Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [154]
‘Oh.’
‘She has quite a short ginger beard. She’s forgotten her lines. In any case, she can’t hear the prompt.’
‘That must be awkward for her,’ Philippa said.
‘Yes. There she goes. You should listen. How about that?
‘… Me suis de ton Paris faite la gardienne
Par ton Pere, qui seul me rend Parisienne …
‘And now,’ continued the architect of the battle of Calais, his voice somewhat stifled, ‘there is a very large ship attempting to walk through the doorway.’
‘Argo,’ said Philippa. ‘I told you.’
‘And you recall those little budge wigs made of lambskin …? Could it be Jason?’ said Lymond. ‘In leopard fur, kicking the belfries in their white satin slops? It’s not their fault. They can’t see where the door is. But they’ve got the ship through. They’re trying to put up the mast. And who’s that?’
Philippa craned. ‘That’s Mopsus, the Argonauts’ soothsayer. He was killed by the bite of a serpent.’
‘Not this one. This one,’ said Lymond, ‘is going to be hanged like Mumphazard for saying nothing. You know how Jason died?’
‘Naturally,’ said Philippa, severely. ‘A beam from the ship fell on his … Oh, dear.’
‘Philippa,’ said Lymond weakly against the rising gale of anguish and laughter, ‘I do beg your pardon, but if I am to attend court again, I shall have to retire under the table with Piero. Gradatim.’
He gazed owlishly at her and she, her eyes brimming, stared back at him. Acutely as she felt for the échevins’ suffering, there was a limit to one’s powers of civil endurance.
They exploded together, and Lymond slid, as he had threatened, under the table to lie silently shrieking beside the reclining figure of the Queen’s favourite cousin while Philippa, covering her face with her hands, sat helplessly through the heroic dregs of the Antique Triumph of Calais.
*
It ended just before midnight. A little after, wild-eyed with enforced courtesy, Lymond handed his wife into their coach and as they jolted off between their torch-runners, proceeded to relieve his feelings with a total recall of the Argonautes, from the warbling rocks to the whinnies of Mopsus.
Half-way home, he remembered that half his possessions were still with Jerott at the Séjour du Roi and the coach was redirected there in the midst of a calamitous declamation by Jason:
‘… Sentiront que HENRY est leur fatal Jason
Si tu scais bien sauver en un tel navigage
Tout le people qui fait avec toy son voiage
De Geans monstreux, horribles, affamés
Sans cesse sur le sang des petits enflammés …’
The coach stopped and Philippa, crying with laughter, followed him in. He entered, clucking O trois trois fois trois fois heureus Trophee and not in the least put out to find himself in the presence of his own English prisoner as well as Jerott.
Naturally, Jerott wanted to know what had happened: Marthe joined them, and almost immediately Danny and Adam. A jug of wine was brought. Sunk, trailing their finery in opposite chairs, Philippa and Francis Crawford related, restored to preternatural gravity, the events of the entire evening, beginning with the welcoming salvoes and going on with the chandeliers and Piero Strozzi’s silver.
They ended with the Argonautes, Philippa taking the parts of Orpheus, Minerva and Argo and Lymond the rest.
Austin Grey, standing obscured in the shadows, watched it in silence. But it rendered Danny and Adam, who in any case had also been drinking, almost totally helpless. Smiling, Marthe kept the wine flask going round. Jerott, already better fortified, with good reason, than anyone, laughed until his ribs ached so much that he had to fold his arms over them.
For a moment, disconnected by the stitch in his side, he listened not to the sense but to the interplay of the two flexible voices, one masculine and light, one mellow and feminine, unreeling their story, faintly affronted amid mounting hysteria. He opened his eyes.
He knew, because his memories of Francis Crawford went back further than those of anyone there, that Lymond was rather drunk, although he could still disguise it. The quick-wittedness,