Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [144]
His voice sharpened. “Lymond will take her life? Or she will take her own?”
“I mean that unreasonable hatred of Lymond now will convict Mariotta publicly of deceit. I mean that if he has become important in her eyes, you’ll win her back by being magnanimous, and not by destroying the monster and fighting the myth to your dying day. I mean that Lymond is with Mariotta now; that he has not touched her; but that she should be taken out of his influence as soon as possible. And if you will abandon this madness, I shall find her and bring her back to Midculter.”
He was on his feet before Sybilla had half finished. Christian heard him, her own hands crushing the arms of her chair, her mind invisibly protesting. No! … Dear God! thought Christian drearily. How could Sybilla, so clever, so acute with others, read her own son so badly?
In a queer, weightless voice, Richard was speaking. “Where are they? How long have they been together?”
Sybilla answered quickly. “I don’t know. It doesn’t matter. She was very ill when she came to him, Richard—she has been dangerously, terribly ill.”
Utter silence. Then Lord Culter said, “The child?” And there was a long interval while he read his answer in his mother’s face.
At length he spoke quite steadily. “So the child is dead. What would it have been? A girl?”
“A boy.” And Christian, with compassion, told him the surgeon’s story.
When she had finished, he laughed. At the tone of it, Sybilla cried out, and he rounded on her. “But this is genius! My irrepressible little brother … the infallible Lymond, with success at the end of each of his pretty fingers … You say you know where to reach them?”
By now Sybilla must have known what was coming, but she spoke steadily. “I said that if you would give up your hunt for him, I should probably manage to trace Mariotta for you.”
“And what possible use,” said Lord Culter, “would Mariotta be to me?”
“For God’s sake, you foolish man!” said Christian, and jumped to her feet. “Give the situation at least the amount of unprejudiced thought you’d give to one of your damned pigs in farrow. What possible misdemeanour can be expected from a woman at death’s door through childbirth? And why blame your brother? You ought to be damned glad that surgeon was called. If Lymond’s all you say he is, he’d have gone about it like Hephaestus with a hatchet.”
“Mariotta is Lymond’s mistress,” said Richard shortly. “She as good as told me so before she left. Where are they?”
“She was lying to spite you,” said Christian.
“Or telling the truth to spite me. Where are they?”
There was nothing more Christian could do. As the question was flung at the Dowager for the third time she heard Sybilla say, “I’ve told you. I don’t know the exact location. I won’t tell you what I do know unless you promise—”
Richard laughed again. “With this story around the whole of Scotland? I admit very few things would make me look sillier than I do now, but the idea of making Lymond a gift of my complaisance is one of them. Why shouldn’t she prefer him? All my women did. Nothing was ever mine that didn’t instantly become his—even your dearest hopes and first-born love—”
Sybilla’s hands suddenly clasped themselves. “Richard!”
“It’s true, isn’t it? Isn’t that why you are trying to save him now? Because you love this one son: not my father; not me; not even your own daughter—my sister—his sister—the girl he murdered?”
“Richard!” This time Christian was on her feet, stumbling across to the Dowager’s chair. She knelt, her arms tight about the older woman’s shoulders, as a voice bawled Culter’s name in the corridor outside.
The Dowager sat like a little ivorine, her blue eyes wide and dark. Richard himself stood by the fireplace, drawn to his greatest height and tension, as if his body were a metal mesh without bone or tissue. The door banged. “Lord Culter!”
The Dowager stirred, and Christian rose slowly, staying by her chair. A scared face appeared in the room. “Lord Culter? The Queen Dowager’s been