Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [145]
He never did recollect much, except in nightmares, of the subsequent exchange; although he never felt quite the same again about the ballad Aucassin and Nicolette. At one point out of dire necessity, he was driven to saying, ‘Hé Dieus, douce créature.… If I fall, sweet being, I shall fracture my neck; and if I remain here, they will take and burn me at the stake.’
And after a moment, thinly autocratic, her voice had observed, ‘Aucassin: le beau, le blond.… You are hurt: le sang vous coule des bras. You are bleeding in fifty places at least.…’ And at last, collecting her skirts with smooth deliberation, the woman began to move downstairs towards him even as he spoke.
‘Douce suer, com me plairoit
Se monter povie droit
Que que fust du recaoir
Que fuisse lassus o toi!
… How I wish to be up there:
Up there with thee!’
Afterwards, he remembered looking up at her, the brocade robe hooked over her arm, her old, ribbed ankle in its pointed slipper two steps above. Remotely entertained, even then, by the crazy parallel between his affairs and the ballad, he remembered trying very hard, halfway into a thorough faint, to pay her the obvious compliment: ‘And thus the pilgrim was cured.’ He did succeed in saying it, but that was all; and of his final journey upstairs to the Dame de Doubtance’s bed he had no recollection.
He wakened twice: once out of a feverish dream to the sound of virginals. He was then in her chamber, a dark, thick-walled cave filled with old books and embroidery, watching her yellow, high-nosed profile as she played. He seemed to be strapped up again; under the bandaging the pain already, surely, seemed to be less.
He saw her finish playing and, rising, come over. A reader of horoscopes, Abernaci had said. Hazily, other things one had heard about the Dame de Doubtance came back. Uncannily well-informed, endlessly inquisitive and unnaturally detached, they said. In her day, she had been accused of practising the black arts, but nothing had ever been proved.… Certainly she seemed to have no interest in acquiring money or power for herself. Her charts were her children; her life was devoted to collecting the facts with which to plot them. Unshockable, old in years and in wisdom, her philosophy of life was just, they said, but harshly just. All the troubles of the soul, after all, were merely a line upon a chart.
When she was close enough, Lymond spoke: a sentence of thanks; a sentence asking her to tell Abernaci of his presence.
Stupidly, he had used English. The old face on its long, gristly neck was attentive, the thick braids still. Then her groined, flamboyant right hand, heavy with queer rings, touched his lips, sealing them. ‘Or se chante,” she said, ‘Rumours fly. They are searching from house to house. Speak your own tongue to me or Gaultier if you must, but to no one else.… What was the day and hour of your birth?’
It was the English, mauled and unregarded, of a person who spoke many languages and left them broken-hinged and crumbled like clams, solely attacked for the meat. She had not asked when he was born. When he told her what she wanted to know she stared at him for a long time with her squinting, intense gaze, and it came to him suddenly that she knew this already. As the thought entered his head she smiled, the narrow, rubbery cheeks crushed apart, the mouth wide, authoritative and tight. ‘You are perceptive. I knew your grandfather,’ she said. ‘Sometimes he speaks to me still.’
Lymond said, ‘He is dead.’ That was true, of course. The first Lord Culter, his brilliant grandfather, beloved in Scotland and France, after whom he was named, had died many years before. Only, spoken to her, the words were foolish; he had uttered them as a defence. Somehow, he realized, she had known his grandfather. Certainly she had known he was dead. What else she knew he could not guess. But in the stillness he could