Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [130]
She was determined not to be childish. She was determined not to refer to the child, to his pride in his livestock, to any of the hurtful things that ran daily through her mind. She said instead, “I can go where I please. To the Three Estates?”
“No, of course. Women aren’t—”
“To state conferences at Boghall?”
“You can’t expect—”
“To any gathering, meeting or convention that is going to shape the whole course and fabric of my life, and even possibly the manner of my death? No. Yet Arran, whom I’ve heard called a weakling and an idiot, not only goes but directs our policy. Lennox went, and proved a self-seeker and a traitor.…”
Richard said gently, “Men have no absolute monopoly of foolishness, Mariotta. The burdens of land, home, children and service to one’s country are heavy enough for two people without asking both to do the same job.”
Mariotta dropped her hands. “I’m not, heaven forbid, suggesting I should take my sewing to Parliament any more than I’m belittling the importance of your children. But I could fill a fifteen-year-old as full of moral precepts as a sponge, and I doubt if he’d keep them long in the sort of world you’ve made for him. Shouldn’t I have some say in that, through you? Shouldn’t you have something to tell your children, through me? Our work mayn’t overlap; but shouldn’t your job and mine at least touch?”
Her voice died away. Richard, bringing his clasped hands up to his face, tried to think clearly through the millrace of pressing business in his brain. “I don’t know how to satisfy you—I’m going to be at home of course so little. But if it would help, I could ask Gilbert to let you know each week what happens in Council. Would that do?”
Three unfortunate words. That his wife was begging him to think differently about his whole relationship with her; that she might wish to share his personal life and his personal decisions—to shoot at the Wapenshaw—to ride alone to Perth—to interfere at Crumhaugh—to deal with his brother—never entered his head.
Mariotta said in quite a different voice, “It might, except that I don’t recollect marrying Gilbert. And while securing your fabulous, much-hacked front door you might have remembered, my dear, the wicket gate at the back.” She got up suddenly and faced him, gripping the edge of the table. “The unlatched postern, Richard. You’ve convinced yourself that the killing of one man is more important than your marriage, and it’s taken you into strange country. Which has its own irony. You should have looked nearer home.”
She had never before watched the blood drain from a man’s face. The flat planes of Culter’s skin became glistening pale and his eyes, shrewd and grey, turned disconcertingly blank. He rose to his feet and she was frightened: nervous enough to back to the window and stand there, watching him move uncertainly toward her. He stopped and said, “Say it again. What are you saying? Tell me.”
Her anger, and her courage, came back. “There’s nothing to tell,” she said. “Only that I like to be entertained. And Lymond is more perceptive than you are.”
The effort of self-control was so great that he was literally shaking on his feet: one hand shot up and gripped the wall to one side of her; the other, following more slowly, held the other side, locking her in the deep embrasure. “Lymond has been here?” He didn’t touch her.
With the remembered warmth of his nearness, her temper flared again. “The man has been paying court to me for months. You might admire his enterprise, at least.” Beneath her anger was a rising excitement. Where was the stolid face now? At last—at last she was laying him bare; he was speaking to her direct, without a hedge of competitive thoughts, and listening to her—straining to hear her words.
He said blindly, “Paying court to you? My brother? While I was away … for months?” The blank eyes rested on Mariotta, not seeing her, but seeing, she thought, a gallery of grotesque pictures filled with laughter and a dallying, gilded head. His voice, when he spoke, was extremely queer.