Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
The empty calyx he was attacking made infinitesimal efforts to avoid him; to refuse his services; to deny his proximity; but he persevered. Hatred was life; shame was life; humiliation was life; the trivial movements Lymond was making in his extremity were life.
Richard Crawford was a very stubborn man.
He went to bed that night hoarse but refusing to be depressed, although the next day, confronted by the same eyes and the same rejection, he was sometimes very near to giving it up.
He was unused to sustained talking: his mind balked; topics forsook him. Recent events he had forbidden himself: everything to do with the Master’s own adult life; all political and national affairs. That left only the half-forgotten, virgin tracts of their common childhood. He dug, obstinately, into those sealed mines and shuttered bondhouses and in doing so dragged out days and weeks of his life hitherto quite forgotten.
That he should mention his father at all was accidental: it was years since the second baron had died, and he had hardly thought of him since. And that was surprising too, considering the part he had played in his boyhood.
“I don’t fancy,” said Richard, thinking aloud, “that he was fond of children, or even of marriage, much. But he wanted us to reflect his own physical superiority—in hunting, riding, shooting, swordplay, swimming and all the rest of it. My God, I used to lie like a Gothamite fisherman sometimes about my scores. And yet”—he paused, hands locked around knees, eyes unseeing as he groped after a new idea—“and yet it wasn’t altogether a good thing. He hadn’t any other interests, and couldn’t tolerate anyone who had. I remember Mother once got a case of new books from the stationer’s, and he burned …”
No. That was one incident better forgotten. At the back of his mind he could hear the two voices, his brother and his father, shouting at one another: or rather, his father shouting and Francis retorting, using the very twin of the voice, he suddenly realized, that Lymond had used to himself in an obscure wood near Annan.
Memory, once jogged, showed him other pictures. A born athlete, at ease with every kind of sport, Richard had been human enough to enjoy his father’s delight in him. He was adolescent before he suspected that his younger brother was less of an effete brat than his father made out; that although he was aggressively scholarly he also moved like an acrobat. He had eloquence. He had charm. He submerged himself and his filthy tongue in music and books, and Sybilla abetted him. Why?
The answer to that had been easy, too. Apple of the baron’s alcoholic eye, Richard was cut out for a mockery, a figurehead, a substitute leaking straw inconspicuously at the joints and accepting the respectful plaudits of the tenants. The steeples were being cut down so that the chimney could aspire. And Francis, of the sardonic blue eye, was without doubt a party to it.
It was a bitter discovery, and one that he had never questioned till now. It had never struck him that his brother, seeing their father with a clearer eye than his, might purposefully have turned aside from all that he stood for; might have taken a satirical pleasure in avoiding their father’s approval. With Sybilla and the brilliant, worldly shadow of their grandfather behind him, he could afford to go his own way uncaring, and allow Richard his arena. Was that what had happened?
Was it? He looked with sudden, searching eyes at Lymond. The hypersensitive face gave him no answer, but there was a change of some sort: the eyes no longer reflected the sky but were half hidden by his lashes, as though there existed a thought to conceal. Richard lifted the fresh bandages he had prepared and kneeling, unfastened the old ones. The Master’s mouth tightened, but he didn’t recoil.
Slowly, it came. As well as instinct, there was somewhere