The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [247]
Bent on her purpose, Philippa received his question without understanding. She said, ‘No,’ and then remembered: the group of horsemen so opportunely placed on the road coming back from Gardington and the civil confinement which followed. ‘That is,’ she said, with her spine staring like a plucked fowl’s, ‘I may have been. I was met by the Lennoxes.’
Lymond drew a long breath and said, ‘Ah. I wonder which version they’ll publish. Unless they find another permutation, as you call it, to offer?’
Philippa said, ‘I’m not the Voevoda Bolshoia of Russia, so I make mistakes. I make diabolical mistakes. But I’m the only one trying to help. You don’t know what Bailey is like. I was prepared to be hurt, and I got hurt. You weren’t prepared to do anything. Not even to go to Sybilla directly and ask her for the truth.’
‘Which would have proved my devotion to my family,’ Lymond said. ‘What did she tell you?’
To her inner self, Philippa Somerville said, I am not going to be sick. To Lymond, she said, ‘I didn’t ask. I don’t care what you are going to say. I don’t care. I don’t care. These things have got to be said. Everyone is frightened to speak to you.’
‘But I allow no one—no one at all, to speak to me like this,’ Lymond said. ‘Come here.’ And as she hesitated, he said in the same, pleasant voice, ‘I don’t need to strike you. Words will do just as well.’
She came towards him, between the furniture, with her neat beret and jewellery and fine satin skirts and took her place in front of him, her mouth firm, her round brown eyes open. She said, ‘You despise Mary Tudor. You are offered love and won’t accept it except on your own terms. That isn’t tragic. It’s the word you’ve just mentioned—it’s childish.’
He waited until she had finished, and for a moment indeed he did not speak at all. The he said, dropping the words with lucid, passionless economy into the stillness, ‘Of all the homes I have known, yours has been a shining model of wisdom and kindness and honesty. For what you and your mother have done in the past, for me and for the child, I owe you a profound debt of honour. You have that claim on me. So has your mother. But if you press it too far; if you will accept no appeal and continue to press it, over and over; if you move into my life, both of you, and take your stance there and feel obliged to command and instruct me in how I should or should not behave, you will destroy our relationship. I shall walk away from you both; I shall deny you both; I shall repudiate all you have done for me. It will all be as if it had never happened … I don’t know what you fear for me, but that you should fear. For I cannot afford it.’
She was unbecomingly crying. She said, ‘How do you find what will hurt?’ because she knew his temper and was braced for it, whereas he had employed a lance she had never dreamed of, against a place which had no defences.
He said, ‘This matter is mine, and not yours or Kate’s. I never want to hear you speak of it again. Do you hear me?’
And Philippa said sobbing, ‘Yes. But I won’t do it.’
‘Yes, you will,’ Lymond said. ‘My God, do you think I said all that because I can’t make you? Be quiet and get out of my life. Or I shall send Bailey’s papers to Richard.’
Then she cried protesting aloud and Austin Grey, waiting anxiously and restlessly at the end of the passage outside heard the sound, and other sounds of Philippa in distress, and drawing his sword, blundered along the narrow corridor and flung open the door. Philippa choked. Lymond, his face perfectly stark, said, ‘Oh, God in heaven, Tristram Trusty …’ and moved quickly back as the sword flashed towards him. Philippa yelped.
It held the stuff of both climates: the tragic and the childish. Lymond was quite unarmed. The room, crowded with bric à brac, was no more fit for a tournament than a woodshed. As Austin Grey came pursuing towards him, Lymond slid back between stool and box and bed until, glancing sideways, he was able to snatch up a baton, left