Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [175]
‘We used to quote from the Hamasa of Abu Tammam,’ Philippa said. She picked up the basket and lifted her eyes. ‘We made the fertility potion as well, but the bird-catchers used to cheat with the cock-sparrows. Communications between Stamboul and Lyon seem better than one might have imagined. Did you ever have a dog?’
For a long time he looked at her in silence, and in his red cheeks and his fat turban and his long, forked beard of chestnut and grey she saw, at length, nothing that was trivial or comic at all.
She had invoked the world of Arabic poetry. His answer, when it finally came, was also culled from the lore of Mohammed.
‘If I told you all I know, said the Prophet, you would flog me with thongs of leather. Time, Le Boiteux, the Lame One, will release you both. I pray for you.’
‘Not to Anäel, I beg you,’ said Philippa tremulously. ‘He would send us to Plurgatory, and even Elohim might find it troublesome to extract us. Maître Nostradame, I am grateful.’ And she left him.
She called, too, at the Chapel of Marie-Egyptienne, with the frozen Osias and a disgruntled Célie behind her; but it was full of companionable souls celebrating the religious rites of the local confrèrie and she came away, unable to concentrate. Once back in the Hôtel de Guise she went to bed, swallowed the potion for the rheum and slept for sixteen hours, at the end of which she awoke to find her cold vanished, and a gift from Austin Grey at her bedside.
She sent for the pot of complexion cream. If one had to turn back the clock, one might as well begin systematically.
Chapter 5
D’humain tropeau neuf serone mis à part
De jugement, et conseil separez.
Leur sort sera divisé en départ.
The yard which saw Francis Crawford’s distinctive collapse in Dieppe belonged to the house of a draper’s widow. On the other side of the building, shutters revealed a counter over which, at certain times, the Bouchard employees sold stockings, bonnets, breech-hose, jackets and lengths of velvet, damask and saye from the stacked shelves which ran round the stockroom.
There was cloth also in the room where they carried him. The mellow, powdery smell of it was the first he knew of his surroundings when he opened his eyes: that, and the fact that there was a feather mattress beneath him, and that his travel-stained outer clothing had been drawn off. Then a voice spoke: that of Martine, the beautiful ageing woman who had once governed the high-bred squadron of the old King’s permanent mistresses, and whose acquaintance with himself over the years had always been one less of commerce than of friendship.
Martine said, ‘I thought when I saw you, mon fils, that the saddle would not contain you much longer. This is Hélène Bouchard, in whose house you are resting. Your Scottish friends have many times been guests under her roof. You may remain here as long as you wish. Master Abernethy is on his way here from the Castle.’
He had already closed his eyes. Archie was not here. Who were his ‘Scottish friends’? Memory, fitfully returning, reminded him of Lord James Stewart, who had intercepted him. Then he remembered what had happened before that. There was a movement above him and the firm voice of another woman said, ‘This is not good. I will send for the barber-surgeon.’
It was the last thing he wanted. He was saved from saying so by the bustle of a new arrival and a hubbub of voices among which could be distinguished the uncompromising cadences of Archie’s. Then, almost immediately, there was no sound in the room but a door closing, and then Archie’s voice again, saying sourly, ‘I gave ye an hour more nor that to stay on your feet: ye must be getting soft as saip-sapples. Ye can open your een.’ Then after a moment he said, ‘Put your hands back, if it helps. You’ve a bit to go yet. I’ll mix ye something.’
He had, as it turned out, a long way to go yet; but in the end it was over,