Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [143]
The flashing pain, as they cut his strappings and dragged him free, roused him for a moment; and he opened his eyes on her angry, feverish face and laughed. Then they had him through the door. Behind, the room had become golden red, a fierce and beautiful monochrome, with detail of bed and chair and table, hangings and woodwork in frail skeletal tracery of gold on gold, red on red. The fire, as they came downstairs, was beginning to show on the ceiling below.
The house was built of wood, and so were many of its neighbours. Already the street was roused: from the burning balcony black smoke rolled over the courtyard. Outside, someone smashed the lock of the gates and, bucket in hand, ran for the well.
The house was supposed to be empty. Oonagh could not be found there with Lymond. Nor, carrying him, could they escape unobserved. Under cover of the thickening smoke they abandoned him near a door, in a wing untouched as yet by fire, with Oonagh’s cloak for a blanket. In a heap, flung there where she brought him from Amboise, were the clothes he had been wearing that night. For a moment she checked, then picking up the Aztec mask she tossed it into the courtyard, to influence fate as it would. Then breathlessly she turned, and slipping through the thick smoke, escaped unseen with her servant to melt into the gathering crowds in the streets round about.
Behind her, Lymond lay still. Oddly, he could hear very well: a single, conscious sense left to him, like the threadlike limb of a crane fly, trapped under a stone. As he lay on the stone flags every sound from the courtyard reached him with great clarity: slippered feet running on the cobbles, the squeak of the pulley, the thin, silvery sound of spilled water jolting from a full pail. Voices shouting. Windows creaking. The rumble of a handcart bringing more water, at speed. A dog barking, very high and fluting, like an owl. And near him, the hollow roar of the spreading fire, spitting and exploding on its fissile diet, extinguishing the home of Hélie and Anne Moûtier.
Just before the roof fell, two pillagers bolder than the rest managed to enter the Hôtel Moûtier from the back, and found what they took to be a fellow plunderer overcome by smoke. Kicked awake out of a simple curiosity, the stranger offered them what appeared to be an excellent proposition: a large sum of money in exchange for a private trip in their handcart to a certain address.
Since there was nothing worth taking, the two men lost no time in arguing; which was lucky for them. Between them they had no trouble in getting the fellow doubled up under sheets in the cart, and were trundling off down the packed street, away from the fire, just as Tosh, without seeing them, picked his way up it.
The house called Doubtance in the Rue des Papegaults had no signboard; its trade was well known.
Above the usurer occupying the ground floor, lived the Dame de Doubtance, of whom he was her keeper, some said, or her owner; an unredeemed pledge like the others which heaped and lined all his rooms, naked and mouldering like picked mice in an eyrie.
The Dame de Doubtance was old; but her private world was even older: the world of France three hundred years before when chivalry was in flower, and the troubadours sang. Moving, in her mediaeval robes, from books to lute to embroidery, she never emerged into the raw, humanist light of sixteenth-century Blois; but many people came visiting her for the out-of-the-way things she could tell them, if she chose. Sometimes, if she did not choose, they came stumbling down the steep stairs of Doubtance with a scratched arm or the graze of a thrown vase on one cheek. For she was not a mouse; but rather a tall, half-plumed predator, pale-spot eyes glaring, mouth flatly downturned into the jaw. And she had a temper.
The usurer Gaultier she never assaulted. Periodically, his clients repaired the deficiency. It was a risk of his trade. Small, opinionative, shrewd, he was no more rapacious than any merchant in Blois, and loved the