Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [57]
Philippa had carried the pepper. Francis Crawford had a flask of neat spirits, filched from an apothecary’s windowledge. He broke the neck at the top of the staircase and splashed it into the channelled stone handrail below him. Then he snatched down a sconce and set fire to it.
They fled hand in hand to the rooftops, and flung shut the hatch on the fire and the shouting. ‘It won’t spread,’ said Lymond swiftly. ‘It will hold them a little.’ And stood for a moment on the dizziest edge of the roof-peak, bright and breathless and smiling.
His eyes were on the south; his hands held two flaming brands which streamed in a soft flowing air that had melted the fog to scraves and streamers wreathing the chimney tops. Fed by flame and by moonlight his hands and hair and shirt contained their own glow, like the globe of a sorcerer.
But he was not a figment of daydream or of fantasy. He was the quick-witted man who had raced with her; the man whose strong wrists had pulled her from trouble; whose laughter recognized, more than his own, her buffoonery; whose voice had whispered, sung, exclaimed or cursed, with equal felicity, carefree as birdsong on top of their striving.
Whose essence, stripped by necessity was, it now seemed, warm and joyous and of great generosity.
He stood, his eyes on the plunging rue de la Orfeverie below him, and intoned, gravely and musically.
‘By the grace and ineffable Providence of God, the only Unoriginated, and Infinite, Invisible, Inexpressible, Terrible and Inaccessible, Abiding above the Heavens, Dwelling in Unapproachable Light, and with a Vigilant Eye inspecting the Earth at suitable intervals …
‘Adam Blacklock has got off his backside and done something about the bloody uproar eventually.’
Philippa dragged off her cap and pushing back her drenched hair, looked below them. He was right. At last the alarm had been raised; the troops mobilized. It seemed that all the streets from the river were flowing with pebbled silver, rising higher and higher and flooding now to the roots of their building as Lymond, shouting, caught their gaze with his voice and his fire-brands. Then he dropped them and spoke to the night air. ‘Well, it’s impressive, you know, but there’s a thing in’t, as the fellow said drinking the dish-clout. The bastards might dodge out the back way.’
‘The side way,’ said Philippa, peering. ‘They’re forcing open a door to the ruelle.’
‘Are they, dammit?’ he said. ‘Then let’s stop them!’
To stop them they had to arrive first at the head of the ruelle. There should be, said Lymond, a tavern there.
To reach it, Philippa fled with him round and round spiral stairs, across landings, along balconies, into arches and doorways and courtyards. There was a tavern there. They went through it like gimlets through butter and gained the top of the ruelle, up which all that was left of their enemies was painfully staggering.
The ruelle Punaise was less a street than a near-vertical drain between houses, roughly stepped and little more than the width of one person. Because they were tired, their former pursuers found speed beyond them. Because, below in the street, the first of the troops were arriving, the climbing men slipped and staggered and fell in their fear but kept running, for at the top of the ruelle lay the steep road to the wall, and the hill of Fourvière, and freedom.
Until the last moment, indeed, they hoped to reach it. They saw the mouth of the ruelle above them, open, empty of people. If they discerned, through the sweat, a certain unevenness on the horizon, it seemed no more, very likely, than a profile of the stone and pebble and mud of the vennel. They were not to know that the outline was that of eight four-gallon blackjacks, arrived there by a neat piece of leverage.
By dint of the same leverage, they released themselves, one by one, as the group of men neared the top of the ruelle. Eight full