Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [7]
“I—really!” said Mariotta, roused. “There is no excuse for rank bad manners.”
“Richard doesn’t like me either,” said the fair one sorrowfully. “But that’s unmannerly rank for you. Do you like Richard?”
“I’m married to him!”
“That’s why I asked. You don’t believe in polyandry by any chance?” He rested a shoulder and elbow against the newel post, staring at her cheerfully. “It’s difficult, isn’t it? I might be a distant cousin with a quaint sense of humour, in which case you’ll look silly if you scream. I might be a well-known cretin to be kept from your guests at all costs. Or I might be—oh no, my angel!”
Quick fingers, closing on her wrist, wrenched her up from a headlong plunge to the lower floor, to the servants and her husband.
“—Or I might be annoyed. Don’t be a fool, my dear,” he said. “These were my men you heard entering below. You are not being badgered; you are being invaded.”
Held close to him as she was, she found his eyes unavoidable. They were blue, of the deep and identical cornflower of the Dowager’s. And at that, the impact of knowledge stiffened her face and seized her pulses. “I know who you are! You are Lymond!”
Applauding, he released her. “I take back the more personal insults if you will take back your arm without putting it to impious uses. There. Now, sister-in-law mine, let us mount like Jacob to the matriarchal cherubim above. Personally,” he said critically, “I should dress you in red.”
So this was Richard’s brother. Every line of him spoke, palimpsest-wise, with two voices. The clothes, black and rich, were vaguely slovenly; the skin sun-glazed and cracked; the fine eyes slackly lidded; the mouth insolent and self-indulgent. He returned the scrutiny without rancour.
“What had you expected? A viper, or a devil, or a ravening idiot; Milo with the ox on his shoulders, Angra-Mainyo prepared to do battle with Zoroaster, or the Golden Ass? Or didn’t you know the family colouring? Richard hasn’t got it. Poor Richard is merely Brown and fit to break bread with …”
“The poem I know at least,” exclaimed Mariotta, chafing her wrist. “Red wise; Brown trusty; Pale envious—”
“And Black lusty. What a quantity of traps you’ve dropped into today.… If you wish, you may run ahead screaming. It makes no difference now, although five minutes ago we were in something of a hurry … the servants to be tied up … the silver to collect … Richard’s personal hoard to recover from its usual cache. A man of iron habit, Richard.”
He had wandered absently past her and ahead up the stair when Mariotta, fully alert and aghast, started after him. “What do you want?”
He considered. “Amusement, principally. Don’t you think it’s time my family shared in my misfortunes, as Christians should? Then, vice is so costly: May dew or none, my brown and tender diamonds don’t engender, they dissolve. Immoderation, Mariotta, is a thief of money and intestinal joy, but who’d check it? Not I. Here I am, weeping soft tears of myrrh, to prove it.”
They had reached the door to the Hall. One hand on the standpost, he turned, and the kitten’s eyes were bright blue. “Watch carefully. In forty formidable bosoms we are about to create a climacteric of emotion. In one short speech—or maybe two—I propose to steer your women through excitement, superiority, contempt and anger: we shall have a little drama; just, awful and poetic, spread with uncials and full, as the poet said, of fruit and seriosity. Will they thank me, I wonder?”
Mariotta, collecting her wits, produced the only deterrent she could think of. “Your mother is in there.”
He received this with tranquil pleasure. “Then one person at least should recognize me,” Crawford of Lymond said, and pushed the door gently open for her to walk through.
* * *
Meanwhile Sir Wat Scott of Buccleuch was riding westward from Edinburgh, free at last of the Governor’s councils, and leaving behind him his good friend Tom Erskine, a distraught smuggler, and a depressed pig.
Buccleuch was accustomed to war. Since the golden age before Flodden of a dynamic