Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [42]
Jerott stopped. Philippa cried out. Only Lymond, unheeding, pitched himself headlong at the dais as the singing silence was marred by a rattle.
The bolt had sprung from the bow of the statue. Bright as fire it swam through the air to where, rosy-breasted, there swayed the golden ring-dove with the silver-gilt chain in its keeping.
The bolt struck. The dove hung on the air, a tinselled cloud of white powder. And the chain, whipping back through its pulley, sent the carmine lamp flying downwards, streaming flame and hot oil, to the canopy.
Before it reached it, Lymond had rammed the tall chair with all the force of his shoulder. The canopy broke in a spray of webbed dirt and splinters. The chair heeled and lingered under his pressure. Then it toppled, almost dragging him with it, and the blazing lamp dropped where it had rested.
There was a table carpet near Philippa, its surface burdened with treasures. She wrenched the mat from beneath them and fled with it. Lymond, jumping down, had already done the same with an altar cloth, and disregarding the complaining angels, had flung the thing on the spreading flames and was trampling on it. Side by side they twisted: thrashing, stamping, stifling the seeded fires sprung up all around them.
The head of Kuan Yin, her fingertips streaming fire, lay on Philippa’s shoulder as she swaddled her, and Lymond beat out the last of the flames and addressed her.
‘Et chi est la fins dou Roumanch. It pays to study one’s Gothic romances,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Perhaps you will allow me to handle this. As you say, we are going to need more than a certificate.’ And turning, he made his way through the smoke and the debris to where the felled chair still lay motionless.
Caught up in the crisis, Philippa had almost forgotten what led to it. But Jerott had not. Unmoved by the flames as if they had no true existence, he had occupied himself with bringing in light. The candelabra from the antechamber were now inside the room, and beside it Lymond’s candles, all burning. He had found and touched off others too, and it was with his hands full of light that he strode now to where the splintered throne lay on its side, in a tawdry tangle of spangles and buckram.
Beside the rucked cloth lay a slipper, of a fashion long since disappeared; the velvet toe narrow and pointed, and the laces tied with a jewel. And woven into the tumble of fabric was something else: a long plait of coarse yellow fibre tossed with a sheet of pale silk which divided, moving, into shining ribbons of young, living hair, combed back from a face which, recumbent and dust-smeared, still contrived for her husband a stare, looking up, of contempt and anger and bitterness.
The moment of surprise for Jerott was long over, but he still spoke her name, looking down, the candles bright in his hands. ‘Marthe.’
And Francis Crawford, walking over, said gently, ‘Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm. She could have died, Jerott.’
‘Who would have mourned?’ Jerott said. He was breathing heavily. He said, ‘You know her. To get what she wants, she’ll do anything, hurt anyone. Even …’ He stopped and then said, ‘Most of all, me.’
‘Was this to hurt you?’ Lymond said. ‘I don’t think so. For some reason she wants me to hold by my marriage. I don’t know why. Perhaps, if you ask her, you’ll find the old woman wanted it. At any rate, Marthe had nothing to gain by it. And she took the greatest risk, knowingly. Anyone aware of that poem would guess what was going to happen. The Dame de Doubtance was mad. But she tried to ensure that if anyone usurped her shadow, it would be one of her own kind, who knew the danger and was prepared to withstand it.’
Marthe moved. With the golden light bright on her hair she began, slowly and smoothly, to free herself from the broken chair and its canopy, saying nothing and ignoring the hand Lymond held, kneeling, to her.
Jerott, standing, made no move to help her at all. Instead, he said, ‘She had something to gain. By maintaining your marriage,