Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [211]
He had become very still; the warmth from him was like the smell of a meal on a frosty day, at the end of a hard ride. He said, ‘Yours is not to lead now: we go side by side. Rest from your travels.’ Then the soft silk of his shoulder closed her eyes. He caressed her, smoothing laces and clasps from his way so that her body, unimpeded learned his hands; speaking softly, until her mind sank back numb, the pressures in the room, in herself, in him, stealing her breath.
His hands searched her, touching her passions one by one and shaping with his musician’s fingers the growing, thunderous chord. The darkness shook, like the bursting crust of the earth, fissured red with the wildfire within. Under a discipline she could not bear to contemplate he drew together in her and united in a single, raging anthem, all the craving strands of her sleepless years. With all the life in her between his two palms, he slid wide his hands and quickly lifting her, swaying, like warm wine in too tender a lapping, took and laid her on the dark bed where, crudely, she had always meant to surrender.
Outside, the dancing had stopped. For a while, the voices scratched the night air, coalescing, thinning, joining again in wine-eased laughter. Then they dispersed, and you heard only the pad of servants’ feet, aching for bed, the chink of cup on tray, the pang of moved lutes and the hiss of brushes, and finally, in the dark Château Neuf and Château Vieux, only the harp-fall of the fountains, and silence.
Behind more than one window the satins lay strewn in the moonlight, and the night passed sleepless, playing at love. For one person only the music stayed all night long, losing no magnificence, demanding more sometimes than she could support. She knew neither where she was nor whom she was with; for Lymond had given her the greatest gift in his possession. For one night he had severed Oonagh O’Dwyer’s soul from her mind; for one single night, she was free.
It was the first time; and the last. They did not know each other when it began, and when it was over they knew nothing still, for they embraced visions and not flesh; his eyes lifted, considering, to wider horizons, and her soul, a stranger to warm earth and harvests, bent on snatching its hour.
Oonagh woke soon after dawn, the blackbirds loud in the orange trees and turned her head, not remembering, against the black swathes of her hair. It was not Cormac’s head, pillowed and assuaged, lying beside her. Francis Crawford was watching her, the sheet pushed back from his shoulders, his chin on his folded arms. He looked as if he had lain a long time, quietly thinking without sleep. He smiled now instantly, a brilliant, fleeting smile of mischief and friendship, and said in her own tongue, ‘It is superb you are, my lady; and a gallant night we made, you and I. But if you would have me lay stress on any syllable at all, I shall have to pray God for the strength.’
She saw the long-nailed hand, lying at ease under the tilted chin, the pale, ruffled hair, the thinly timbered face with its inbred austerity giving the lie to his words; and through the dawnlight and the peace and the unturned memories, like drowned jewels, of the night, she remembered why it was done.
She had meant to show him that he had nothing to barter. He had given her instead the price of her secret, her pride, herself twenty times over. And defying all the great laws, the laws of hospitality, the laws of humanity, the laws of her own people, being what she was, she must fling it back in his face. She looked at him, and for a long moment he answered the look, before turning away. He buried his elbows in the down, and cradling his brow in his laced hands, closed his eyes. ‘Well, Oonagh?’
With bitter smoothness, she sat up, the heavy