Checkmate (85 page)

Behind her, the murmuring voices had stopped.

The world ceased. Only the spirit stayed, watching.

This was not a man with pistols in his hands. He stood, with the wintry boughs swaying and swaying, frail as leaf ghosts behind his fair head, and his person as still as the tree-stems.

And she had crossed, now, the boundary she wanted to cross; for the face was the one which, before God she loved; and the look was the one upon which she had opened her eyes, lying within the folds of his cloak in the desecrated house where he had been born.

Then he said, ‘Philippa?’ in the key she had come to learn at Sevigny; which was not the light, charming voice which had drawn her from her warm home here at Flaw Valleys, and had taken her through deeper seas and over crests more steep than her spirit alone would ever have striven to conquer.

And if they were on the same side of the boundary, it must be real; for Sybilla was standing beside her, and Kate and Jerott and Richard … all of them, silent as she was, and gazing. So she began to walk forward.

He stayed where he was; and after a little it became clear that she was going to reach him, and touch him.

Then she started to run.

He did not move even then until the last second, when her hands reached his shoulders and he flung his own hands out from his sides, and kept them there. Then those left behind saw Philippa lift her palm and turn her cheek over and over against his, like someone blinded.

On that his hands locked, imprisoning them both. He held back one moment longer. Then he slid his fingers into her hair and bending his head, sought her mouth as a man withered by sun might seek water.

They are made for one another, and they know it, his wise friend had said. Kate turned from watching, to Adam.

Jerott Blyth also turned; and walking slowly, knelt by the green cloak; and after a moment, dropped his face in his hands.

My beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi
.

My beloved is dead.

They set off that evening to take Marthe Crawford to the home of her fathers, which she had never known. And behind them, in care of Flaw Valleys, left Philippa, and Sybilla and her younger son, who could not easily travel.

To Jerott’s question of
‘Why? Why?’
Sybilla could only say, ‘She was coming, perhaps to find you. Jerott, what will you do?’

‘Bury her at Midculter, if you will allow me,’ he said. ‘And then leave.’

‘For France?’

‘For Malta, I think,’ Jerott said. ‘It is different, now. I should rather fight than be a merchant. Danny Hislop, perhaps, would come with me.’

Only Richard, as they were preparing to move off, said to his mother. ‘She couldn’t have been coming to Jerott.’

‘No,’ said Sybilla. ‘But it will do him no harm to think, in years to come, that he was in love with her and she with him.’

‘Why, then?’ said Richard.

‘I think,’ said Sybilla, ‘to follow Francis. Someone took her for him on the way and delayed her: there is a note of indemnity in her saddlebag. Also a letter for Francis. I shall give it to him in the morning. Today is his.’

Today had been his, and nothing could touch him. They had arranged, without him, the decent bier which would carry Austin to his home, and the account they would give there of the chance enemy shot that had killed him. He had stood for a long time beside the closed coffin that held the broken bones and golden hair of his sister; and then had closed the door on it to find Philippa waiting, as he used to wait outside her room, to join with him her hands and her warmth and her comfort.

In one stride indeed, the wall had been scaled and the boundary crossed. Death had sprung the trap; shock brought the release; desire, broken now from all bondage, had excavated clean with its torrent all the poisoned gulf which had lain between them. To be apart, in those hours, was more than they could bear; and to touch a thing of sweetness and anguish. She moved all day, lightly, in the shelter of his arm.

Then, standing at the gatehouse with Francis, she kissed Kate, who was weeping, and watched Jerott and Adam take their leave also.

Richard said, ‘You will come soon? We need you.’ And Francis said, ‘We shall both come.’

Archie Abernethy was the last to go from Flaw Valleys.

To him, Francis gave no easy farewell, but set his hands lightly on the wiry shoulders and said, ‘How much of it did you see, back in Rouen?’

‘Not as much as the auld besom,’ said Archie. ‘She had a grip of me long before that, looking for you. It’s been a fair upgang. It’s a bloody sight easier with …’

And Lymond laughed, his eyes brilliant. ‘I know. But I can’t offer you a zoo at St Mary’s. Can you make do with what I have?’

‘With Hoddim and Guthrie and Blacklock? What you have is a zoo,’ said Archie Abernethy; and shook his hand, and turned his thin leather back on Flaw Valleys.

Then Sybilla retired, in broad daylight, and Francis said, in the empty upper reaches of the house, ‘It seems that if there is a room set aside for me, no one knows where it is.’

‘There is my room,’ Philippa said; and freeing her fingers, laid them on the latch of a door. ‘Here it is.’

He made a little movement, turning his face into her hair.
‘Asik; Durr-i Bakht; Yunitsa
 … my dear, my dear …

‘I am in love-desire, and unless you take me now, I shall fall in pieces … but I do not think I can be moderate. Forgive me, forgive me …’

But her breathing was as changed now as his, and all order retreating before the strength of the living force beating about them. She pressed the latch, and set the last door to lie open.

‘Khush geldi:
welcome: thou art come happily,’ she said gently, and let him come, where he belonged, within her gouvernance.

And so, incontinently, the striding flame that consumed them, without words, without courtship became, instead of the echo of lust, the cauterizing fire which expelled it for ever. For in the total extremity of need, with the fine mind overturned and subjugated for once by the overwhelming desires of his body, there still remained, drowned and helpless but there, the shadows of grace, and care, and courtesy, caught fast like stars in the deluge.

It would have been enough, were she still the crippled Philippa of Sevigny, to have swept her with him. But although she marked them, rejoicing, she did not need them, for by then she, too, was part of the torrent.

*

He slept half the night through after that, motionless in her arms in the kind of peace he had probably not known since childhood. She wept a little, from happiness and from pity for him, and then herself sank into slumber.

So that he had the felicity of wakening her; and the first thing she knew was the exquisite drift of his hands, and his voice saying, ‘Qedeshet,
Mistress of all the Gods, Eye of Ra, who has none like her.… Come and let us beget all kinds of living things.’

And then his true courtship of her had its beginning; and to the worship of his body, he joined the fairest garlands from the treasure-house of his mind, and made a bower for her.

Adored; caressed into delight; conducted by delicate paths into ravishing labyrinths where pleasure, like carillons on glass, played upon pleasure, she leaned on his voice, and sometimes answered it.

And once, triumphantly, ‘And Harald went with his host out to Jerusalem-land, and sithence up to Jerusalem-town, and wheresoever he fared over Jerusalem-land, all towns and castles were given up to his wielding.’

And that was when she realized that laughter, which they had lost, had come back to them, and they were whole again.

*

Sleep overcame them far into the day and the November light was falling grey through her windows when he woke her to joy again, laughing. ‘Amis, art thou asleep? My lyves loy, myn hertes plesance … The world knows all our affairs. It is tomorrow, and nearly the day after tomorrow, and we have neither eaten, nor dressed, nor gone to visit Sybilla …’

‘I have eaten,’ Philippa said.

And then the blue eyes, with gentleness, scanned all her new-made body and came to rest on her eyes. ‘I have begun to eat,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘And I have begun to slake my thirst. But in you I have found a banquet under the heavens that will serve me for ever.’

*

Sybilla was in her room when they tapped on the door and stood there, robed like children, with Philippa’s long hair on her son’s shoulder.

This time, it was Philippa who ran to her, and knelt, and put her head, smiling, on Sybilla’s lap.

Sybilla kissed her, and then taking her by the hand rose herself, and crossed the room to where Francis stood, his eyes grave, his face so changed that it took her breath away. He said, the deep blue eyes smiling at her, ‘They gave me some medicine.’

Then he held out his hands and, when she came, bent and kissed her.

She said, ‘I asked you to come when you woke, for I had something to show you.’

She glanced at his feet and then, quizzically, up at his face. ‘Can I send you on an errand?’

He flushed, Philippa was delighted to see; and then laughed. ‘Within limits. I am sky-clad like the Digambaras.’

‘Then you will simply have to risk upsetting the servants,’ said Sybilla. ‘Lace that garment properly. Then go to the music room and take from the little desk at the wall the letter you will find just inside it. Here is the key.’

Both Francis and Philippa looked at her. He said, ‘A letter?’

But Philippa, meeting his eyes, walked forward and taking the key said, ‘Let me get it. I know where the desk is.’

‘So do I,’ Francis said; but did not explain. And in a moment Philippa was back, with in her hand a long packet bearing the seal of Jerott Blyth.

‘That was found in Marthe’s baggage,’ said Lady Culter. ‘It is addressed to you, Francis, and there seems to be another letter within it. Take it, and read it.’

He took it from Philippa’s hands, his thoughts still, she saw on something else and not on the letter. Philippa said. ‘You may give me a brooch. A sapphire one.’

‘Ah,’ he said. ‘But will you take care of it?’

Her smile was a very private kind of answer. Then he looked down and broke the seal.

Inside was, as she said, another letter, with this time the wax already ruptured. Then he saw what the crest was, and lifted his eyes.

Sybilla said, ‘Jerott tells me that Marthe went to Blois. My guess is that she found this document there, and was bringing it to you. Or if not to you, to all of us at Midculter.’ She had seated herself again in her stiff leather chair by the fire. There was just enough light from the window to read by.

Lymond said quietly, ‘I don’t think I want to read this. You may have it.’

‘If it had been addressed to me,’ Sybilla said, ‘I would have withheld it. But we must keep faith with whoever is leading us. It is yours. Read it.’ And so he bent his head, reading.

At the end, he did not show his face even to Philippa. Instead he walked to the window, the paper still in his hand, and Philippa, who had thought, enchanted back into childhood, that there was an end to all pain heard his breathing and knew that whatever it was, it was not the
old story. It was not another confession of petty fault, bought back by shame and by barter. Then he said, ‘Will you tell Philippa?’

The fire lit only one side of Sybilla’s face. The pretty profile, with its tilted nose and soft lips and large, thick-lashed eyes for a moment looked less than its seventy years: looked perhaps almost as it had looked when she spent such a night as that with a man as beloved; and from which had been born Francis Crawford.

Sybilla said, ‘What Francis is reading tells him for the first time that the castle Richard lives in, its lands, its estates, its wealth and all its properties belong to him, along with the title of Culter.’

At the window, Francis did not move. Philippa said, in a dry void of utter bemusement, ‘How? How can it be possible, when Richard’s birth followed your marriage?’

Sybilla said, ‘Richard’s birth followed my marriage to Gavin. Francis is the son of Gavin’s father, the first Francis Crawford.’

‘We know,’ said Philippa quietly. ‘We know, too, that Eloise was his daughter.’

‘You know that,’ said Sybilla evenly, ‘because it is as much as Leonard Bailey intended you to know. There was a very good reason why he did not sell my secret to anyone else … the same reason, I suppose, that compelled him to put Isabelle, who knew it, to death.

‘Francis and Eloise were the only children born to me and to Francis, Lord Culter.

They were legitimate. What Francis has in his hand are my marriage lines.’

Philippa sat down. Then, as no one spoke, ‘Please?’ she said. ‘I can’t understand.’ At the window, Francis had turned.

‘There is no need to make a long story of it,’ Sybilla said. ‘We married in France, secretly, and then he was lost at sea: swept overboard sailing home to Scotland with Albany. I had loved him.… Perhaps you know, or can guess, how I loved him. I had nothing left. I went back to Scotland. And there was the castle he had made, with his books in it, and his clothes and his music, and all the men who had known him … and his son, importuning me to marry him.… If Francis had died yesterday instead of Marthe,’ said Sybilla suddenly to the girl, ‘could you have brought yourself one day to marry Kuzúm?’

‘Yes,’ said Philippa. Her mouth was dry.

‘I was seven years older than Gavin,’ Sybilla said. ‘Then after illness and imprisonment, Francis—my husband—came back to France. He had forgotten his marriage. He had a child, Marthe, by the Dame de Doubtance’s daughter, whom he had also known before he met me.’

‘He also had a son by her earlier,’ Philippa said. ‘Didn’t he? A sick boy who died.’

‘A sick boy, and a daughter. So it seemed to the Dame de Doubtance that her great scheme was going to fail: to breed a son from Francis
Crawford who would carry his blood and do what the times had been wrong for the first baron to do. Therefore she brought back to him the recollection of our marriage, and he came back to Scotland, and found Gavin in his place, and Richard a young boy of nine.’

‘That was when he threw Bailey out,’ Philippa said.

‘Yes,’ Sybilla said. The room had become very dark.

‘But not Gavin? He didn’t expose your marriage to Gavin as bigamous, and Richard as …’

‘Gavin Crawford was a vicious and venomous man,’ Sybilla said. ‘But I had wronged him very deeply. He chose to remain my husband in appearance, and to have Richard reared as his legitimate heir. In return, I received the discretion to visit France when I wished and my children, when they were born, were brought up as Gavin’s.’

Francis said, ‘Why? Why did you not …?’ and broke off.

‘Disown Gavin and make it all public? For Richard’s sake,’ Sybilla said. ‘And when he came back to me, Francis—my Francis—had only four years of life left to him.’

‘And all the rest you spent in that castle, tied to his son, putting up with threatened disclosures from Bailey, watching Francis …’ Philippa choked.

‘I had given my word,’ Sybilla said, ‘to both men that I would never tell Francis or anyone else what had happened. And I had committed a sin. To marry a man and his son is not permitted.’

‘So Francis suffered,’ Philippa said.

And Lymond said, ‘No. I understand. You had given your word. And it was more than that. Every step of the way, the signs have been laid for us, haven’t they … even yesterday?’

‘For much of the way,’ Sybilla said. ‘Camille de Doubtance knew me when I was at la Guiche. Through her I made the journey to Ireland where Richard met Mariotta; and Mariotta had cousins who knew Oonagh O’Dwyer.’