Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [144]
It was his treasures which he first thought, naturally, of saving, that grey February day when fire broke out at the top of the road. With his clerk and an apprentice to help, he began loading his wheelbarrow, stopping often to engage his clerk in raucous arguments about workmanship and costing. Soon the wheelbarrow was full and dispatched down the steep road to the river, already crowded with the womenfolk and possessions of the richer and wiser residents.
It was the only conveyance he had, and he could do nothing until it returned. Maître Gaultier went back alone to his dark nest of bric-à-brac and, fierce-eyed, began to cull his other favourites therefrom. As he emerged for the sixth time to his threshold, bearing a clock dear to his heart, he saw a miracle coming towards him in the flurried bustle of the street: a four-wheeled handcart, propelled by one heated individual and steadied by another, which bumped down the steep incline of the street, headed straight towards Doubtance and stopped flat beside Master Gaultier’s astrolabe clock as if scenting its destiny.
Almost before the owners of the cart had pushed it into the forecourt and had uncovered and explained the unconscious man inside, Georges Gaultier had bought the cart and its contents and had dismissed the disreputable pair. He had no time just then to consider the implications of what they told him, or even to do more than compare briefly the face of the man they had brought with a description once given him by Archie Abernethy. The moneylender was accustomed to job lots. Drunk or not drunk, the less important item could wait. With a deft heave, Georges Gaultier removed the senseless man lumbering the bottom of his precious conveyance, and stowed him out of the way under the stairs to recover.
Stacking the handcart after that, Georges Gaultier from time to time looked all around him; he at least had no quarrel with his fellow men.
Once, imagining a stirring behind, he turned his head on his shoulder and said practically, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening; ‘My friend, you will need to put on a better face than that before your wife sees you. If you go upstairs, Madame will clear the fumes from your head. The fire will only come this way should the wind change, and men walk faster than clocks.’
In the end, he snatched time from his labours to turn indoors, and grasping the man’s singed and dusty cloak, lifted him six steps out of the way to the first quarter landing. The fellow opened his eyes. Master Gaultier grinned, and raising his pebbly voice, addressed the inhabitant upstairs. ‘Madame! A visitor!’
They were the first coherent words Francis Crawford understood since leaving the burning house up the street. Dimly, he remembered the plunderers who had carried him out; the bargain he had made in the hope that Gaultier, knowing his history from Abernaci, might pay; the subsequent bumping journey in the cart to this house whose address Abernaci had given him, long ago. And now a voice, hoarse and offhand, bawling, ‘Madame! A visitor!’
And by then Lymond, with a kind of brutal persistence, had got himself upright. His good hand, groping, felt the cold wood of a stair rail. He leaned on it, all his weight on his serviceable leg, and looked up, straight into the pouched eyes of a woman, whose papery skin, in soft, unfolded swags, hung from her brittle, down-peering bones. Two long braids, thickly plaited and impossibly gold, dangled gently swaying from a wimpled headdress out of fashion a century ago. Her robes were long, flat and flowing, without a farthingale, and her nostrils above the creased and confident mouth were antique and wide.
There was a pause, which Lymond occupied at some cost by standing straight and still, his head thrown back and his breathing nicely controlled. The Gothic face in the gloom far above him seemed to smile. ‘Aucassins, damoisiax,