Game of Kings - Dorothy Dunnett [92]
The clear eyes viewed him. “Have it your own way,” said Gideon Somerville resignedly. “As usual.”
II
Discovered Check
The third pawne … ought to be figured as a clerk …
yf they wryte otherwyse than they ought to doe
may ensewe moche harme and damage to the comyn.
Therfore ought they to take good heede that they chaūge not ne corrumpe in no wyse the content of the sentence. For than ben they first
forsworn. And ben bounden to make amendes to
them that by theyr tricherye they have endomaged.
1. Diagonal Mating Begins
IF THE Richard Crawford who went to Branxholm was a troubled and reticent man, the Richard Crawford who returned was, as his wife ruefully put it, as sociable as a Trappist monk.
From this aspect, it was a pity his wounds were no worse. The tender bonds of love and service which Mariotta would cheerfully have wrapped about a helpless and stationary invalid were stretched instead, frayed and snapping, to the heels of an absent, overactive, uncompromising gentleman, up before he should have been out of bed and out before he should have been up.
Lady Buccleuch, approached by Mariotta, had proved an unhelpful confidante. “That’s his job,” she pointed out. “You don’t, I suppose, want to flit here and yon tied to the man’s collar like Agrippa’s dog with the devil.”
“But are you telling me the two circles never meet?” cried Mariotta in exasperation. “Are we to spend the young days of our lives with never a shared doubt, or pleasure, or worry but what falls crash at our feet the one rare Sunday in five we’re together?”
“God,” had said Janet. “I’m not likely to buy doubts off Buccleuch. I’ve enough myself for the two of us, and I’ll fight to the death to keep Wat’s great blundering thumbs out of them.…”
That was at the start of November. Very soon afterward, the first parcel of jewellery arrived.
Mariotta found it, wrapped and anonymous, in her solar: discreet inquiry could not discover how it came there. Inside was a handsome ring-brooch, disingenuously inscribed Nostre et toutdits a vostre desir. There was nothing else to betray its origin, and from that fact, and the arrogance of the message, she thought she guessed the sender.
Lady Culter passed an uneasy afternoon, considering what to do. Tell Richard? She might be wrong. There might be a letter on its way with a perfectly innocent explanation. Or another less innocent. But Richard in his anger had already exposed himself too rashly to his brother: to repress further injury was something the Dowager, at least, would approve. She decided to wait.
No letter came, but a week later, a second packet. This was a bracelet, demanding boldly, Is thy heart as my heart? with an insolence which was almost its undoing. Mariotta roamed her room, arguing and counterarguing, dogged by a recollection of blue eyes and a blurred, inebriated voice.
It was monstrous, of course, even to compare the two men. A well-balanced, mature woman of nineteen would unpin the ring-brooch from inside her bodice and put it and the bracelet in Richard’s hands saying meekly, “Your brother is paying court to me. What do I do?”
Mariotta didn’t ask what to do. She wore the bracelet and waited for Richard to comment first, and Richard failed to notice it. She wore the diamond brooch when it came as well; with the same results. The Dowager, on her return from Branxholm several days later, admired it, taking it for an Irish piece of Mariotta’s own. Committed, the girl did not contradict her. Then Lady Buccleuch had arrived, as invited, on the nineteenth, had remarked cheerfully on the pale, glittering gold, and had added: “Sybilla, that reminds me. Did Richard ever do anything about that glove of Lymond’s that he dropped at the Papingo?”
The Dowager shook her white head. All three women were in Sybilla’s own room, and the firelight, rosy in the November mirk, fluttered over bed and desk and gave odd, frenetic life to the wall hangings.
“The glove’s still in that French cabinet of mine in the Stirling house. Of course,