The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [74]
‘Who married your sister,’ Philippa said. With a training painfully learned, she avoided twisting her gloved hands together.
‘Who made a fool of her,’ said Bailey harshly. ‘Married at seventeen, dead at eighteen, giving birth to the heir. The great first Baron Crawford of Culter. He seized her dowry; he took her, and bedded her, and never came near her again, from the moment he planted his son until the hour she gave her life bearing him.
‘That,’ said Leonard Bailey, ‘is how the second Baron, Gavin, was born, and that is how he would have died, a half-orphan of brutal and vicious neglect, had I not been there to save him and care for him.’
Philippa felt very cold. The half-orphan, Gavin. Sybilla’s husband. And the father—the putative father—of Richard and Lymond. She said, ‘Did you take him to stay with you?’ and then sat very still as he laughed.
‘You don’t know their history, do you? Whoever sent you on this little mission has kept the rarest morsel to himself. No, I could not take Gavin with me, mistress, because I was a child of eight, and an orphan myself when Honoria died. I was already at Midculter, the Baroness’s young brother, there on sufferance, there to be kicked and maltreated, and there to see them do the same to the baby when it was born. He saw it born, the great lord of Culter, then he barely waited to bury his wife before he was out of the castle. Out of the castle, leaving his son and his brother-in-law to the blows of the kitchen boys, to stinking food, to rags for then backs.’
Philippa said, steadying her voice, ‘Were the family poor?’
He laughed, the black cloth hat shaking; the sun catching the silvery nap of his beard. ‘Poor, madam? That dung-heap of rascals, respecting only the weathercock? They could have sold the Crown ten times over, and did. And did. No. He could have dressed us in velvets if he wished to, but the 1st Baron didn’t like children. Didn’t like Honoria, who knew too much of his love-nests. Resented her child, and loathed me, who reminded him of her, and who knew too much—damn me,’ said Leonard Bailey, his face sweating with anger remembered, ‘what does a child of eight—ten—twelve not see and hear? He was away—at Court, in France; away for months. Away sometimes for years. But he heard. And we were told, sneering, by the men he had left to humiliate us. Gavin grew up as an animal grows, with no gentle company but what I could give him, and I knew little enough. But he grew handsome. And it was when the 1st Baron departed to France and stayed there that this woman laid hands on Gavin and married him.’
‘Sybilla?’ Philippa said. Her throat was dry.
‘A Semple. Sybilla, yes, was her name. A shrewd family. They knew there was money. They had seen none of it spent on Gavin or me. But Gavin was nearly of age, and when he came into his inheritance, the wife got it all. When his father came back to Midculter the marriage was legal, the money was hers, and she had spent it as a riddle would spend it—Midculter rebuilt and refurnished, and filled with her clothes and her pictures, her statues and jewels fit for Solomon’s temple.…’
‘Was he angry?’ said Philippa. Beautiful Midculter, with its painted roof and suites of fine tapestries. The jewel boxes in Sybilla’s own solar. Lymond’s wealth, now squandered also.…
The harsh voice was sliding and slow, and so was Bailey’s glance. ‘Have you seen a sow burst apart in a furnace? That was his anger. That was the day which repaid all the years of my wretchedness.’
Philippa said, ‘What did he do?’ from dry lips. She felt very empty.
‘What could he do? Break the marriage? He tried to, but she would have none of it. Take back the money? But that was impossible. It had been spent, and the house was Gavin’s as much as it was his. He could do nothing to Sybilla or Gavin, because, apart from all that, in his absence Sybilla had played her best card. She had given Gavin his heir, the boy Richard. No,’ Bailey said; and despite the fierce smile on his face, the long quill in his thick hands bent and snapped