ‘No. Oh, no,’ she said. ‘They deserve each other. That’s what I think. Don’t you think?’
Struggling between kindness and honesty, Kate’s unremarkable face was a picture. ‘No.…’ she said at length. ‘I don’t think I think. Let’s consider the subject exhausted except for choosing the wedding gift. Something