Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [328]
Jerott said, ‘This is Michel de Nostradamus, who has had the ordering of the sickroom over the past week. The Dowager Lady Culter, Master Nostradamus, and my lord count’s brother, the Earl.’
‘Lady Culter and I have met,’ the astrologer said. He stood, the napkin folded between his hands and looked at them with an expression, oddly, more of anger than sympathy. ‘I have no good news to give you. His injuries are great, and he is already far on his journey. Do not fear to go close, Madame. There is nothing you can do that will disturb him.’
The high bed on which Francis Crawford lay had no curtains at its foot, so that between the bare pillars there was an uninterrupted view from every place in the room of the virgin sheets and the white, creaseless pillowbere and the coverlet, smooth as fresh-fallen snow on a casket. Sybilla, with Richard behind her, walked to the head and looked down on it.
All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would.
‘And so I am punished,’ Sybilla Crawford said aloud, and stood looking, with tears silently running down her colourless cheeks.
Richard said, ‘Why are his eyes covered?’ And then turning suddenly from the bed, rounded upon the physician, standing with Jerott silently at the far end of the room. ‘Why are his eyes covered? How can you tell if he is awake or if he is dead? Are you doing nothing for him?’
‘Put your hand on his wrist,’ Nostradamus said quietly. ‘As for the bandage …’ He glanced at Jerott.
But Jerott, his face frowning with sleeplessness, was looking at Richard, this powerful man with the brilliant grey eyes who had not contemplated bereavement with stoicism but was rebelling, as Sybilla was not rebelling, against what he had found. He said, ‘He was already ill when he went to Dourlans. It was why he went.’
‘Why?’ said Richard. ‘I know the face of the drug addict. I know the face of the drunkard. You cannot tell me that what I see on the pillow is either of those.’
‘No,’ said Jerott. ‘That is the destitute face of the sightless.’
For a long moment, Richard did not speak. Then he said, ‘It isn’t possible.’
‘It is,’ Sybilla said. She was holding herself, very carefully, by the back of a chair. ‘It is Nature’s way—Nature’s most unforgivable way—of preserving a machine past its breaking-point. Tell me …’
But although she began it, she could not frame the question she wanted to ask. Jerott said, ‘It began eighteen months ago, Lady Culter. He has tried to end his life twice. Once Archie brought him back. Now I have done the same. We have interfered in what doesn’t concern us. He belongs to himself and is at his own disposal. Or else what are we?’
Richard Crawford, his brother’s wrist in his hand, laid it down gently and turned to him. ‘We are,’ he said, ‘at least no less than the animals. We are members of a race, and of a kingdom, and of a family. The world has borrowed his strength often enough: can we not lend him ours when he needs it? What can be done? What is wrong?’
The black-robed doctor answered him, the ruddy, chestnut-bearded face full of a curious intelligence. ‘There has been a monstrous loss of blood, my lord, with flesh wounds and burning. Also there is a hurt to the head. The extent we cannot tell, but it has brought a stupor so deep that nothing will rouse him. He cannot move, although what liquids we give him can be swallowed. We bring him what ease we can.’
Richard said, ‘You must engage his will. Does he feel pain? Do you speak to him? There must be