Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [296]
Marthe watched them go. Then she turned to her brother.
Quiet and firm, her light voice addressing him made no concessions to tragedy. ‘You are not going to fall. This is shock. Put your hand on my arm.’
There was a long pause; then without really seeing her Francis Crawford did remove one hand from the wall and stretch it, groping, before him. Marthe took his palm then in hers and, drawing him from the wall, supported him lightly. ‘It’s all over now. Leave it. You can change nothing by staying.’ The voice, so like his own, was quite even. ‘The moment is past. The chessboard has gone; and the people. You must let me take the room from you too.’
Outside, it was dusk. On the way to the threshold she had slipped off his stained surcoat and he stood beside her now in the European clothes he had worn at Míkál’s house, torn a little where Gabriel had manhandled him, his face still bruised and his lip cut and swollen from it.
But Gabriel was dead. And beside her, the man Gabriel had so scornfully challenged now stood, wit exhausted and self-command fallen away: all consciousness reduced to a single lens projecting, over and over, a small boy running; and stopping, frightened, to beg; and Míkál’s voice saying, Come, my love.… Say goodnight to the dark.
Archie would give no more opium: not yet. Lymond was too near the edge: too near the limit of the drug: the place where, driven beyond their means, first the body relinquished the race; and then the mind. Madness cometh sometime of passions of the soul, as of business and of great thoughts, of sorrow and of too great study, and of dread. Marthe said, thinking aloud with that austere, sexless mind, ‘Would madness be kind?’
They were waiting for the Kislar Agha to return and conduct them to their quarters. Lymond shook his head slowly, his eyes looking at nothing, and Marthe said again, watching him, ‘Would it be kind? The spinet is there. Shall I play for you?’
And the calculated cruelty of it stung him awake. Within the dead wastes of his mind she struck a spark: a spark of new shock, which must have glimmered, for the first time, on the days and months and years still lying ahead. Lymond looked at her, his eyes open and living, and said, ‘Leave me here. Please go and follow the others.’
Blue eyes stared into blue. ‘No,’ said Marthe. ‘Such things will not last. Music makes you a coward because you have no other key for your passions. One day it will come. And you forget. You have one child to see still to safety. I think you owe that to him, and to Philippa. Think … when Philippa goes back home from this, what will become of her? Will a convent accept her? Or will she become as Janet Fleming, the courtesan she is now trained to be? She has not considered these things. You must do this for her. Escape into self-destruction by all means; but not until your duty is done.’
The Kislar Agha was coming. Francis Crawford stood beside Marthe and awaited him, drugged and dizzy in his torn clothes, and said nothing more.
The day appointed had come. And in it he had indeed received, as Gabriel promised, the anvil sunk in his heart.
When the time came, he walked collectedly enough by Marthe’s side through the garden to the rooms set aside for their quarters. Then the head eunuch left and Lymond, groping, put both hands on the doorpost and rested his wet brow on his wrists. Marthe said, ‘Yes. You are going to faint. But it will be more comfortable here than in that death-chamber. And here we shall see that you wake.’
They had put a blanket for Kuzúm in Marthe’s chamber. She watched Philippa settle him, fussing; before observing with faint and familiar irony, ‘I don’t intend to eat him, with lettuce. If he’s a quarter as fatigued as I am, he will sleep until morning.’
Philippa pushed back her hair. The moment when Kuzúm was asleep and she had no more to do was one she had tried not to think of, ever since leaving the Throne Room. She said, ‘I’m sorry. It must be so irritating. I know he’ll be all right, of course.’ She hesitated, and then said, pallidly cheerful, ‘Have you heard