The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [288]
‘Don’t,’ Lymond said. He had turned round, his eyes very bright. ‘Don’t, wise Philippa. The damage is spread too widely as it is.’
‘But,’ said Philippa, ‘even if you accept bastardy, you are left to wonder why Sybilla didn’t confess to you, since you have always been so very close. And from that, to surmise that the facts of your birth must be such that Sybilla knew they would destroy even your love for her. And that is why, at first, you wouldn’t make any inquiries or allow them. But now …’
‘Wise Philippa,’ said Lymond again. Standing very still, with his back to the window he offered no resistance to what she was saying, but simply remained, his eyes dwelling on her as she sat bolt upright in the firelight, her wet, combed hair glowing chestnut where it fell forward over the darkened brocade of her gown. He said, ‘Tell me, then, why I come now to Gardington?’
She drew a long breath and released it again, her eyes open and honest on his. ‘Because, as you say, absence has hardened you. There are things you can face now which you couldn’t face in Stamboul. And because, I think, at last, the bond with Sybilla is being shared with another. Before, all your mind and all your emotions were contained in your feeling for her. Now it is different. Now you have Güzel’s love also.’
He had been holding his breath. He released it all at once, leaving his fair-skinned face for a moment as drained as his lungs, and then, after a pause, inhaled again with a long, vagrant column of air, caught as on the teeth of a ratchet with snatches of shock, and of laughter and of a sort of tearing, choked self-derision. ‘Wise Philippa,’ Lymond said. ‘Wise, wise Philippa.… Do you know: after all, I do not think I can manage both Master Bailey and Mistress Somerville …?’
And when, looking at him, she said sharply, ‘Sit down!’ he did drop, abruptly, on to a stool by the window and remained there, his head in his hands, while Philippa found his unused cup and poured into it the last of the punch. Then kneeling beside him, she said, ‘It will be worse if you don’t go. Do you want me to stay here and wait for you?’
But instead of answering her he said, ‘Philippa, will you go away? Out of the room.… Anywhere, just for five minutes. I shall come to you.’
And so, leaving the cup beside him, slowly she did.
He did not come in five minutes, but in ten; and then, although still extremely white, he had assumed again, flawlessly, the supreme self-possession of the Voevoda Bolshoia. He said, ‘Poor Philippa: it must be worse than the Masque of the Pilgrims and the Irishmen. There are no more hands to be held. But I think, if you can bear it, you should come with me after all into Gardington. After that masterly exposition, you deserve to see how it all ends.… I have taken two rooms here for us overnight. Unless, of course, Master Bailey offers us hospitality for the night. He is, after all, my great-uncle.’
‘And mine. By marriage,’ said Philippa in the same tone exactly. ‘But if he does, I shall look under the bed for the bombard.’
*
On the same day, Wednesday, April 28th, Peter Vannes, the former English Ambassador to Venice, reached the town of Sittingbourne on his journey from Dover to London, and at about the same time the idle onlooker from Dover, riding untrammelled at fullest possible speed, arrived at John Dimmock’s house in Fenchurch Street, London, where he found and had hurried words with Daniel Hislop.
Danny, with a catastrophe on his hands and no Voevoda to deal with it, made his excuses to Dimmock and his fellows of St Mary’s, threw a saddle on the swiftest horse in Master Dimmock’s stable, and set off for Sittingbourne as fast as he could go, making rendezvous with certain highly paid rogues on the way there. The idle man from Dover he sent, with a fresh horse, north-west to Gardington, in an effort to trace and bring back the Voevoda Bolshoia as fast as possible. The far from idle man, who had travelled seventy-two miles in an extremely short time, set out