Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [329]
‘My lord,’ said Nostradamus. ‘You have heard. He has long sought this gateway, and at Dourlans he found it. He is not going to come back now, for me, for you or for anyone. This time he has found the boatman, and the boatman has taken him over.’
*
At the end of life, parent and kinsman are as a blind man set to look after a burning lamp.
Because, it seemed, the river was wider than anyone knew, he lived in that way for ten days, in a room always peopled with his friends. Between them Alec and Fergie, Jerott, Archie and Danny covered the twenty-four hours at his bedside, with or without sleep, and every day Sybilla was there.
Afterwards, leaving the silent bedside, she would walk out into the free, scented air and pass under the portals of the cathedral, with its pairs of saintly, confiding figures upon whose heads the blue-grey pigeons roosted, preening their malachite neck-feathers. Within, she would not pray, but moved from place to place under the light-dappled vaults of the ceiling, pausing sometimes beside the busy carvings: the handsome, apple-cheeked burghers with their curling beards and draped hats and shoulder capes, where could be read again the sad tale of John the Baptist: En prison fut Sainct Jhan decapité, Poir avoir dict et presche verité.
Even here, people came up to her to ask how Francis did. A good lord, so brave, so sweet, so very debonair. She came here not for comfort, but to do penance, for she knew the sin she was paying for; she had watched his love die; she had been constrained, in her fear, to turn his own knife against him at Dieppe and thus simply add to a burden which, in the end, had grown too great to carry.
She was in the ambulatory one day, waiting for Richard to come for her, when a cool, contemptuous voice fell on her ears.
‘Are you mourning? Seneca says a wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can. You should be pleased. At last Francis has managed to follow his own misguided path without the rest of us consuming time and energy on setting him right.’
Sybilla turned.
Beside her was the face on the pillow, save that here the eyes were open and clear, the lips rosy, the bright hair drawn out of sight beneath the hood of a travelling cloak.
It was Marthe. The hostile, heavy-lidded eyes gazed at Sybilla, and then altered a little as, stepping forward, Jerott Blyth’s wife caught the older woman under the arm. ‘Or, I can see, you have been consuming more strength than you should. Sit down. I have no business with you. I have come to help your son, if I can.’
‘And how can you help?’ said Richard Crawford from behind her. Marthe looked round. And so for the first time, Richard Crawford stood face to face with his grandfather’s daughter.
And before her, with open disdain, Marthe saw the brown-haired Scottish countryman in whom the titles and honours of the first Baron Crawford were now vested. A man who, no doubt, could manage a leech or a ploughman: who kept his fishings and cornfields and coney-runs, but had never touched a pen, or a lute, or a brush; or seen an ikon, or a masque in the making. A man to whom the law had given all that she might have been born to, as much as the half-brother who had taken Güzel from her.
Güzel, who was dead.
Richard said, ‘I was told that you looked like my brother.’ The colour, sapped from his face by the last week, had receded before the same shock as Sybilla’s. With some fortitude, he continued, ‘I am glad that you have come, but I am afraid that no help is possible.’
She raised her eyebrows. ‘But that, as I was saying, is no matter surely for self-reproach. Let the statemongers mourn him. I hear that John Erskine and the Queen’s brother are in Amiens wringing their hands. Soon there will be no Protestants left except pregnant Abbesses.… You haven’t thought of sending for Philippa?’
Sybilla said, ‘She couldn’t possibly get here in time. Nor could it help matters under the circumstances.’
‘I see,’ said Marthe, ‘that Austin has edified you also with the circumstances. And what is this other story,