Pawn in Frankincense - Dorothy Dunnett [317]
Jerott went forward and put his hands hard on his shoulders, but Lymond stayed there, his throat knotted, and would not turn round. After a long time, he spoke. ‘If she comes in here again, I shall kill her.’
Jerott let his hands drop. ‘She won’t come,’ he said curtly. ‘And neither shall I, if I can help it. There is a bell, if you want me.’ And he left abruptly, closing the door; leaving Lymond to face whatever was coming as he wanted, alone.
He did, in his own fashion; nor did he ring all that night. As the new day dragged its way on, the watchers below were able to follow, by sound, the steadily rising violence of the whole onslaught until as the sun reached its height a voice above joined the uneven footsteps; softly at first, and then in outbursts of noise, stopping raggedly and starting without warning and rising to strange rhythmic climaxes before falling to a murmur again.
Her eyes on Jerott, Marthe rose and went upstairs; and after a while Jerott joined her where she sat in the passage above, outside Lymond’s room, her cheek pressed to the cold wall. When Jerott made to speak she held up her hand, and he took his place beside her in his turn, and, in his turn, listened.
If I screamed, you wouldn’t like it, Lymond had said. And because the anguish could now no longer be borne, and because he would not scream, he was using the uncontrollable voice, the trumpet of suffering and conduit of impossible sorrows. And he had dressed it, as a burning ship sets out her fragments of bunting, with the trappings of poetry. Agony spoke in the ringing, uneven voice, but decently transmuted into the words of the poets, flowing onwards and onwards, verse after verse, tongue after tongue.
En un vergier lez une fontenele
Dont clere est l’onde et blanche la gravel
siet fille a roi, sa main a son maxele
en sospirant son douz ami rapele …
Still under the leavis green
This hinder day, I went alone
I heard ane mai sair murne and meyne
To the King of Love she made her moan …
I pray thee, for the love of God
Go build Nejátí’s tomb of marble …
He spokç each poem through to the end, and beside Jerott, Marthe’s lips moved, following. Sometimes the hard-pressed voice, uplifted, made no sense of the words it spoke. Then when the violence died would come relief, and the voice would pick its way again:
Unlike the moon is to the sonne sheen
Eke January is unlike to May …
Sometimes the voice trailed into silence, perhaps even into sleep for two minutes or five. Then it would leap into life, footsteps treading the boards back and forwards accompanying it, and a little thicker, a little more tired, it would go on with its recital, rising, holding and failing to a tide not its own.
Jerott stood half an hour of it and then left, suddenly, his face white, walking straight through the common-room and out into the faint golden sunshine where he sat, his hands over his ears.
Marthe stayed. She stayed until the voice, now roughened and slow, found trouble at last in sustaining that uneven flow of beauty and other men’s wisdom and stumbled, spinning the fabric of poetry too thinly to conceal what was lying beneath. Then she opened the door, and went in to him.
Lymond was beyond attacking her now, and almost beyond reasoned thought. He stood between the two windows, his back to the wall, and his face was nothing but eyes, blue and lightless and dead. Staring at her, he looked like a man crossing a chasm on a fine skein of silk; who has seen its strands fray, and now watches an enemy untie the whole.
‘Whom have ye known die honestly without the help of a potecary?’ said Marthe. ‘We can do better than this. Turn your back to me, and listen.’ And paying