The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [296]
The door to her room was beside them. ‘Come in for a moment,’ said Philippa. And as he made no immediate response, she added, ‘I know. My company isn’t going to help, but my medicaments might. I had a word with one of the maids there myself. Short of executions and violets and even the brain-pan of the blessed St Michael there are a few humble remedies which might make the thing a little less crippling. What does it spring from? The opium?’
He did come in, but not to sit down. She shut the door with a bang and knelt to improve the inn’s idea of a fire. ‘Lack of self-control, I thought,’ said Francis Crawford.
‘Yes. Well, I deserved that,’ said Philippa grimly, getting up. ‘I have seldom seen such an exhibition of howling restraint. And if you want to shout and smash things, please do. I should have been better pleased if you had smashed Master Bailey.’
‘On the contrary,’ Lymond said. ‘I think you were the restraining element. For which I am grateful. Philippa, I am better alone. You must forgive me.’
‘In a moment. Do you think he knows?’ said Philippa abruptly.
‘Who my father is?’ He moved incessantly, drifting from the table to the window to a chair, and back to the window again. ‘I don’t think so. Or my mother surely would not be paying him.’
Philippa said, ‘Do you want to find out?’
‘It seems a little late,’ Lymond said.
Philippa said, ‘Except that we both know Sybilla. Whoever he is, he must be a remarkable man. Your blood is not Gavin’s, which would please anybody: do you not want to know whose it is? You need to understand yourself better than you do.’
‘I have enough difficulty,’ Lymond said, ‘trying to understand your tortuous reasoning. You want my leave now to track down my father?’
‘That was by the way,’ Philippa said. She had a mild headache herself and wondered whether he had actually envisaged her sitting down, arms akimbo, to attack even the lightest of meals. ‘I was about to suggest that you must next find the originals of these certificates, and destroy them.’
He said, ‘Your mind works too well, doesn’t it, Philippa? I thought today we should come to the end of it.’
‘Something happened today,’ Philippa said. ‘You shared Sybilla’s burden. You didn’t want to do that before.’ She paused. ‘You can’t look for the papers yourself: you’ll be in Russia. Unless you want to confide in Nick Applegarth, let me do it. Or if there are things you don’t want me to know, tell me, and of course I’ll do nothing more.’
And she looked, candidly, at the place where he had come to rest, his arm on a chairback in the shadows.
‘I know no more than you do,’ Lymond said. ‘The papers will be in France, I should think. Perhaps Sevigny is a clue.… It was in the family, and Sybilla perhaps stayed there. One might look among the Dame de Doubtance’s papers, or seek the witnesses, or question priests and wetnurses and midwives.…’ He broke off. Then he said, ‘I don’t think I can stand the thought of that particular kind of prying. No. I don’t want you to do it.’
‘Because of the prying?’ Philippa said. ‘Or because of the certificate that wasn’t there?’ And as he looked at her without speaking she said, ‘For there should have been three papers, shouldn’t there? There was no certificate for your other sister, whom we know was illegitimate. There was no paper for Marthe.’
She did not know that her headache showed too: that the fresh colour had gone from her cheeks and had left behind it two half-circles of strain under her thinking brown eyes, and a single line across the clear brow, between the sheer, silky falls of her hair. She stood lost in worried contemplation and was only moved to look up when a sound told her, to her surprise, that he had found his way without warning to the door.
Francis Crawford stood with his