Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [176]
It was no use protesting. Having turned the other cheek, Will Scott submitted, with as much tranquillity as he could muster, to having it slapped. He mounted with his father and spent the rest of the daylight hours scouring the countryside for the escaped man, without any success whatsoever.
* * *
At Midculter, Sybilla occupied herself that Friday and Saturday in turning out cupboards and making long and superfluous lists of her gold plate. Mariotta, who had been straying restlessly from room to room ever since Janet Buccleuch left, burst into ill-considered speech. “How can you sit there and do that?”
They had heard nothing since the news that Lymond was to be trapped: nothing of Will; nothing of Hunter; nothing of Sir Wat. Listening to Mariotta’s hand-wringing tirade Sybilla, who was rather pale, sat back on her heels and reached a decision. “Look,” she said incisively. “I try not to interfere, but we may as well be honest with one another. Whom are you afraid for? You’ve cast off Richard, and you find my other son detestable.”
Mariotta said indistinguishably, “I don’t want any harm to come to him.”
“Who?” said the Dowager sharply. “Incidentally, if it interests you, my guess is that Lymond hardly knows you exist.”
“I meant Richard,” said the girl.
“I see. Well, Richard for all his flummery, worships his wife. Unhappily, neither of you knows what the other is dreaming about half the time.”
She said defensively, “He’s not easy to understand.”
“And yet you rather expected Richard to read your mind, didn’t you? You thought he pictured you encysted forever with pots and pans—A woman is a worthy thing; they do the wash and do the wring. And so on. Whereas—”
“Of course I did. No other thought crossed his mind.”
“Heaven forbid,” said the Dowager crossly, “that I should tattle over other folks’ errors like an unemployed midwife; but look. Wat Scott is like that. With Wat it’s sew Tibet, knit Annot and spin Margerie and no nonsense. He’d think it a downright insult to his manhood to clatter of his affairs in the house.”
Mariotta sat down, prepared to argue in spite of herself. “But Janet seems to me to know everything that’s going on.”
“Exactly. What’s more, in her wrangling way, she makes sure that Wat knows her opinion on everything that matters. In other words, she uses her own methods of informing herself on everything Wat’s interested in, and half the time he’s acting exactly as Janet is making him act.
“You want Richard to be interested in the minutiae of your day: it works both ways. Do you ever wonder what Richard is doing with these building experiments of his? Did you ever get him to tell you of the time he carried off all the prizes at Kilwinning? Did you know, for example, that he’s probably the best swordsman in the country, and that he sometimes teaches, for Arran, when some of the nobler scions turn out to need a little polish?”
“If you mean,” said Mariotta, red-faced, “that I should copy Janet, I hardly think—”
“I don’t mean anything of the sort. I’m only doing a little dissecting work on adjacent marriages; you can draw your own conclusions. Look at the Maxwells, for instance.”
“Agnes?”
“If you like. While thinking she was choosing, she was being chosen. While electing this man as hero of one of her appalling romances, she was marrying a hardheaded intelligent person who will be clever enough—and kind enough—to preserve the fantasy, or at least let her down pretty lightly.”
“And Richard?”
The Dowager put a wandering hand to her white hair. “Richard. I can’t tell you the path to take there. You’ll have to find it for yourself. But I can tell you two things about him. One is that the most serious thing in his life is his country. The other is this. The only thing that could kill Richard is a lack of stability.”
Mariotta’s face darkened. “You mean inconstancy.”
“I mean,” said Sybilla gently, “the folly of allowing oneself to be attracted always by superficial glitter. I mean a craving for change and excitement—even the nasty excitement of waiting to be found out about those jewels.”
Mariotta