Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [275]
The house was in darkness, save for a single light in a dormer, high over his head.
He tried the tooled wooden door under the sphere, and it was not locked against him, any more than had been the gates. He thought he heard, for a moment, a whisper over his shoulder; but did not look round.
Only, quite softly and steadily did he push the door open and enter the house where he had been born.
Chapter 9
Les deux malins de Scorpion conioints
Le grand seigneur meurtri dedans sa salle.
There was no sound in the Hôtel des Sphères, nor any light in the wainscotted hall, or the parlour which led from it.
The scent of the small room was pleasing. Moonlight limned in grey the story of Psyche on the finely arched window, and alighting within, touched upon nymphs and garlands and roses, and upon lines of silver, glittering by the chimney-piece:
I shall harness thee a chariot of lapis-lazuli and gold
Come into our dwelling, in the perfume of the cedars …
Míkál … Güzel … Where are the links of the chain, glimmering there: joining us to the past? The perfume was pleasing because it was familiar to him. The other presences, in the silence, were older.
No one stirred. If there had been servants, there would be candlelight; the door would have been locked: a cresset left on the stair for the mistress or master.
For the mistress; for this must be the house of Isabelle Roset. The house whose direction her sister had had no chance to give him before dying, blind in a smoke-filled farm kitchen in Fleuvy-le-Martel. Perhaps hers was the voice in his thoughts, saying Climb …
Dabit Deus his quoque finem. Seek me in the broken hearts and by the crumbling tombs.…
‘I do not believe in God,’ Piero Strozzi had said, ‘but I respect His dignity. I shall not visit Him in His house with my presence.’ And so had catarrh …
Help me to seek.
One knows, when all one’s life one has walked in dangerous places, when the silence is that of ambush and when the silence is that of emptiness.
This was emptiness. The little staircase, roundly carved, gave upon a passage, and of all the doors in the passage, only one showed a line of light under it.
If one believes in God, but has learned not to pray, one offers only, in silence, one’s apologies, and then asks the spirit to do what it can.
Francis Crawford laid on the door the beautiful hand of his father, and pressed the latch, and opened it. And as he did so the candle within flickered and went out.
Inside, the quiet and the darkness were absolute. He stood in the doorway listening, and allowing his eyes, like a cat’s, to enlarge again. Slowly, a window opposite grew into his sight, indigo against Indian blackness. And a little flare of light in the sky showed him, glimmering for a moment, the shape of a bed, and tumbled sheets, and a shadow lying upon it.
He had no weapon, except perhaps surprise. Where the candle had been, there must be a flaxbox. He moved noiselessly into the room, guiding himself by his fingertips. A chest; a tall hutch-press; an iron stand with a laver; a chair; a stool, with a candle upon it. Then he felt the box with the tinder and paper, and lifting it, cupped his hands and made a little flame.
What had seemed orderly was an ill-kept chamber, its dusty floor strewn with a man’s clothes, rudely discarded. The coverlet drooped to the floor and a pillow, deeply indented, lay there beside it. On the bed, the stained sheets were rammed to the foot of the mattress, one of them torn in half. And upon the mattress, grotesque and naked in the writhing light of the guttering flame, lay the muscular body of Leonard Bailey, lustily spreadeagled in untimely and partnerless death.
The flame burned his fingers and vanished. He did not relight it. He did not want to see again that oxlike