Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [200]
The music room was filled with sunlight and the smells of warmed wood and fruity earth from Kate’s pot plants. They passed the lute and rebec and the fiddle and harpsichord sealed in silent jubilee, and crossed to the inner room.
Kate had also heard the story, attacking the situation with her mind and squashing emotion and surmise with a prompt if temporary thumb.
She did what was necessary out of the bounty which suffering naturally commanded, and out of a sharp reaction to the courage of the injured girl. Conjecture firmly dismissed, she sat down beside her own bed, when every service of comfort had been performed, and took quiet and efficient note of the quiet and efficient messages enumerated from the pillows.
Christian’s mind was perfectly clear. Her chief anguish, clearly, was the death of the boy Simon. Beyond that she wasted no time on regrets or self-pity, except perhaps when she had said all that was vital to say, and after lying silent for a moment observed: “You know, life has so many ridiculous hazards when one is blind—and yet I never expected somehow to die so far from home, without anyone of my own.” She smiled quite successfully and added, “I don’t suppose it matters. We’re all pretty solitary anyhow, aren’t we? Is someone else coming in?”
Kate hadn’t heard Lymond enter. Across the bed she saw him tweak a strand of dark red hair gently between finger and thumb, and then slip into a chair beside the pillow. “Don’t be so superior. Someone of your own is here,” he said.
The girl’s control was weaker than his. Her brow creased and tears sprang into her opened eyes. She shut them and said shakily, “It’s witchcraft. You are about to babble like magpies and herring gulls.”
“But not about the ruin of charity: in Flaw Valleys it multiplies like rhubarb.… What in God’s name must you think of me after all the drivel I had to talk at Threave?”
There was an undeniable smile on the white face. “That you expected to be hanged. And didn’t want me to be pointed out solely as the girl with a strong attachment for her dependents. It was all right. I understood.”
“It wasn’t all right,” said Lymond flatly. “It’s been all of a piece. I’ve been a joyless jeweller up to the last, exquisite drop from the crucible.”
“There aren’t any dregs in my cup,” said Christian. “You’re the only person who could make me swallow them. I’d do what I did over again. I never cared for old age, or the idea of outliving my friends and being a chattel to my relatives. I mourned a little because nobody would ever point to a page of history and say, ‘The stream turned there to the right, or to the left, because of Christian Stewart.’ You could make that come true for me, if you think you owe me anything. And you could promise me not to retreat to a wine barrel and reduce what we’ve both done to a few artificial bubbles of regrets and self-blame. You prophesied yourself that I should have all I wanted from life, did you not? And I think I have,” she said.
He answered her like the lash of a whip. “There seems no doubt I’ve been reserved for great things—
“Io son fatta da Dio, sua merce, tale …
I am the chosen of God. He will see
That your suffering does me no harm
That the flames of this fire never touch me.”
The impact of the words was almost physical. Kate flinched and the girl in the bed cried out, “No!”
He broke off of his own accord. “No,” he agreed after a moment. “God knows why you think it’s worth it, but I wouldn’t have the puny effrontery to waste what you’ve done. When I think of my brilliant pose of anonymity …”
A smile twitched her lips again. “I knew you’d be much too high-minded to come back if you suspected I knew. That’s why I stopped you at Inchmahome.”
Lymond’s face was as white as the girl he was talking to, but his voice hardly varied.
“I am grovelling. I also owe you one or two stinging innuendoes for those letters. If Agnes Herries