Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [23]
At first, she saw no one. Then, as a flame jumped, it revealed two people standing at the far end of the room behind the service screen, and the light glimmered, for a moment, on the pleated cambric at the neck of a man’s doublet. Lymond’s voice, continuing lightly, said in French, ‘It seems very clear that there is some objection. I should be obliged to know what it is.’
She could not see whom he was addressing, but in any case the problem was instantly solved for her. Georges Gaultier’s voice said, ‘The young man is temperamental, merely. There is no possible objection that I can think of. Once afloat, believe me, there will be no time for childishness. You are more than capable of taking care of that.’
‘That is hardly the issue,’ said the other, cool voice. ‘The point is rather that I have no desire to be exposed to it in the first place. I think perhaps you should bring your friend in. Obviously we are going to get nowhere until we have this meeting you have all been so eager to avoid.…’
They were going to emerge from the screen. Perfectly prepared to be an eavesdropper but unwilling to look like one, Philippa backed quickly towards the door and collided, hard, with an unseen person striding forward equally fast into the room. There was a hiss, more than echoed by herself as the breath was struck from her body. Then two cool, friendly hands held and steadied her, one on her shoulder and one on her flat waist, and a low voice said, ‘Admirable Philippa. I always enter my battlefields in reverse, too. But my own battlefields, my little friend. Not other people’s.’
It was the same voice. But it couldn’t be. It was the same felicitous, dispassionate voice that she had just heard speaking from behind the screen at the far end of the room. There, a shadow emerging from the screen, was the speaker. And here behind her, as she spun round and he dropped his impersonal grasp, was Lymond himself.
A sense of danger, instant and unreasoning, overwhelmed Philippa. She saw Lymond look at her with sudden attention, and in the same moment there was a flood of light outside the door behind him and Jerott arrived, breathless, with a servant bearing candelabra behind him. He had no time to speak. As the branched candlesticks were borne in and the room filled with flickering gold, the two whom Philippa had overheard moved from behind the screen and walked slowly towards them.
One of them, as Philippa had guessed, was the usurer and clock-maker Georges Gaultier. The other, whose voice Philippa had thought so unmistakably familiar, was not a man at all, but a girl. A girl far younger than Kiaya Khátún, with high cheekbones and open blue eyes, set far apart; with a patrician nose, its profile scooped just less than straight. The face of a Delia Robbia angel, set in gleaming hair, golden as Jupiter’s shower. ‘This,’ said Maître Georges Gaultier gently, ‘is Marthe.’
‘Hell,’ said Francis Crawford so softly that only Philippa heard him, ‘and damnation. And God damn you, Lady.’ Then, his face wiped clean of all real expression, he moved forward smoothly and sociably to greet Maître Gaultier’s assistant, while Jerott and Philippa stood side by side helplessly behind.
An eighteen-year-old blonde of doubtful virginity, had been Lymond’s first ironical guess. But, Philippa thought, Jerott had tried to send this girl home for other reasons entirely.