To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [312]
‘I paused now and then,’ Gelis said.
Her voice was patient rather than tolerant. This time, however, he was not being received by the charming young girl in loose silks. She wore no elaborate jewels, but she was dressed as formally as for the previous night, and her hair was bound under stiff voile. Noli tangere.
She added coolly, ‘Alonse put you to bed.’
He wondered if he had attempted to touch her and was immediately and painfully convinced that he had not. If anything in this world could be sure, it was that. He sat down and said, ‘Well, we have something to talk about. You begin.’
‘No apology?’ Gelis said.
‘No, Lady Better-than-Good. Let all receive thy pity, none thy hate. You begin.’
‘Are we to have a discussion?’ Gelis said. ‘I thought you had submitted one simple question to answer.’
‘That is the great disadvantage of being a woman,’ Nicholas said. ‘If you come to the conference table in that mood, you will lose. This is your Alnwick, your St Omer. I have proposed a date for the cessation of hostilities. That is, a time by which one side will have won or be about to win, or by which it will be apparent that neither can reasonably prevail.’
‘Reasonably?’ she queried.
‘Without demanding a fight of such length, or so destructive, that the victory would be worthless to either. Pyrrhic. Puerile.’
‘You are afraid of losing,’ she said.
‘Not at all. I am afraid of not recognising when I have won. In war, each should know the other’s objective. We have come to the place where I need to know yours.’
‘I know yours,’ she said. She sat with her hands clasped before her, her expression watchful, attentive. He had seen her thus when faced with other problems of innovative complexity – when preparing the Play, for example. His hatred for Willie Roger, for all of them, welled.
She said, ‘I have known your objective from the beginning. To live with me as with Katelina, except that I should bear your numberless children in wedlock.’
‘How shaming for you,’ he said.
‘Do you deny it?’
‘No,’ he said. ‘That will do, to begin with. So what did you really want?’
‘I shall tell you,’ she said, ‘when I have won.’
He closed his eyes. It didn’t help. He opened them. ‘Tell me now. Isn’t it your objective?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘It is my reward. My objective is so to reduce you that my life will be as I wish, and whatever happens, you can never change it.’
He said, ‘I might agree to all you ask now.’
‘You might,’ she said. ‘But you see, I cannot trust you. Nicholas, you cannot even trust yourself.’
‘And how shall I know when you have reduced me?’ he said.
She said, ‘When you beg me to stop.’
‘How optimistic of you,’ he said. After a moment he added, facetiously, ‘I might be quite happy, as on a recent occasion, to invite you to continue.’
She didn’t reply. He said quickly, ‘There is really no need to anguish over mistakes with la cauza doussana. I don’t.’
He waited again. He knew she understood. That sweet thing which she had engaged in with Simon, had nearly shared with a King; in which Nicholas himself had been so profligate, was debased: there was no need to repine over that. That union, sweet beyond imagining, which once had been theirs was still inviolate, waiting. Thunder for God, if you please. But nothing lasted for ever.
He said, ‘Do you hear what I am saying? If we deny ourselves very much longer, even that may have gone. There will be nothing worth having.’
She said, ‘I was about to tell you. I agree. There are eight months between now and the end of December, and by that time, one of us will have outwitted, shamed, prevailed over the other. The loser submits: the victor should have the right to direct what is to happen thereafter. Is that what you wanted to hear?’
‘You haven’t asked my objective,’ Nicholas said.
She exclaimed, ‘You didn’t deny –’
‘I said it would do, to begin with. But suppose we regard it, in your