Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [315]
The priest and Archie between them lifted him into the litter. He had not spoken again and was quite unconscious, the blood stiff on his clothes, the cavities deep under his eyes. Shortly after that, having instructed Jerott with all he knew, Archie took the road to Volos city and harbour, Philippa with Kuzúm at his side.
She didn’t cry. Her spirit felt scoured; her brain arid as if slaked in quicklime: she remembered with shame the doubts and vanities she had shown over that mariage de convenance whose conveniences, so humiliating at the time, were indeed a matter of life and death to so many, and whose lack of grace concealed a true grace she was only beginning now to discern.
Until their wedding eve in the Seraglio of Topkapi, Francis Crawford had been a friend of her mother’s; an adult whose alien being she did not wish or pretend to interpret.
She could say that no longer. She was his wife in nothing but name: the privacies of his nature were not hers to explore and to analyse: she kept him as far as possible out of her thoughts, and conjecture out of his affairs. Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read.
She saw him before she left; but it did not occur to her to give him any spurious parting embrace, any more than she had expected to receive one at her wedding.
Yet he himself had bestowed one, on Khaireddin. It was, perhaps, the most disturbing of all the things she had seen him do.
Kuzúm liked the boat.
29
Volos
They kept Lymond in the crowded ward of the hospital until he recovered consciousness. Then they moved him to one of the almshouses, a small, self-contained building with a low common-room and, above, one small cell with a bed.
This became his. At first he lay there, his eyes closed, while the nursing brethren spoke in whispers to Jerott. Such stillness was what the overstrained body required. Pray God it would last.
Downstairs, Jerott unleashed his anxious irritation on Marthe. ‘They know it can’t last. Why don’t they admit it?’
‘They are kind. They are innocent. They believe God is merciful,’ said Marthe.
From the moment of Lymond’s collapse, the supply of opium had been cut off completely. This isolation and privacy were what Archie had advised, and the priest in charge of the sick man endorsed it, his wise eyes turning from Jerott to Marthe. ‘Have you seen one thus afflicted when the drug is withdrawn? There is acute pain, intestinal and muscular, with intense weakness and tremors and nausea. That is in the body. In the spirit, there is also a peculiar anguish and isolation, a madness I can compare only with the frenzy of total bereavement. This young man has a strong and resilient body. Pray that this may be true of his mind.’
He was strong-minded enough, when the time came, to send the nursing monks packing. It was the first sign of trouble: the priest on duty descending the stairs from the sickroom, his robe dragging on the rough unfinished wood, and walking over to Jerott. ‘I fear I and my brothers can be of no further help.’
At first Jerott believed they were abandoning Francis. Then he understood that it was the other way round. ‘He does not wish us to attend him. It is not wise, but it is understandable,’ said the priest. ‘Indeed, there is nothing we can do that you, his friends, cannot now do better.’
One could not argue with that. Jerott was silent. It was Marthe, accepting it, who said, ‘I shall sleep here then, if a bed can be made up in the common-room. I suppose one of us should be on call.’ And Marthe who, when the arrangements had been made, walked upstairs with the first tray of bouillon and entered the sickroom for the first time.
There was little in the room but the bed, placed between the door and the two small windows pierced in the