Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [157]
‘Strike you?’ said Lymond, and laughed. ‘No. I am going to describe Güzel’s naked body. And call upon you for corroboration.’
A woman sniggered.
Philippa ran for the door. Marthe, her face sallow, must have twisted out of her way for she reached it: a moment later they heard her footsteps flying down the stairs and then crossing the yard. A horse stamped, and there were voices.
For a moment Lymond stared after her. Then he, too, made his way out precipitately. They heard his voice speaking her name; but the sound was overlaid by the rumble of wheels. The noise and splashing receded and dwindled. Lymond did not come back into the room.
Freed at last to move and to speak Austin Grey choked and then, his face yellow, left the room abruptly. No one stopped him.
Marthe also got up and went out.
There was a little silence. Then Danny Hislop heaved a sigh. ‘O beau sire Dieu, what a hell of an evening. Jerott, you either want to have another half-bottle, or vomit three ways what you have, like the Rosault.’ In five months the professionals Hislop and Blyth had reached an understanding.
It was Adam who found another bottle and helped them drink it, the scar bright and pink on his face. It was also Adam who said presently, ‘Listen. It’s pouring.’ Lymond had still not returned.
‘I’ll go,’ said Jerott. ‘It was my bitch of a wife. When Marthe’s about, there’s always someone puking-drunk somewhere.’
Adam and Danny watched him as he walked out of the room and through the house and down the steps into the downpour.
*
Outside, it was darker than the slades of the Comté of Oye and muddy, though less so than the Pas de Calais. The voices of the men were stilled and all mankind was changed into mud. All the captains who had worked like dogs for the success of Calais had had to sit at table, Philippa said, and listen to the great Guisard claiming the victory. Including Strozzi. Including Francis, the Voevoda of all Russia, who had allowed his work, without comment, to stay in obscurity.
Standing drunk in the yard, while the rain soaked his hair and spread cold through the cloth of his doublet, Jerott thought of the fine design, firmly executed, of the campaign of Guînes and of Calais. And of his own joy and his liberation, after these huckstering years, to be again under the hand of this man, his arts at their meridian.
It had given him courage last night to come home to Marthe: to say, ‘I have been wrong. Forgive me. I love you: I wish to stay with you; but I have discovered I am a soldier.’
And she had laughed and said, ‘Does the army know? Have some more wine.’
He had not answered because he did not know, as Francis did, how to wound without blows to protect himself.
A fact which Marthe just now should have remembered. She had set out to attack and had been cut down without mercy, and without care for who else besides Marthe might surfer.
He had always known, Jerott supposed, that Marthe had been close, long ago, to Lymond’s mistress. He knew no other man who, in cold blood, would have made that threat, or who would have carried it out as Lymond would, ignoring every instinct of decency.
He shivered. The cold was beginning to penetrate. Against the cressets under the archways the rain spangled the darkness like the wild silver threads of horse-harness: as from the passing of heavy cavalry the wind buffeted his cheeks and his flanks and his sleeve-knots. His senses filled with the hiss of the rain, Jerott walked through the ghostly steam of its impact, and through a passage, and, mechanically, into the chain of large courtyards beyond it.
Because of the rain each was empty even of servants. He had found the locked stables and turned, conscientiously, to explore the arcades which enclosed them when he noticed, not in shelter at all, the pale, shallow cup of the fountain.
It was less symmetrical, in the sheen of the rain, than he remembered it. Then he saw that a man rested there on its steps, his head turned on the rim. One