Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [225]
Impaled shrikewise on his boulder, Lymond had no reserves of strength to make the half-crippled journey back to couch and clear thought. Knowing, surely, that the last, bowelless assault was upon him, he spoke under his breath. “Nay, brother,” said Lymond, “I wyll not daunce.”
Richard’s voice, too, was soft. “And the love of young boys, of course: you must miss that. Someone to relax with, in a gracious way, to twist and indoctrinate and shatter with the wild, delightful mutability of your moods. You must miss Will Scott. And your women.”
Lymond spoke without dropping his eyes. “Suppose we leave out the women.”
“Christian Stewart, for example?”
“Suppose we leave out Christian Stewart and everything to do with her?” It was so quiet that his breathing was quite audible.
“Wouldn’t you like it,” said Richard, “if she were here with us now? A kindhearted girl, Christian: she wouldn’t mind. She would help, without asking questions. She was used to that—a little too trusting, one would say, but after all, in God’s world, we must trust somebody?” His gaze never left Lymond: inexorable, ruthless, dissecting, hygienic as burin or scalpel. And there was a change in his brother’s face: the fissure; the first break.
A great pain of joy seized Richard’s heart. My God: my God, was it coming … ? “Yes,” he said calmly, and got up. “A little adulatory company would be pleasant. That fellow who promised you all his gold, Turkey something: he tried to help you as well, and died, poor fellow. Blaming Will Scott for it, I’m told. Would you like his support now? I’m afraid you’ll never enjoy his cottage in Appin …”
The level denunciation gave the words a power that rolled like the thunder of Götterdämmerung through the meadow. And Lymond cried out, “Stop it, Richard!” and at last, violently swaying, forced himself to his feet.
Culter watched him; watched the hands groping at the cliff face behind for support; watched the death of all the characteristic, cultivated graces and spoke again, quite close now, a stony and judging shadow.
“Or if you hadn’t killed her, would you be comforted by Eloise?” Lymond made no sound.
“The only daughter, and the finest child. The most vivid, the most eager, the most intelligent. By now, cherished by her own lover, with her own children in her arms. Once, late at night when you were away, she told me …”
No!” said Lymond. “Oh, damn you, no.”
“No? You wanted her burned alive, and she was,” said Richard with a terrible impartiality. “Why should you cringe over it now?”
The guard was down. There was the face he yearned to see: never again inscrutable; never again would he need to wonder what lay behind the smiling mouth and the delicate, malicious wit. Skull, flesh and muscle, every fluent line and practised shade of Lymond’s face betrayed him explicitly, and Richard, swept into a major, a foreign dimension, was suddenly dumb.
Behind clenched hands, face to the rock, Lymond spoke at last.
“Why? I made one mistake. Who doesn’t? But I despised men who accepted their fate. I shaped mine twenty times and had it broken twenty times in my hands. Of course it left me deformed and unserviceable, defective and dangerous to associate with.… But what in God’s name has happened to charity? … Self-interest guides me like the next man but not invariably; not all the time. I use compassion more than you do; I have loyalties and I keep by them; I serve honesty in a crooked way, but as best I can; and I don’t plague my debtors or even make them aware of their debt.… Why is it so impossible to trust me?”
“You shut the door yourself.” Richard spoke harshly. Now that it had come he recoiled from it: recoiled as Lymond turned and baring his face to the light went on, his voice exhausted, dogged, unsteady.
“Why should you think so? Why assume me to be of such different stuff? We have the same blood, the same upbringing. What else is