Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [37]
In the candlelight he stood in the doorway like a piece of good, sturdy carving, hand-tinted in white lead and flesh colour. Lymond wandered towards him, his soiled hands curled limp at his sides. ‘To dispel doubt and error, one must exercise the light of supreme wisdom. You didn’t imagine it would be an Oratory?’
And of course, it wasn’t, although a tinge of aloes and myrrh still lingered in the dead air and a bronze font, flanked with marble, stood where perhaps once an altar had been. Now, there were shelves laden with jars, their mouths stopped with parchment; with retorts and horn flagons; with mortars, crucibles and alembics. And funnels, beakers and ladles lay on tables below the dried herbs—hellebore, plantain, clubmoss, centaury, camomile—which hung in faggots from the low rafters.
The stand of candles Jerott had lit glimmered on ovens; on a tall figured ewer of blackened silver and a situla, banded with jewels and peopled with patient religious. There was a lead casket, inscribed, on a prie-Dieu. Lymond lifted it.
Inside, pink as a nude human body, was a plant root. ‘A female ginseng,’ said Lymond. ‘Guaranteed to bring back youth and beauty … She had something, didn’t she, for every contingency? Foxglove, laudanum, strychnine; roots of hemlock, dry pepper, valerian … Unicorn’s horn.’ He took down a glass jar and opened it. ‘Ivory dust? Or narwhal, more likely. The Lord created the medicines of the earth, and he that is wise will not abhor them. There should be a cauldron.’
‘Here it is. The font.’ Philippa pointed.
‘But of course!’ said Lymond cheerfully. He leaned on the rim and breathed into it. ‘Wings of a screech-owl, entrails of a wolf …’
‘Medea,’ said Philippa. ‘I thought you were occupied with Camilla the Volscian.’
‘I was. I can’t think why,’ said Lymond. ‘Or I can. It was the painting of Amazon arms in the anteroom. The myrtle shaft, the golden bow, the darts, the sling, the javelin. Oh, God, there’s nothing here; and call him that doubts it a gull. I am not entering another astrologer’s workshop. Ne sui pas abandonè A chascun qui dit “Vien ça”.’
But the other rooms were only bedchambers, hung with ancient fabrics, their painted friezes lurking over the candlelight in an appled procession of furred haunch and scaly shoulder; their tarnished treasures crowded on tables draped with time-stiffened embroideries, their mirrors blind, their blackened coffers striated already with virgin clefts of sprung wood.
Only one room was in any way different, and there, the funeral obsequies of Camille suffered another interruption.
‘D un drap de soie d’Alma rie
Fu la meschine ansevelie,
Et puis l’ont mise an nne biere
Qui molt fu riche et molt fu chiere.
… Li liz fu de coton anpliz
Et desus fu mis uns tapiz,
Qui covri tote la litiere …’
Philippa, following on Lymond’s heels into the bedchamber, stopped when he stopped, and then bit back an immature hiss of pure panic. The blockish shape of a naked man stood erect just inside, facing them. It was made of worn wood with a head of blackened silver: the jutting lips were crudely gilded.
And behind, the weaves on the wall were from a world more ancient than that of the Lady, and the vessels and goblets, the statues and ikons, the winged chair and the golden-pawed leopards which upheld the tall ebony bed stirred a memory in Philippa of things she had put behind her: a memory she was just, with pain, bringing to light when Jerott saw the statue and exclaimed, ‘Christ, Francis. What in God’s name is that?’
Lymond walked into the room without answering. There was a swan-necked oil flagon of tinselled glass on one table: he unstoppered it, and filling a silver lamp, set it alight. Not until he had finished, did he turn to them both. ‘It is a statue of Perun,’ he said. ‘A Slavic pre-Christian idol. The door was a little open. The dog must have come from this room.’
Philippa said, ‘You knew there was oil in that flagon!’ and Lymond answered from where he was searching, quickly, discreetly, knowledgeably as in