The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
‘To hear more?’ said Lymond. ‘Goodbye, Kate.’
‘No,’ Kate said. ‘Wait. There is someone out in the passage to see you.’ She grabbed his arm and he stopped, his face hard with animosity.
‘Who? The child, on its hindquarters, begging?’
‘No …’ said Kate, and fell back as he wrenched his arm from her grasp and, swinging from her, pulled the door open.
Outside, standing very straight and patiently against the opposite wall was a small person in a long, hooded cloak worked with fur, with jewels on her lightly clasped fingers and more, gleaming through the chain at her throat. Her hair, unlike Kate’s, was dressed with shining and perfect elaboration below a fragile French hood and its colour, once so blonde, had turned the pure porcelain white which suits only a fair, finegrained skin, and makes the depth of blue eyes still more striking.
Small and silent and elegant she waited, and did not move as the door was pulled open, although the hem of her skirt, had you looked closely, was trembling and her eyes, hollow with vigils, were unnaturally dark.
So, as Lymond strode out and stopped, rigid and white by the doorpost, Sybilla set eyes on Francis, the son of her heart; and so Francis Crawford, after four years of unharnessed power, came face to face at last with his mother.
And Kate, falling upon the door and looking up at her self-contained relative by marriage, saw his face torn apart and left, raw as a wound without features; only pain and shock and despair and appalled recognition, all the more terrible for being perfectly voiceless.
There was time to comprehend it, and to see a reflection of it begin to break in Sybilla’s paper-white face. There was time for Kate to cling to the door and realize, with a sickening ache in her chest, the size and scale of the mistake she had made. Then Lymond drew a long, unsteady breath and moved. Without a word or a glance, he thrust between Kate and his mother, and walked to the end of the passage. For a moment, his back to them, he paused. Then with his fist he struck the door open and vanished. A moment later, they heard his step on the stair, and the main door opening, with an ostler’s voice wishing him a good night. Had they looked out of the window, they might even have seen him walk off through the snow, his bare head bright and dark by turns under the lamps.
But they did not see it, for Kate was on her knees on the cold flags of the public inn passage, crying, and Sybilla was standing beside her, on the same forlorn spot, and unseeing, stroking her hair.
The girl Osep Nepeja did not want was coming downstairs as Francis Crawford came into their lodging, and she drew aside on the landing, since she saw it was the head one, the one who paid and never came near them. Who likely, they said, wasn’t able.
But Lymond greeted her, smiling, and smiling gripped her and walked her into his room and kicked the door shut.
Half-way through the night she said, ‘What’s the matter?’ but he didn’t answer.
And Osep’s friend drew a long, lonely sigh, there in the darkness; for he had been thoroughly able, and she had thought that perhaps he had liked her. But it was the old story. Some bought a drug for their troubles; and some bought a body. She waited until she thought he was sleeping, and left him, with her money, and a few extra coins as a keepsake.
Chapter 6
With their funds, their possessions, their lives threatened by the forthcoming war, the merchants of London decided as a measure of trust, a measure of pride and a measure of long-headed commerce to give to Osep Grigorievich Nepeja the finest reception ever received by foreign envoy to the capital city of England. And the Crown, for intricate reasons of its own, elected to support them.
Come in stately progress; escorted from county to county by sheriffs, the Ambassador’s party was met within twelve miles of London by a company of eighty Muscovite merchants riding in velvet