Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [34]
‘Witnesses to what?’ Jerott said; and Philippa looked at Lymond, who glanced at the elaborate German clock on its bracket and got up. ‘You aren’t old enough to be told yet,’ he said. ‘Philippa, have you finished?’
Philippa gazed up at him. ‘I haven’t finished,’ she said. ‘And you haven’t started yet. We have the rest of the house to search: remember? The harvest is great, but the labourers are few.’
‘Oh, confound you. In the dark?’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Faint, faltering and fearful? Importuned?’
‘Unless you would prefer to come back another day?’ said Philippa with forgivable acidity; and lifting the torchière, waited politely for Marthe to lead them to where the Dame de Doubtance’s inheritance lay, locked and waiting for its reluctant beneficiary.
Chapter 5
De feu volant la machination
Viendra troubler au grand chef assiegez.
Sera laisse feu vif mort cache
Dedans les globes, horrible, espouvantable.
Antique, adamantine, rich as Daedalus’ honeycomb, the house of Gaultier did not easily give up its privacies to the chance-met foreigner to whom, so surprisingly, the Dame de Doubtance had willed it.
The Lady’s own rooms, locked since her death, were the last to which Marthe led Lymond. Before that, as if constrained to prove her custodianship, she moved ahead of him with her candle through the strange uneven passages and up the winding turnpikes of all the great house, from the stone-flagged kitchens where the servants huddled, staring at them, to the vaulted warehouses on the quayside where Jerott’s stock-in-trade lay stacked, in bags and barrels and boxes.
In Jerott’s stockrooms, his office and his cabinet was the only order in all the brooding jumble of chambers. Swept, stacked, spartan in their furnishing they bore the last vestiges of the sea-going knight-hospitaller he had once been. And to Philippa, following silently on the heels of her husband, it was painfully clear that this was so because Jerott cared for these rooms himself. Shirt-sleeved in the darkness he stood beside her now, a little heavy footed, as Marthe swept her candelabra around, and Philippa asked him questions. There was nothing else of moment to see: only empty rooms, bare of panels or chests or armoires. Wherever the Dame de Doubtance had kept her secrets, it was not here.
Then she took them up the winding stairs and along a high, open gallery to a door so low that she stooped, unlocking it. The key took a long time to turn and the door, when it swung slowly open, showed them only the foot of a narrow, worn staircase, stretching up into darkness.
Marthe turned and facing Lymond, proffered the candlestick to him. ‘At the top is a curtain and another door, which leads into an anteroom. On the left of that is the Lady’s bedchamber. On the right of the antechamber is her study, her oratory, and a suite of other small rooms. There is a locked door at the far end, where her visitors could enter without Gaultier seeing them.’
‘And on the left?’ Philippa said. ‘Beyond the Dame de Doubtance’s bedchamber?’
‘Nothing,’ said Marthe. ‘There is no other door from that room, and the windows are sealed with bronze shutters.’
‘You aren’t coming?’ said Lymond. In the airless dark, the pointed flame in his hand drew the eyes of all the tongued gargoyles, and painted the gallery rafters in ribbons of satin and charcoal. A fading of river-mist, sunk from the chimneys, lay waist-high below in the courtyard, bearing the dim lotus-heads of the orange trees.
Marthe said, ‘She has not told me to come,’ her voice tranquil. The Dame de Doubtance, to hear her, might not have been three years and more dead in her grave.
It disturbed Jerott. He made a sound of exasperation, and his wife turned on him instantly. ‘If you are unhappy, go back to my room. There is wine in the flask.