Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [39]
‘Une liste ot d’or el tonbel,
Letres i ot fait a neel,
Son epitafe i fu escrit.
La letre sone, li vers dit:
“Ci gist Camile la pucelle,
Qui molt fu proz et molt fu belle
Et molt ama chevalerie
Et maintint la tote sa vie.…” ’
The door to the bedchamber was bronze, hung between twisted stone posts, and the handle was a grinning horned head with a shining bronze ring in its mouth. Philippa watched Lymond’s hand closing on it; saw him press; saw the heavy door stir on its hinges.
It began to open, on darkness. When it was wide enough to admit him and no wider, Francis Crawford released the ring and walked past it into the chamber.
*
Because he had been here before, he knew what to expect: the windowless cathedral with its silent worshippers of wood and marble and metal; the falling black gauzes of mouldering colours; the dead precipitation of incense; of damp; of decay. The statues, culled from every age and every civilization, still glimmered within the weak measure of the candleflame: the hawk-head of Menthu; the axe of Rama; the bow of Eros; the four stone mouths of Svantovit from their niches above the pale sarcophagi, the tables of bronze and of marble, the chests with their labyrinthine friezes of clutching hand and smooth eye.
Flanked by seraphim, the four golden pillars of the bed, shrouded in membrane, glimmered far to the right. Ahead, drowned in tapestried shadows, the tall chair of state stood empty now on its dais. The canopied chair with its crocketed spires where the Dame de Doubtance had sat, austere as a worn silver monstrance within the Saxon gown and the gross yellow plaits, saying, ‘You don’t ask the date of your death? I can tell you.’
Holding high the candlestick, Francis Crawford made his way through the room, his tread quiet on the figured tiles; his attention on the empty chair. He approached, as if he had measured the place, to a spot at the foot of the dais and then, resting the candelabrum on a low column, stood in silence, his hands lightly clasped before it.
Gryphon, pegasus and hippocamp stared unmoving back at him. Nothing had changed. On the right of the chair stood a papal candlestick ten feet high, mitred and peopled with penitents. On the left, on a low Roman table lay a chessboard. The pieces of rock crystal and silver digested the candlelight, translucent and bulbous as lenses. A gilded ring-dove, fixed high in one cornice, bore in its beak a silver gilt chain from which a jacinth lamp hung next to the canopy.
In the candlelight it flared like a poppy. Lymond glanced up, drawn by it. At the same time, a breath of air, light as a chimaera, moved against his skin and extinguished the whole of his candelabrum.
Lymond stood perfectly still, his hands at his sides; his eyes open on darkness. Nothing moved. Weighted and waxen, the old fabrics were silent; the closed and untenanted chests had no voices left: the gods in their alcoves were beyond reach of a whispered awakening. He waited for what, even to himself, seemed a very long time, and then, moving softly, drew out tinder and relit the candles.
Beyond them, on a table, stood an oil flagon, the third of its kind; identical with the one he had just opened in the room which had once been Güzel’s. As he noticed it, the candleflame again wavered.
Before the draught could strengthen, he had lifted and unstoppered the oil flask. Then, drawing the lamp chain gently down on its light pulley, he filled and lit the lamp and raised it once more, so that its mellow glow touched the tarnished fringe of the heavy canopy and burnished the breast of the ring-dove. Then, taking up the candlestick, he turned his back on the chair and began, with infinite pains, the task of searching the bedchamber.
A task from which an imaginative man might have excused himself from superstitious fear, or from revulsion. An exercise which a sensitive man would have abandoned at the outset, attuned to the pagan spirits within the chamber: the sense of dim, faded anger; of resistance, even, as the coffers were persuaded open and the gowns,