Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [36]
No one spoke, least of all Philippa. In these rooms, four years ago, had begun that long journey to the Levant in which she and Francis Crawford had become man and wife, and she had rescued a child for her mother to care for. On that journey, Lymond and Marthe had met for the first time and attained the guarded truce, based on mistrust, whose fruits they were seeing that evening. And Jerott, meeting Marthe, had fallen in love with her and made her his wife, to end here, walking silently beside her. On that journey, they had all met again the great courtesan called Güzel, by whose favour they had escaped with their lives from Stamboul, and with whom Lymond had then travelled to Russia.
Had it all been foreseen? Had the Lady known that undreamed-of power was waiting for Lymond in Russia: that he and Güzel, by the side of the unstable Tsar, might hold the future of a nation in their hands? Or that, sent on embassy back to London, Lymond would find himself overmastered by his friends and conveyed for his own safety to France and now to this house in Lyon where, although she was dead, the Dame de Doubtance lived in every corner?
A woman whose grotesque appearance and dominating habit had induced people to think her a witch, in spite of her bond with the usurer Gaultier, her wealth, her two houses, the importance of her customers.
What was her true name? No one knew. No one knew how long she had lived in Blois before the presence of the child Marthe was discovered but never elucidated.
The Lady whom Francis Crawford had met only twice, and yet who, dying, had left him all she and Gaultier had owned. Call it an old woman’s whim, Philippa thought, but you still had to explain the similarity between Lymond and Marthe. And once you admitted the possibility of a relationship, you had to believe that somewhere in this queer house there must be a record of it, which would dispose once and for all of the ignorance which had now severed every tie between Lymond and his mother and brother in Scotland. And not, of course, for Francis Crawford’s sake, but for theirs.
So Philippa, her head up, her rigid hand gripping her candlestick, walked through the study which was not a study, but was hung with charts and long, pleated record-rolls, and whose carved desk and heavy tables were laden with papers held down with brass instruments beside a litter of broken quills and crayons and rules, pounce-box and abacus, hour-glass and oil lamp.
There was a torchière with half-melted candles still standing cold in the sockets. Under its still light Lymond went through the papers quickly and neatly, and then ran his fingers, grimy with dust, over the scrolls and the tall, leather-bound books on the wall-shelves, singing under his breath as he did so.
‘Atant la gent Camile apele
Il fist les pucelles venir,
Lor Dame lor fist descovrir.
Ele estoit tote ansanglante …
That’s odd,’ said Lymond. ‘Where’s Jerott?’
‘Gone into the next room. He couldn’t stand the Tomb of Camille,’ Philippa said. ‘What’s odd?’
‘Shouldn’t there be more books? The armoires under there are mostly empty. And look at the gaps on the shelves. I can think of half a dozen works which should be standard for anyone making a living from medicine and the casting of horoscopes, yet none of them is here. Wouldn’t you expect some mysterious papyri, for example, from Memphis and Busiris and Hermopolis? Think of Jíwaka, who gave an aperient to the great Buddha himself in the smell of a lotus flower.’
‘I think of him constantly,’ said Philippa shortly. She tried, and failed, to lift a bronze inkstand, two feet high, in the shape of Mithras surrounded by bulls with gilt garlands.
‘It wasn’t theft,’ said Lymond absently. ‘There’s a Cîteaux Bible over there among other things.’ He resumed singing:
‘D’eve rosade l’ont lavee,
Sa bele crine l’ont trenchiee,
Et puis l’ont aromatiziee;
Et basme e mirre i ot plente,
Le cors an unt bien conree
Talking,’ said Jerott, ‘of