Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [104]
‘Madame,’ he said. ‘I have brought you milk from your cow.’
Silence. If anyone was there, it must be a woman. A man would be dead, or would have escaped. A man would not have been reduced to cutting that pitiful bundle of firewood, or have tethered the little dun cow where she could graze concealed, and wait for her mistress. If it was Renée Jourda behind those closed shutters, she must be seventy years old, or over.
But that would be highly unlikely. Out of three farms, Renée Jourda need not belong to this one. She had probably been taken away long ago. Or had died, taking her young secrets with her. He tapped again on the shutters and said, ‘Madame, I come from Compiègne, and not from the Spaniards. I wish to help you. Come to your window, and I shall give you your milk.’
Nothing stirred. He was talking, it seemed, to himself: to an empty house, in the autumn sunshine, in a land where any soldier could claim a king’s fortune for taking him.
I have your mind in my palm. I will crush it. A shiver ran through his nerves and his skin tingled, as if fine wires had moved beneath it. The light, familiar throb in his head, paired with his heartbeats, began to come thicker and faster. He took a moment, breathing quietly, to subdue it; then gripping the edge of the shutters with hard and powerful fingers, he wrenched them both open.
Framed in the lozenged window behind was a face, grey and blurred as if printed on muslin. A face which dwindled, its mouth a dark square as his hands laid their grasp on the windowframe: which emitted, without shape, a long wavering wail as he broke the catch and opened the windows, so low that he knelt to look through them.
It was a small room inside, bare of comfort and almost bare of furnishing. The used air of old age and sickness came lingering out from the window. Below the sill inside was drawn up a pallet, the linen sheet stained and wrinkled, the coverlet sagged on the floor. The woman who had been lying there stood now, her knotted hands gripped white together; her face, framed with soiled cap and tangled grey hair turned to the window; her eyes round and pearly as frog-spawn.
It could be no one but Renée Jourda. And Renée Jourda was quite blind.
Realization withdrew from him the power of movement. He bent his head, and when it returned, and she had fallen silent he said, his hands motionless on the stonework, ‘Madame Jourda, I am not here to harm you. I am alone. If you like, I shall throw my sword at your feet, and you may take it.’
Renée Jourda said, ‘Give me your sword.’
He had hoped she would not ask it, but there seemed to be no alternative. So he unbuckled the blade and holding it carefully, cast it through the open window so that it fell beyond the bed, on the broken tiled floor of the chamber. The old woman bent. Her hand, moving straight to the sound, uncoiled like a willow wand and touched, warily, the metal pommel. With both hands she lifted and couched the sword on the only tall chair in the room, standing still with the wall at her back and the point of the blade aimed straight and true at the window. Then she said, ‘You may come in, Mr Francis Crawford.’
He paused again, momentarily, before easing himself deliberately through the casement. His headache had begun again. He said, speaking distinctly, ‘You are not well. Keep the sword, but sit in the chair. I shall bring you some milk, if you tell me where I may find a pitcher. When did you last eat?’
‘Yesterday,’ I think,’ said the old woman. She hesitated; then after a while lifted the heavy sword tremulously from the chair and supporting herself, moved round and dropped into the worn seat. ‘They brought a piece of seethed fowl the day before, and some ale, and some cut bread. Today they must have forgotten. I have not been well. It was too far to milk Lisa.’
‘Don’t they milk her for you?’ said Lymond. He had found