Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [171]
‘It was unfortunate that he heard and saw what he did, but he knows now where he stands, and he’ll respect you none the less. I imagine he is feeling as concerned for you this morning as you are for him. Needless to say, we are moving him to the Hôtel d’Hercule as soon as possible. If Francis comes back in his right mind, he’ll arrange a nominal ransom and dispatch him home instantly along with you, Philippa.’
There was no doubt now that he would try, whether he was in his right mind or not. By now, if he rode by post through the night without stopping, as he was quite fool enough to do, he might be in Dieppe. She thought, tramping her way through the frozen mud, of the five enervating things that might happen, and his probable response to them, in the condition he would be in by this time. Adam had begged her to go to Dieppe. To refuse him had been, she supposed, the hardest thing she had ever done in her life.
Célie called, ‘Madame! You have walked past the turning!’ and she saw, looking round, that she had. She also saw, discreetly strolling behind them, the red-headed bodyguard she had stopped once before. His name, she knew now, was Osias. He shared his duties with another man of Applegarth’s with a scarred cheek. Célie or her serving man took them in occasionally and gave them something hot in a cup if she had kept them out unduly in bad weather. It reminded her, in case she forgot from time to time, that Francis—Mr Crawford—felt that her association with him might bring danger to her.
But there was danger everywhere in a big city, lawful as well as unlawful. You could be killed by sewer gas from a well, or by crossing the rue Vieille Barbette during crossbow practice. You could be killed by lightning like Célie’s cousin, an Augustine, trapped in his blazing belltower with the molten bell mouths and gutters dropping seething upon him a mantle of vermeil and silver. Or you might hold the wrong opinions and be hung bleeding to death like a sheep before your limbs were cut off; or be maimed and nailed to the door of your house, or burned alive, or have your eyes torn out, living.
Down there at the Hospital des Quinze-Vingts Aveugles there was a charity stall for the blinded. There they sold what they had made: the woodwork, the mended clocks, the pieces of wicker and lacework. There was a man who, if you gave him a teston, would play for you on the spinet. He was an indifferent performer.
Célie, waiting for her at the turning into Marie-Egyptienne, said accusingly, “Look at you! You are acquiring a fever! I told you that you were crazy to come out with your cold in this weather!”
Poor Célie, victim of the Somerville passion for thoroughness: à fin, fin et demi. Philippa smiled to reassure her and crossed to the house she was looking for: one of the many lodgings in the old Hôtel de Flandre on the corner of Egyptienne and Coquillière.
It was plaster mud here, oozing white round the sliver-stones of the paving. There was more of Montmartre on the white-washed walls of Paris, the saying went, than there was of Paris in Montmartre. On her pattens and cloak hem, she and Célie carried a good deal of it into the porter’s house with them. The last she saw of Osias, as the porter conducted them across a yard and up some steps to their destination, was a face, blotched red and blue, peering through the shut gates and scowling.
*
She had not, for some reason, expected the room to be so comfortable. Deprived, by a vanishing servant, of cloak, pattens and Célie, Philippa gazed at the florid little man with the black hat and long beard who came forward to greet her and said, ‘Salut, Maître.’
‘Ah,’ said the King’s surgeon-philosopher Michel Nostradamus. ‘The comte de Sevigny’s exquisite lady wife. As was said of Mademoiselle d’Heilly: la plus belle des savantes et la plus savante des belles.’