Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [243]
It was hard, but she meant to be hard. She watched him as he groped painfully for an honest and lucid answer; trying with all his strength to satisfy her and win through to her without invoking the shadows of the last five months, and of the last three weeks. It couldn’t be done, and she made it clear to him that he mustn’t try. “Richard? What have you done?”
He didn’t look up, or call his brother by name. “Nothing. He’s alive. This isn’t an act of expiation.”
“Did he tell you what passed between us?”
Richard’s face was buried in his hands. “Some of it.”
“He told you he had never laid hands on me?”
“Yes.”
“And you believed him?”
“Yes. I don’t know. Not when he told me. But later on—I’ve had a long time to think.”
“And when he took me to Crawfordmuir?”
“It was an accident: he intended you to be taken straight home. He did what he could for you. I know about that.”
“Then either Will Scott or myself is a liar,” said Mariotta gently. “Because Lymond told me face to face that he meant all the time to bring me to Crawfordmuir; that he took me there to dishonour you and disrupt the inheritance. It was to save myself and you that I escaped.”
Richard’s hands dropped from his face, and his wife said, “So which story will you favour this time? His or mine?”
There was a long silence. Then slowly Richard got up from the chest. He looked very tired. “Are you sure … ?”
“He spoke very plainly indeed. Will Scott can tell you.”
Her husband walked to the window. Faintly, in the courtyard, the dying glow of Johnnie Bullo’s embers searched through the open door, were cut off, gleamed and disappeared as it swung in the wind. Mariotta said, “Well?” and he turned, making a gesture of despair. “I have lived with him for three weeks. He’s tormented, perverted, dangerous, ruthless, but—”
The candlelight lit her soot-black hair and the soft wool on her shoulders, as if a silver quill had embellished the air about her. Her face, resting on her knees, was shadowed and unreadable. “But you believe him. It’s another impasse then, isn’t it, Richard?”
“I’m damned if it is,” said Lord Culter suddenly, and swung around. “My dear: listen. We’ve been married less than a year. Because of circumstances and foolishnesses and my mistakes and shortcomings we’ve been parted for nearly half that time. We’ve each in our own way been through a number of minor hells; and we’ve had a great loss.…
“A mistake is something you build on: it’s the irritant that makes the pearl; the flaw that creates the geyser—but a mistake made twice is a folly. It’s cost something in terms of thought and sacrifice and even suffering to bring us tonight to speak with each other. We have a moral duty at least not to toss it away.”
“And Lymond?”
Richard said steadily, “You had no right to ask me that question, and no right to expect me to make that choice.”
“I knew you wouldn’t make it,” she said. “I knew if you had made it, even in your own mind, that Lymond would be dead. I was only—”
“—Frightening me for the good of my soul,” said Richard, and suddenly smiled. “As Francis rejoices in doing. I’ve spoken to Will Scott too, you know. But won’t you believe me? I’ve been frightened enough already.”
He was standing looking down at her. “Perhaps you’ve married the wrong brother. And that would be a pity. Because Francis lives in a passionless vacuum and keeps his love for abstract things. And in the second place, I should never let you go.”
She had longed so much to hear it that she was beyond speech; but there was a quality in her face that drove him suddenly toward violence.
“I love you,” said Richard to his wife. “You have dominion of life and death over me. I am asking nothing except to prove it without being turned away. Or”—his eyes on her lifted arms—“being taken out of pity.”
Her outstretched hands did not waver, and the candlelight on her face found an expression unsought even in his dreams. He came carefully to her side,