Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [56]
A heady experience, for an only child accustomed to single-thread happiness, and not to the moment of creation that occurs when the warp is interlocked with the weft. When the singer is matched with the sounding-board; the dream with the poet. When the sun and the fountain first meet one another.
Side by side they were evading, she and Francis Crawford, a pack of men who intended to kill them. To escape them would be a miracle. To try to escape them with wit and grace and all that civilization could add to an occasion essentially barbarous was her care, her delight, and her intention. And the outcome he had foreseen touched her in its terrible proximity not at all.
So they fled into the night-black traboules: up the steps, between the pillars, over the courtyards and again into the twisting broken-backed tunnels, with the thudding of feet always tracking the darkness behind them.
Since the flight from Greece when he had been sick with opium, she had never seen unleashed, for such a span of time, his strength, his gaiety and his physical charm.
Every circumstance conspired, like a merchant, to display them to her. Swooping like birds from space to space of the tall houses scaling the hillside, they used what fortune suggested to defend themselves with. Baulked by a locked door, they took to a high, sprawling staircase whose galleries overlooked a nest of different courtyards: as their pursuers swarmed after them he bombarded them blithely with geranium pots, chanting: ‘Ding ye the tane and I the uther’ as she helped him, so that children screamed and dogs barked and a man in his night shirt, opening shutters, discharged an arquebus into the night air and dislodged an entire family group of Jupiter, Ganymede and the eagle from a cornice. ‘A sangre! A fuego! A sacco!’ sang out Francis Crawford; and seizing her hand, set off running again.
He talked, indeed, all the time, breathlessly, with snatches of verse and of laughter and a flow of frequently ribald comment which only ceased, now and then, in the cause of evasion. To begin with, also, he guided her, until she showed him there was no need for it. Philippa Somerville had spent a childhood competing with schoolboys among the woods and streams of north Tyneside, and in her cap and apron and sensible shoes was as agile as he was and, she wished to prove, not without invention.
They clambered over the cold nested clay of the pantiled roofs and crossed a narrow street on a ladder, because Philippa insisted on it. They sprang from niche to balcony and swung between pillars. They arrived at ground level and freed a mastiff and unshackled the door of a pig sty: at first floor, and found looms and a great roll of silk which streamed and bounded, calendaring all their assailants; at second and third and fourth floors and found sacks of flour to upset, or a bucket of slops or a wallsconce to send flying downwards, first from her hands and then from his, watched by the winged lions and griphons on the ceiling bosses, the angels guarding the windows; the fanged faces grinning from corbels or spewing open-throated from gutters above them. Decoration Gothic and classical heaped its profusion around them: shell and pilaster, acanthus and ballflower, bas relief and statuary in niche and fountain and rooftop as they crossed the road on a plank and began again, in the next house above them.
It gave them, also, a profusion of openings. Hanging gardens contained jets of water which could be diverted and pools into which the unwary could be enticed in the darkness. Fruit hurtled down (Pesches de Corbeil! les pesches!) and Tyndale’s snake, in a glorious mélange of colour (Tussssssh! Ye shall not dye …) burst from the vats of a dyeshop.
Walls handsome with stone frieze and tracery were not hard to climb, any more than garden ramparts with vine and trellis and niche, whose cage or pot or plaque or classical amphora might suggest a ponderous helmeting. And there was alway something to use, a row of melting grey plates from a kiln shelf: