Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [352]
It was hard to say therefore why he did not go below, and rally his brother, and encourage him to let the past fade, and look forward to what lay before him. Unless, in his heart of hearts he recognized as Lymond did that what lay around him were shut gates; and what lay before him was nothing.
Chapter 11
Coq verra l’Aigle, l’aesle mal accompli
Par Lyon mise sera en extremité
Up the twisting stairs of the house called Doubtance in the rue des Papegaults, Blois, the dusty rooms were little more habitable than they had been a year before when Philippa, helped by Nicholas Applegarth, had searched them.
The sparse furniture Marthe had brought stood untended against the peeled stucco, and the clocks, the instruments, the ancient artefacts of her business lay unopened still in their cases. So it was a simple matter, watched by the short, bearded figure of Nostradamus, for Marthe to push aside the single chair in the room once occupied by her grandmother, and probing with her long fingers along the wainscoting, to press the boss Archie Abernethy had told her of, which opened the way to the treasure house.
At first, it stuck. Marthe had to push with both hands, disregarding the smears on her gown, to force back the thick sliding door in the panelling, and then to stop and take time to light a lamp, before she could step into the small hidden room in which the Dame de Doubtance had kept the cream of her collection and once, Francis Crawford.
So finely had the wood fitted that only a light film of dust dimmed the objects which lay stacked on the shelves, or spilled from the caskets stored in the little dark cabinet. The yellow of ivory smiled at her, delicately wrought on its plinth, and the glint of thick, opaque jewellery, and the gleam of rich tissue, a trifle disturbed from its wrappings. A marble cupid gazed at her over his shoulder, and a visage much older, with arched, spidery brows and bent finger.
It was that face she moved towards, her neck bent and her yellow hair brushing the ceiling; and for a moment knelt before, looking. From the doorway the sonorous Jewish voice said, ‘Was she like that?’
‘Yes,’ said Marthe. ‘She was more beautiful.’ And then, turning, followed the slender, bent finger to its destination.
And there on the floor was a little casket, as old as the ikon and painted like it in deep, vibrant colours in which the blue-shadowed angled heads and long faces followed each other in silence from panel to panel.
The heavy lid was not locked. Inside it, as she had expected, was a thin roll of parchment, bound in blue silk and sealed with the pheon and phoenix of Culter. She lifted it out, and a voice from the doorway said, ‘I doubt, Mistress Marthe, if birth or any other sanction gives you authority to read that particular document. Why not let me have it? I’m a very good friend of the owner.’
It was the little sandy-haired Scotsman who had followed her to the rue de Marie-Egyptienne, and had then brought Lady Culter to plague her. Handing his way courteously past the astrologer, Danny Hislop stood by the door to the treasure chamber.
The parchment cracked in her clenched hand. She could not even stand fully upright. Marthe said, ‘This is no business of yours. Get out of my house.’
‘I’m sorry. A wholly vulgar reaction,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘I’ll give you another, in two syllables, if you press me. It isn’t your house, nor are any of the objects within it. They belong to Lymond.’
‘Then bring him in,’ Marthe said. ‘And I will give them to him.’
The pale, clever eyes turned up. Their owner quoted Surrey at her.