Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [174]
There was a short silence. ‘I am afraid,’ said Nostradamus, ‘that there exists no such word.’
‘There must be,’ Philippa said; and without warning gave vent to the kind of ignoble whoop which used to ring round the yards of Flaw Valleys. ‘The silly ass has put his mad L at the start again. It’s Cerasi.’
‘Cherry trees,’ said Master Nostradamus.
‘Cherry trees … Of course! The rue de la Cerisaye, the street of the cherry trees, between the Bastille and the Arsenal. Clerasi!’ said Philippa scathingly. ‘He’s met William Baldwyn, and if I’d anything to do with it, I’d make him damned well languish locked in L.’
‘I beg your pardon?’ said Michel Nostradamus, looking up at the wrong moment. He put down the verbena and moving a step, stood gazing at her in gentle inquiry. ‘Madame? Why are you weeping?’
‘Because,’ said Philippa, ‘I have such an extremely bad cold. The kindest thing you can do is to pay no attention.’ She blew her nose. ‘Now. I don’t suppose Anäel is any good with house-names?’
‘I am afraid not,’ said Master Nostradamus with apparent regret. ‘But I believe it is a very short street. If I were not so hard-pressed with my charts, I might have accompanied you there with my divining rod.’
He was an odd character. He might be a good deal more frightening than he seemed. But he had been generous with both his help and his time. And from beginning to end, he had asked no questions whatever. Perhaps, in an astrologer’s work, that was usual.
She did not want to stay any longer, and it would be less than seemly to ask him to descend the steep stairs in white linen. She held out her hand. ‘I’m sure I shall find it,’ she said. ‘I want to thank you.’
He took her hand, and held it in his two, healthy rounded ones. Then he looked at her.
‘You will not speak of that which is in your mind but I, if you will allow me, would advise you. Here you have a hawk of the lure, not of the fist. He will not come to you. If you would have him, you must lay your heart upon your hawking-glove; and feed it to him.’
Unfair, unfair. She banished fright from her face with an effort, but in his hands, her own started to tremble. Then he said, without waiting for her to speak, ‘You are cold. I must not keep you. What was the question you wished to put about M. your husband?’
Her mind, then, was still open to him. She said austerely, ‘How perceptive. I only wondered why neither of you has ever mentioned your meeting at Lyon?’
The grey, impersonal eyes gave no impression of shiftiness. Then, unexpectedly, he removed them and thought, combing his long grey-brown beard with his fingers. Then he looked up again. ‘Madame, an hour ago I would have told you the bare truth, which is that the gentleman, being incapacitated, had no recollection of that meeting and that it was far from my place to refer to it.’
‘And now?’ Philippa said. She picked up the key and held it, ridiculously, like a buckler in front of her.
‘Now,’ said Nostradamus, ‘I shall give you another piece of advice. When next you meet M. le comte, ask him to tell you, in detail, what occurred on that evening in Lyon. And if he refuses, as he will, tell him that I, Nostradamus, will inform you.’
‘He went to a … I know where he spent the night,’ Philippa said.
‘You think you do,’ Nostradamus said. ‘But I must tell you that I did not find my patient, or treat him, in a bawdy-house. You may remind him of that. I have placed in your basket an excellent remedy for the rheum, and a pot of complexion cream for which, as you may have heard, I have a certain reputation. The inflammation of your skin will require it.’
‘Me fera Hecuba en Hélène,’ said Philippa rather dazedly. Rendra, it said on the pot, une souveraine splendeur naive à la face. It had a familiar smell.
‘If used from the age of fifteen,’ Master Nostradamus said briskly, ‘it will preserve lifelong beauty and enable the skin at sixty to look as young as that of a twenty-year-old. The contents are quite pure. Sublimate, quicksilver, rose-water, and the saliva