Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [24]
If Lymond was unprepared for her voice, he showed no sign of it. After a short, placid interval during which he surveyed her as she sat, from the shining fall of her hair to the pale blue folds of her gown, he said, ‘That was only Jerott, wishing to preserve both from the barbarian.’
‘Meaning you?’ said the girl Marthe’s light voice. ‘Meaning me,’ agreed Lymond.
‘I think,’ said the girl pleasantly, ‘that you may quite safely leave that aspect to me. If it also concerns you, I have sailed the Middle Sea a great many times without either giving birth or fainting in battle. If I am captured, it is no concern but my own.’
‘How disciplined of you,’ said Lymond. ‘Et tu ne vois au pied de ton rempart …’
‘ … Pour m’enlever mille barques descendre. Of course not. No man would. So why should I look to be rescued?’
‘Is that why you wish to come?’ said Francis Crawford. Flippant though his tone was, his eyes, Philippa noticed, had never dropped from the girl’s. ‘To prove your masculinity?’
There was a little pause. Looking into that angelic, fair face Philippa saw the authority she had missed before: the small lines round the mouth; the winged curve of spirit on either side of the fine planes of the nose: the faint, single line between the arched brows. ‘I came because I was told to come,’ said the girl Marthe. ‘My wishes have very little to do with it.’
It was coolly said; and she added nothing. But Philippa, sensitive to every shade of the exchange, suddenly caught the controlled anger behind it. This girl, whom Gaultier had refused to allow home, had no desire to sail on the Dauphiné with Francis Crawford of Lymond. And at the same moment, Lymond, no less perceptive, spoke with a coolness fully equal to hers. ‘On the contrary. Your wishes are paramount. If you prefer it, I shall send you back to Lyons with an escort today.’
Sitting straight-backed, her hands modestly in her lap, the girl answered, sweetly. ‘Thank you. I fear in this case inclination must give way to duty. If you have no other valid objection, I intend to sail with my uncle.’
‘Your uncle?’ said Jerott, startled into speech.
‘A courtesy title,’ explained Georges Gaultier placidly. ‘In fact, she is more of a collector’s piece, are you not, Marthe? In exquisite taste. Given the choice, I make no doubt that Sultan Suleiman would prefer her to the spinet. How happy,’ he added, in the inimical silence, ‘that you have taken to one another. I was certain that we should have your permission to sail. What an enchanting voyage, with two such ladies, in prospect.’
Slumped stricken in her mud-encased frieze, Philippa suddenly realized what he had said. She applied to Jerott, in an undertone. ‘Has he given permission? Am I going?’
Lymond had heard. Rising, in one practised movement, he gave one hand to Marthe and the other to Philippa and, raising them so that they stood before him, frieze to satin to velvet, he lifted each girl’s hand in turn to his lips and holding them lightly, smiled speculatively into the blue eyes and the brown. ‘You are going,’ he said. ‘Like an Ethiopian grasshopper plague, we’re all going. And we shall know each other better than this when we come back.…
‘If we come back, that is to say.’
Many weeks later, long after the Dauphiné had sailed, cannon firing and pennants streaming, from Marseilles harbour and when Lymond and Marthe and Philippa indeed knew each other better, two letters reached Philippa’s mother at her home in Flaw Valleys, near Hexham in England: one written by Lymond, and one by Philippa herself.
My dear Kate, Lymond had written. She is with me, and safe. You know what she feels her mission to be: and I cannot bring myself to flatten that Somerville pride. We are sailing tomorrow from Marseilles and very soon her own common sense is going to tell her that,