Queen's Play - Dorothy Dunnett [179]
‘A French merchant controlling a Flemish trading ship?’
‘His father came from Bruges. He has made a fortune in illegal trading and a second fortune out of piracy. That is Mathhias’s work. The Spanish treasure ships don’t begin to run until they see the cannon mounted. This is where he stays in Rouen.… Why are you laughing? Francis,’ said Martine, who in her own way was a great and powerful woman, ‘You are Hell’s own Apollo.’
‘Quetzalcoatl,’ said Lymond, and shutting his eyes, crowed like a fiend. ‘Ma belle, ma belle, you have rebuilt the walls of Rome.’ And setting himself, lightly, to please her, he would explain nothing else.
From Rouen he sent her a little barrel, plated with gold, with a string of twelve-carat pearls in it, from which she guessed he had discovered the warehouses of M. Antonius Beck.
The presses were silent and the house empty of society when Lymond called at the Hôtel Hérisson, Rouen; for the sculptor was working, the chisel sweet as a dulcimer over the rumbling ground-bass of oaths.
The name Crawford of Lymond meant nothing to him. The chime of the chisel stopped and, waiting outside the cellar door, his visitor listened with amusement to a profane exchange between Michel Hérisson and the steward sent to announce him. After a moment, Lymond pushed open the door and wandered down the steps by himself.
The statue was of the giant Tityus, felled and twisted, with the vulture sitting on his chest. Lymond had seen it, hewn into half-detailed torment when gout, in classical retribution, had forced the sculptor to break off. The gout, you could see, had not left him. He was working in spite of it, his thick forearms knotted in his white fustian gown, an old dust-cap buttoned under his chin, the grooves in his broad, high-coloured face wet and silted with dust. Round his neck, as he turned, was visible a sad rag half stuffed into his collar. Lymond recognized it, shrunken and sweaty, as Brice Harisson’s smart, braided doublet. He said quietly, ‘I have a message from the Prince of Barrow, M. Hérisson. I shall not take up much of your time.’
Below tufted brows like his brother’s, Michel Hérisson’s hot, round eyes ran over his visitor, from the brushed yellow hair to the dark jewels and the thoughtful clothes. He said, ‘My god, a Fatimite!’ without undue force, and dismissed the steward with a thumb. Francis Crawford’s eyes were on the Tityus. There in the dust-filled cavity of the mouth, the arched ribs and splayed hands, the stony gougings of gut was all one needed to know of the mind of Michel Hérisson, whose late brother Brice had so gallantly served his country by exposing Robin Stewart’s perfidy to the French.
‘Damn you,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘I’m working like a horse treadle in an iron furnace. Look again.’
The big, dirty face glared, suddenly impatient. ‘Christ—’
Through the haze their eyes met, and held. ‘Christ.’ repeated the sculptor with an intonation totally different. ‘It’s Thady Boy Ballagh!’ And with a roar of joyous recognition, Michel Hérisson leaped to embrace him.
Unconstitutional activity was Hérisson’s life-force. It was enough for him to be told Lymond’s purpose in France and to shriek at his assorted escapades and at the whole inspired lunacy of his masquerade without requiring to know for whom, if anybody, he was doing these things. The visit had been worth the risk. Michel Hérisson’s kind of morality was highly personal and was based on fierce and passionately defended convictions. He would have hounded to death for bowelless principles and shoddy thinking any man setting out to murder a child from some sort of distorted crusading zeal. For Robin Stewart and his hurried, muddle-minded expediencies, he had nothing but careless contempt, tempered by a fairly accurate understanding. In the fallen giant and the vulture were all that the sculptor would ever say of the sword stroke with which Robin Stewart had killed his brother.
Rumour had told Michel Hérisson what all France knew,