Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [35]
‘Or come with me?’ said Philippa. ‘If Mr Crawford will let us follow him?’
As she spoke, the gallery darkened: Lymond had passed through the low door already. His voice, in a canon of echoes, came to them hollowly from the steep, thin-leaved stairs. ‘I am Hermes, Conductor of Souls. Come if you wish. Come if you dare. All things arise from Space and into Space they return: Space is the beginning and the final end. There isn’t much of it here: watch your head on the newel-post.… I have found the curtain. Jerott, do you remember the curtain? We came this way, the only time that we called on her. And the doorway. I am opening the door …’
Philippa, stepping through from the gallery, was half-way up with her kirtled gown and her candle when Lymond stopped speaking. Jerott, behind her, put his hand on her arm and with a movement unexpectedly lissom swung himself up before her and round the last curve of the staircase.
The curtain Jerott remembered was now pulled fully aside, but the door beyond was only half open. Silhouetted in the light of his own candle, Lymond stood there on the threshold, his hand on the door edge, looking at something unseen on the floor. Jerott said, ‘What? What is it?’
‘An empty room,’ Lymond said. ‘And a sacrifice. Where was the Dame de Doubtance buried?’
‘By the Roman Amphitheatre,’ said Jerott. ‘Apparently. She arranged it herself beforehand.’
‘Not in hallowed ground? Why?’
‘Not because the Church stopped it,’ said Jerott. ‘They never proved that she practised black arts; only that she cast horoscopes and sometimes performed acts of healing. It was because of the way she wanted to be buried. And even that was better than her first choice. She was mad. She wanted them to embalm her enshrined in her baldachine chair.’
Without moving further into the room, Lymond lifted the flame in his hand. The light fell on a small, tapestried room, simply furnished with a coffer, some stools and a plain hooded fireplace in which the ashes of its last fire still lay, overlaid with a shroud of grey dust. On the coffer stood a group of wire cages, empty and open. And on the floor beside it, another tall cage lay on its side, with husks and sawdust and bird droppings strewn about it.
Lymond said, ‘She wanted her creatures buried with her? I suppose she would. No one would care for them. Gaultier was dead. Marthe hadn’t returned yet, bringing Jerott. They wouldn’t resist. Perhaps they sensed she was dead. Only the dog didn’t want to die.’
‘What?’ said Jerott; and Lymond, moving forward at last, let them walk past the door and see what was lying behind it.
Stretched where the free air of the four seasons over and over had moved past the weight of his muzzle were the delicate ruins of a tall, noble dog, dead so long that the dry smell of his passing had grown part of the other queer smells in the fabric around them: of faded herbs and fine woods and lost incense.
The tail, long and silky and fronded, lay with pride and with elegance on the soiled floor: the pearly coat and the long, slender shafts of the legs were of a breed unknown to both Jerott and Philippa. It was Lymond who said, ‘It was an Arabian gazelle-hound. He must have hidden when they came to slaughter him, and they went away, thinking perhaps he had escaped.’
He bent and rose again with a small, dusty dish in his fingertips. ‘He might have lived for a few days on what was left in the cages, but the water would spill or evaporate. The house was said to be haunted. No one would come to his barking.’
‘Poor beast,’ said Jerott. ‘We could open the grave, if the Lady set store on having him.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Philippa. Her throat was painful, but no stupid tears came to disgrace her. She said, ‘He led a separate life. He ought to be buried separately. If he was a creature of hers, he would have gone where her body went.’
‘Perhaps he wasn’t a creature of hers,’ Lymond said. The door to the bed-chamber was shut. He laid down the small dish and turning right, touched the door which Marthe had said belonged to the study. It was not even latched but gave