Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [187]
So he had learned at Flavy-le-Martel where the old woman Renée had died; Renée who with her sister Isabelle had served Sybilla as a young bride and who, eleven years after Sybilla’s marriage to Gavin, Lord Culter, had witnessed the birth of Francis Crawford here in Paris, and then of his sister Eloise. Who knew, and alone in the world might yet tell her, the name of the two children’s father.
This time, Philippa had left Célie in her chamber. There had been a fresh fall of snow just before sunrise and the rue St Antoine was already deep in rimed slush. Beyond it, the small roads lay tranquil and white, edged with ancient walls and speckled groups of brick and wood houses all chequered with snow like cloisonné work. The sky, smoky red behind the Bastille, turned the snow in the gardens to sherbet: the cherry trees bore it like blossom, and the bowers of birch, beech and elm, the weeping thorns and the lilac and vine stems which laced the sky over the gateways. Behind the Célestins’ wall there was holly, and the rilled ranks of a physics garden, and a row of Bergamot pear trees as high as their snowy steeples.
Behind her, when she stopped at the wrought iron gates of the Hôtel des Sphères there was only the single track of her chopines, and the flouncing blur from the thick hooded cloak which enveloped her. She had told Célie, before she left, to have Osias called in and given hot soup in the kitchen. Whatever had happened once in the Hôtel des Sphères, there was no reason why anyone remotely connected with Midculter now should know of it.
There was a bell by the gatepost but the clapper was missing, and when she put her gloved hand on the heavy gates, they gave way before her. So, pushing them slowly apart, Philippa carved her way over the creamy snow to a small elegant mansion of patterned brick laid between wrought bands of silvery wood. Above the chiselled door, modelled within a cartouche, was a celestial globe with two winged figures brooding over it. Philippa raised the ring knocker and rapped with it.
The serving-girl who opened the door was young, but well trained in her duties. She asked madame la comtesse to enter, and taking her pattens and cloak left her seated by the fire in the pretty, wainscotted hall, while she retreated to call her superior. Then, before Philippa could receive much more than a pleasing impression of a kind of shining and miniature richness, the maid returned, and she found herself in the parlour, being received by Isabelle Roset.
Unlike her sister’s, Madame Roset’s eyes had no flaw in them. They stared out, bright faded hazel from the blotched tussore skin of old age, under an old-fashioned goffered cap as white as her hair; and her black dress with its high neck and long, tight sleeves with epaulettes was old-fashioned also, unless you looked on it as a uniform. And indeed, depending from the chain at her waist was the châtelaine’s cluster of keys and the hands, broad fingered and knotted, clasped before her were working hands: the hands of a housekeeper or, indeed, a peasant girl from Coulanges. Philippa said, ‘It is kind of you to see me, a stranger. Forgive me, too, for approaching you through your neighbours. I had looked for your name at the Hôtel de Ville, but could not find it.’
‘You thought perhaps I owned the Hôtel des Sphères. But that is not so,’ Madame Roset said. Her voice, thin and girlish was that, Philippa thought, of a talker with no one to talk to. Her eyes, active as monkeys, were brilliant with curiosity. ‘Pray be seated, Madame. It is a matter of a bereavement? Allow me to condole with you.’
The chair on which she sat was embroidered, and so were its cushions and footstool: the curtains over the paintings were taffeta, and the little bow window pictured in grisaille the story of Psyche. Philippa said, ‘The lady who left me your doorkey was