The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [317]
And Lymond then, with a sudden gesture which perhaps only John Dee understood, turned to Philippa and said, ‘I told a lie. You must forgive me. I broke an oath, letting him perish. Should I have chosen him to survive, knowing his heritage?’ And to d’Harcourt he said flatly, ‘I let Joleta’s son live.’
‘And mine,’ Ludovic d’Harcourt said. The tears, standing wet on the rosy cheeks under the tightly curled hair, looked like a schoolboy’s tears, for a lost animal or a scraped knee. ‘The boy was not Gabriel’s. It was Joleta’s and mine.’
One of Philippa’s hands spread its manicured fingers over her brow and her eyes for a moment. She took it away and said, ‘Can you prove it?’
And grief, for a moment, was replaced in d’Harcourt’s ravaged face by defiant hostility. ‘She loved me, not her brother. Of course it was mine. She told me. She said, “Ludo, you have a son.” She laughed with the joy of it.’ Then, as no one spoke, he turned to Lymond and said, ‘You guessed then. You guessed that I was the man chosen to kill you.’
‘I knew,’ Lymond said. ‘At Lampozhnya, Aleksandre confessed. You betrayed Lychpole. And the Tartar girl was your doing, too.’
‘Then why——’ began d’Harcourt.
‘Then why did I let you live?’ Lymond looked at him. ‘I shall tell you that if you tell me why you rode to Sittingbourne that day.’
‘To try to get the papers from Vannes.’
‘Because you knew about them and you knew whom they might incriminate. And you had no inkling in fact that we were prepared for Vannes, and that Danny might be there already. It was a genuine attempt to help us, not to harm us. It has not been the first.… I came back from Lampozhnya prepared to confront you and I postponed it because of a change I found in you. Aleksandre killed for money. The Lennoxes are driven from ambition. You, I think, were misled from the beginning.’
‘Yes,’ said d’Harcourt. After a moment he said, ‘It was because of Joleta, I hated you. And the child you killed. I thought you killed. I heard it all in France from d’Aubigny, Lord Lennox’s brother. It was Lady Lennox who wrote and sent me the money.’
Alex Guthrie said, his face very grey, ‘So I did bring you a traitor. You should have killed him, Francis.’
‘No,’ Philippa said. ‘You forget what I said. He is not a machine. Or he would not have changed Ludo’s intentions towards him.’
‘I don’t think it matters,’ Lymond said. He could hear his own voice, but not very clearly; to the others it probably sounded the same. He added, ‘I did not care to think of anyone rushing out to kill Lychpole or Danny, that is all.’
‘Doesn’t it matter?’ d’Harcourt said. A dragging flatness in his voice, he appealed to Lymond, and Lymond shook his head.
‘I am taking no one with me to Russia. You may do as you please.’
The eyes of the other men of St Mary’s, like animals in a wood, stared at d’Harcourt. And Lymond, in the same tone of voice, said, ‘He is not to be harmed. And that is an order.’
From the shadows, John Dee’s dry voice spoke. ‘You must explain to your men why you will not harm a would-be assassin, and yet will do them such injury, when they attempt to save you from yourself.’
There was a little silence. Then Lymond said, ‘Because d’Harcourt is not quite good enough to succeed at his task.… And they are.’ And as he spoke Ludovic d’Harcourt, unmolested, walked sideways through the wall shadows and, with a sudden uncouth snatch, through the door, while the impersonal lamp lit the bright salty drops on his cheeks.
‘It is so important?’ said Guthrie to Lymond. And then, ‘Yes. I see it is. You did not strike out of any petty frustration Then, if you are going, you will wish to take back your gold.’
One felt the pressure must melt the fragile bones of one’s face; blow open the structure; send the blood streaming from every orifice. In the voice which, again, did not to himself sound familiar, Lymond said, ‘So the horoscope is already proved faulty?’
‘You must judge for yourself,’ John Dee said.
And Lymond, looking at him, said, ‘I have not heard what else it contains.’
‘Some