Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [38]
‘I have another like it in my house at Vorobiovo.’
Philippa felt Jerott stir. She said quickly, ‘I told you I met Güzel here once. The Dame called her cousin. Did you ever ask Güzel about the connection?’
‘The occasion never arose,’ Lymond said. ‘Güzel was Dragut’s mistress, and Dragut on occasion sent expensive gifts to King Henri, as the Sultan himself did. That would be how Güzel’s visits were made, and how the dog came here, I fancy “cousin” was a courtesy title.’
‘Will Güzel come back?’ Jerott said.
‘No. I rather think, in this Jeu de Prophètes, her part has been played,’ Lymond said. ‘I told you I thought there were some books missing. I have another mystery for you to ponder. Where are the horoscopes?’
They stared at him. ‘With her clients?’ said Jerott. ‘We’ve seen the charts and the room where she worked on them. If she kept any back, they’d be stored there.’
‘The commissioned ones, of course, with her clients,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘But she was a mischievous, meddling woman. The interesting horoscopes in this house would be the uncommissioned ones. The horoscope of the King; the Queen; the Constable; the Duchess de Valentinois … Of all of us, since she took such an interfering interest in our lives. We have one room to search yet. Will you do something for me? Will you let me search it myself?’
His sleeves blackened; his wine-ruddy face smeared with dust, Jerott viewed his former commander. ‘I was going downstairs anyway,’ he said with hauteur. ‘If you don’t need my help any longer. Philippa?’
‘I’ll come in a moment,’ said Philippa quietly. And as Jerott took his candle and left, she added, ‘I should like, as a safeguard, to wait in the anteroom. Would that worry you?’
Jerott’s footsteps receded. Philippa heard the stair door open carefully, and then firmly close. The tread, still truculent, diminished in sound and than vanished. Lymond said, ‘… For it is full of serpents, of dragons and of cockodrills, that no man dare dwell there. For whose safety? Mine? And from what?’
‘The beastly snare,’ said Philippa tartly, ‘of over-confidence. A certificate for social ingenuity isn’t going to carry much weight in that bedchamber.’
Lymond beat the dust off his hands and quenching the flame in the lamp, lifted the triple candlestick which had lit his part of their journey and led the way, undisturbed, past the rooms they had just explored. ‘You forget. I am in such high favour, the Lady left me all her fortune. And here I am—All sall de done, fair lucky Dame—to obey her. I think you should go downstairs.’
They had reached the antechamber, closing the last door behind them. In the stilled flame of the candles, she turned and faced him. Behind the well-mannered authority she wondered if there was a thread of tension: an echo of the tightness she felt in the air, in her head, in the quality of the silence about them. The windowless room wavered in shadow; the dog, its long head laid where it had last breathed, seemed to stir as if the woven princes had called it. Philippa said, ‘I smell what you smell. I smell danger.’
Surprisingly, he gave her his attention. He said, ‘Shall I seal the last chamber, and leave it?’
There was a long pause. Then Philippa shook her head slowly. ‘I brought you here; but the knowledge of what you must do should come to you, not to me,’ she said. ‘Go in, if you must. I shall wait for you.’
‘Yes, I must,’ Lymond said. ‘If I run out barking, you may commit me with her other familiars. There is the candlestick. I shall light another to carry. Do you know the rest of the poem?’
‘What? No!’ said Philippa, taken aback.
‘It’s very beautiful,’ Lymond said.
‘Camile vestent de chemise,
De fin blialt de balcasin;
Corone ot an son chief d’or fin,
La cepre tint an sa main destre,
En son piz tint la senestre.
Enmi la volte fu asise
La tumbe ou Camile fu mise …’
‘Why are you chanting?’ said Philippa. ‘To warn off the spirits, or to bring them?’
Lymond picked up his fresh-lighted candlestick. ‘Because it seems appropriate,’ he said. ‘Or I have been made