Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [331]
The scent, the evocative, insidious scent thickened in the still air of the room. The tapers burned, lighting the watching faces: of mother and brother and sister, of sister’s husband and familiar spirit: the staunch servant who was the bridge between the room in the Hôtel Moûtier, Blois, six years before and this silent, night-filled room today at Amiens.
Archie Abernethy walked to the bed and looked down, in greeting, in farewell, in pain, with a strange and searching curiosity at the peace which lay there now in the empty carapace of a being who, like the Athenians, had never known rest himself, nor had allowed others to know it. Then he lifted a taper and walking back, held it out to Sybilla.
She did not, as Archie had done, look down at the tranquillity on the pillow. She took the candle and, thrusting it forth, touched into flame all the hangings about her son’s bed.
*
The voices screamed, calling his name. The scented smoke filled his senses: the brooding presence above him changed and shifted, now to black hair, now to yellow. Someone, thinly mocking, said, ‘Sleep well.’
But that was the reality, and this was the dream. Or had that been one of the nightmare furnishings of his opium, revisited again and again, and was this real?
In his dream she had stood by the door, her black hair on her shoulders, mocking him. And he had fought the drugged tapers with fire.
There was fire close to him now. The sound of it beat across the voices like a strong wind, obliterating them; the smell of sweet opiates had been pushed aside by stronger fumes; the hypersensitive surface of his body, long since lost to his awareness, recorded for him, hesitatingly again, the sensation of a dry and hovering heat.
So it was happening now, and the Dame de Doubtance was waiting for him.
Francis Crawford unclosed his eyes.
The flames were there, like glistening silk, rippling up through the curtains and canopy about him, red and gold as the tall swirling fires of a Moroccan sunset.
He had defied her then, and must escape. In his nightmare he had been wounded, and strapped to the bed. He remembered the pain, as he tried to pull himself to the side.
But that had been only a dream, for now he was not conscious of pain when, summoning his willpower, he ordered his body to move. Instead, holding him immobile was a lethargy as unsurmountable as the bonds of his imagination. He drew a short breath and tried once more, aware again of a shouting; a clamour of voices that used his name, over and over, except for one, which simply said, ‘… damoisiax … sire!’
And that was the one to whom he must respond. He said, without sound, ‘… com me plairoit Se monter povie droit …’ and release came. His hand, moving, caught the edge of the bed and he turned his head, slowly, into the pillow to follow it. Then, it seemed, of no volition of his own but brought by many hands, he was unravelled from the high blazing theatre of his isolation and supported, his head on someone’s arm, among the shifting airs and cool shadows deep on the floor.
The last time, as now, there had fallen a sudden quiet. Against a pattern of sounds one did not need to interpret, of struck wood and falling water and the pleasant, domestic hiss of a Russian calidarium he was again in a place of silence and falling darkness. The effort was over.
A branch of candles, thrust to within an inch of his face made him, with reluctance, reopen his eyes. The last time, he had been left alone.
The kneeling woman holding the candlestick was not Oonagh, nor the Lady from the same chamber, the chamber which held his dead. It was a face from another room: the room which held the living well of his torment and which, since he left the waters of the Authie, he had not been made to revisit.
It was the face of Sybilla, with upon it an expression he had never known.
The door to the present stood open. All the dark waters of the well rose and moved, deep and glittering towards him. In grief, in fear, in supplication, in total rejection,