The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [285]
As it was, she rode on grimly, accepting what punishment the elements chose to inflict on her, until she emerged from a small, noisy wood to see the road winding empty before her, and a single horseman waiting silent beside it, his long cloak sleek as satin with wet.
Philippa Somerville slowed her horse to a trot, and, pulling off her right glove, held her hand high and flat, white palm outwards as she paced forward to Lymond and stopped. ‘Never again,’ Philippa said. ‘Never, never again.’
He sat still, breathing deeply as yet from the ride, with his face brushed and ridged with wet light from the rain. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t deserve that. I think.’
Philippa looked down and then up again, her cheeks red with mortification. ‘It works with Austin,’ she said.
His lips tightened, and Philippa sat, empty and braced for the stinging attack she deserved. ‘It works with me, too,’ he said. ‘But perhaps not quite in the same way.’
There was another brief pause. Then he said, ‘I can hardly let you ride back on your own. Do you always get your own way by——’
‘Persistence,’ Philippa said, ‘is the secret. So many buls do compass me That be full strong of head. Yea, buls so fat as though they had In Basan field been fed. I haven’t had my breakfast.’
He lifted his eyebrows, but not quite in the same way as before, insolently, in the presence chamber at Whitehall. ‘Then you are going to be very hungry, aren’t you?’ he said. ‘Because on my journeys there are no halts before dinner. For bulls or heifers.’
But that worried her not at all, for she had got what she wanted despite him. Although, as she knew very well, she could never have caught him had he not stopped, from regard for her safety. For he did not want her. Of that, there was, loweringly, no possible doubt.
They had forty miles to cover to Gardington: a longer journey than any she would normally ride in one day; but she was light and active and determined and did not hold him back as they galloped, changing horses at post stations as they went; or, if she did, he concealed it. For the rest, it was a strange day which remained in her memory, for it was so different from her experience of him hitherto.
The quick, vituperative exchanges which she had found so challenging and exasperating and, sometimes, hurtful did not appear; and when she thought of the purpose of this journey she accepted that, today at least, his mind would be removed far from banter. He did talk, however, when there was breath at a ford or a ferry, or when he commanded a meal for them both, or half an hour’s rest and shelter at an inn. It was none of it personal conversation and began, so far as she could afterwards remember, with a book she had just read by Leonard Digges about prognosticating the weather from the sky. It appeared he had read Digges’s last book and they discussed it; and then went on to talk about Roger Bacon.
It was only gradually that she came to realize how steadily he was controlling the conversation: how, whenever it became less than detached, he steered the subject elsewhere or exchanged it skilfully for another. It was noticeable simply because there seemed, Philippa concluded, to be so few dull topics in the world, and even when he thought he had found one, it would suddenly burst into life, full of new aspects and intriguing possibilities as they discussed it, and then he would switch subjects again. She wished, looking at his face, that he would yield, and let the talk drift, as he would with some of his friends. But the strains of today were already quite bad enough, without forcing unnecessary demands on him.
Twice, they did stray briefly from the impersonal. She remembered querying, in surprise, a quotation from Thomas Aquinas and he smiled and said, ‘Forgive me, but I have read some books since I left my library at Midculter Castle.’
It was the first break in the wall with which he had