Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [146]
He did not know how long the silence lasted, their wills interlocked; but somewhere someone let out a long breath, slowly and nearly inaudibly, and the grey, crocketed fingers lay again for a moment on his brow. ‘You keep your secrets well,’ she said. ‘Make my compliments to Sybilla.’ Then, as if a gentle harness had collapsed, he lost all sense of her and of the room once again.
The next time was brief. He was not in bed, but lying cold on some sacks, sharing a minute closet with a little treasury of precious articles; and the room outside the closet was being searched.
He heard stiff questions and unaccustomed civilities: the men at arms and their lieutenant were a good deal in awe of the Dame de Doubtance. A peephole, through which he had no strength to look, threw a single arc of blue light. With idle fingers, Lymond touched the mother-of-pearl and the bronze, the little lacquers and the bracelets so close to his head.
Then the searchers had gone, apparently satisfied; and the door of the little treasure house opened, and he was carried from his hiding place back to bed. For a moment he had the illusion that it was Oonagh O’Dwyer bent over him, with long, incongruous gold hair; then he realized that it was the Dame de Doubtance herself, with the little usurer’s head at her shoulder; and behind that, smiling, the dark, turbaned face of Abernaci.
And now it was simple. All he had to do was frame the instruction which had been gripped clearly in his mind since he wakened, the four words he had rehearsed over and over to say.
Jammed by God knew what tensions, by fever and drugs, by lacerated muscles and an exhaustion of mind and body, his voice would not answer him. For a moment, in the stress, sight vanished too, and he was left in a void, silent, blinded, able to communicate nothing.
But he must. But he would.
His eyes shut, Lymond lay and forced panic out of his brain; freed his mind and found, waiting, a block of clear, untrodden thought standing silent for his message.
There was a pause, which to the watchers round the bed seemed interminable. Then the Dame de Doubtance, an odd light in her faded eyes, turned from the silent bed and addressed the mahout in brisk French. ‘Take him to Sevigny,’ she said.
The next day, demolishing the Hôtel Moûtier for safety, they passed through the stone-flagged basement and found the stained clothing and the ruined feather cloak. The rest of the house was destroyed and if, as rumour said, Thady Boy Ballagh died in its ashes, there was no other trace.
For a day and a half, his brother, his Queen, Lady Fleming and the Erskines believed with the rest that Lymond was dead; and Erskine, desperately sorry himself, became afraid of what, behind the white numbness, was growing in Richard’s blank face. Then Abernaci’s message came, with its bare command. Lymond was at his own home of Sevigny and was to be approached by no one—not by Richard nor by the Erskines or their friends.
February wore into March and the weeks passed, but no new message came. Richard rode past Sevigny once as the trees were beginning to bud, and saw its white towers above the mist of dark pink and chrome; but its walls were too high and its wooded gardens too wide to offer more. He had not known it existed. The next day, moving in some endless, purposeless void, he went with an irresponsible young party to an astrologer in an eccentric building called Doubtance. It was a woman. She cast his horoscope and gave him only one piece of advice, regarding him with an irritating kind of tolerance down her high-nostrilled nose. ‘Spring is pleasant in France. You should stay.’
Tom Erskine was going home at the end of the month. And it seemed very likely, despite her confidence, that Jenny Fleming would be going, too. They would stop in Paris and then would cross the Channel to England where Erskine would pause to pay his respects to the monarch before going north. By sea or litter, Jenny’s journey would be more direct.
Richard wondered whether