Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [52]
He was not there. What did a Governor do to protect fisherfolk from the fire, the arrows, the cannon, the scimitars of twelve thousand Turks? Whatever it was, thought Oonagh O’Dwyer with no emotion at all, Galatian de Césel would not attempt it.
Years in Ireland as mistress of Cormac O’Connor, heir to one of the great native houses, rebel, fighter, outlaw, struggling by any means fair or foul, to throw the English out of his native country—years of battle in Ireland and, exiled, out of it: years of supporting the coarsening fibre, the blurred ideals, the ambition of the thick, loud-voiced, black-haired man who had been the dark Fraoch of her spirit, had sent her finally, soiled and disillusioned, to look for freedom, space, sun, escape, loving wisdom if such were to be found; kindness and friendship if it were not.
At Marseilles, in the courtly, middle-aged Spaniard she remembered meeting once in Ireland, Galatian de Césel with the clear oval face and fair moustache, the perfect linen, the quiet silks, the dark, monkish robes of the Order he wore over his jerkin at Mass—in this man she found shelter. Kindly, he offered her passage, without payment, to his island of Gozo where, after a brief visit home, he was now returning. There were convents there; and one or two who would welcome her, for his sake, to their homes on Gozo and on Malta. And while there she could think, and plan, and decide where her future should lie.
And so, on board his galley, with the forked banner of his house streaming from the mast, she had lain passive in the sun as the years of brutish stress slid away and Cormac’s shadow lessened and shrank; and the shadow of Francis Crawford of Lymond, who with such damnable detachment during his sojourn in France had shown her Cormac for what he was, and what he should have been. Lymond had been the agent, for his own ends—always for his own ends—who had divided her at length from the O’Connors and their fate in order to preserve the safety of the child Queen Mary. She wished to forget him.
Galatian had made it easy to forget. His kind touch brought her solace. The passing caresses reassured her even when, becoming gently constant, they stirred her to realize that, pathetically, he was craving more than her presence. She pitied his innocence and his lonely disciplines and out of pity, that momentous dark night, she had moved a little closer, as he touched her arm at the ship’s rail, until her smooth shoulder lay under his hand.
His fingers had stopped, stricken, piteously unsure on her bare skin. Then suddenly as some desperate child’s, his hand had plunged on, down and down, over the warm swell of her breast where, cupped and shaking, it rested.
She had not expected it. With a thud like a bolt in her buried flesh, need struck her, parted as she was for the first time from Cormac’s brutal assuagements, and, unasked, her flesh sprang stark to his palm. Galatian de Césel moaned, a queer, desperate sound, and pulling his hand free to grip her, trembling, by her side, hurried with her, stumbling, to her cabin below.
They did not even reach it. In the darkness outside her door he started to sob, and a moment later, there in the heaving alley, they were charged with one another. He cried, she remembered, throughout.
Afterwards, lying on her pallet with his sleeping weight on her breast, Oonagh had framed silently, with compassion, the words she would use to comfort the tortured conscience she must face when he woke. But she drifted into sleep before he stirred, and awoke to his gentle urgency about her and presently, under his melting skill, her own breath suddenly lapsed. She met him, flesh to flesh in convulsive want, and raging, he took