De feu volant la machination
Viendra troubler au grand chef assiegez.
Sera laisse feu vif mort cache
Dedans les globes, horrible, espouvantable.
Antique, adamantine, rich as Daedalus’ honeycomb, the house of Gaultier did not easily give up its privacies to the chance-met foreigner to whom, so surprisingly, the Dame de Doubtance had willed it.
The Lady’s own rooms, locked since her death, were the last to which Marthe led Lymond. Before that, as if constrained to prove her custodianship, she moved ahead of him with her candle through the strange uneven passages and up the winding turnpikes of all the great house, from the stone-flagged kitchens where the servants huddled, staring at them, to the vaulted warehouses on the quayside where Jerott’s stock-in-trade lay stacked, in bags and barrels and boxes.
In Jerott’s stockrooms, his office and his cabinet was the only order in all the brooding jumble of chambers. Swept, stacked, spartan in their furnishing they bore the last vestiges of the sea-going knight-hospitaller he had once been. And to Philippa, following silently on the heels of her husband, it was painfully clear that this was so because Jerott cared for these rooms himself. Shirt-sleeved in the darkness he stood beside her now, a little heavy footed, as Marthe swept her candelabra around, and Philippa asked him questions. There was nothing else of moment to see: only empty rooms, bare of panels or chests or armoires. Wherever the Dame de Doubtance had kept her secrets, it was not here.
Then she took them up the winding stairs and along a high, open gallery to a door so low that she stooped, unlocking it. The key took a long time to turn and the door, when it swung slowly open, showed them only the foot of a narrow, worn staircase, stretching up into darkness.
Marthe turned and facing Lymond, proffered the candlestick to him. ‘At the top is a curtain and another door, which leads into an anteroom. On the left of that is the Lady’s bedchamber. On the right of the antechamber is her study, her oratory, and a suite of other small rooms. There is a locked door at the far end, where her visitors could enter without Gaultier seeing them.’
‘And on the left?’ Philippa said. ‘Beyond the Dame de Doubtance’s bedchamber?’
‘Nothing,’ said Marthe. ‘There is no other door from that room, and the windows are sealed with bronze shutters.’
‘You aren’t coming?’ said Lymond. In the airless dark, the pointed flame in his hand drew the eyes of all the tongued gargoyles, and painted the gallery rafters in ribbons of satin and charcoal. A fading of river-mist, sunk from the chimneys, lay waist-high below in the courtyard, bearing the dim lotus-heads of the orange trees.
Marthe said, ‘She has not told me to come,’ her voice tranquil. The Dame de Doubtance, to hear her, might not have been three years and more dead in her grave.
It disturbed Jerott. He made a sound of exasperation, and his wife turned on him instantly. ‘If you are unhappy, go back to my room. There is wine in the flask.’
‘Or come with me?’ said Philippa. ‘If Mr Crawford will let us follow him?’
As she spoke, the gallery darkened: Lymond had passed through the low door already. His voice, in a canon of echoes, came to them hollowly from the steep, thin-leaved stairs. ‘I am Hermes, Conductor of Souls. Come if you wish. Come if you dare. All things arise from Space and into Space they return: Space is the beginning and the final end. There isn’t much of it here: watch your head on the newel-post.… I have found the curtain. Jerott, do you remember the curtain? We came this way, the only time that we called on her. And the doorway. I am opening the door …’
Philippa, stepping through from the gallery, was half-way up with her kirtled gown and her candle when Lymond stopped speaking. Jerott, behind her, put his hand on her arm and with a movement unexpectedly lissom swung himself up before her and round the last curve of the staircase.
The curtain Jerott remembered was now pulled fully aside, but the door beyond was only half open. Silhouetted in the light of his own candle, Lymond stood there on the threshold, his hand on the door edge, looking at something unseen on the floor. Jerott said, ‘What? What is it?’
‘An empty room,’ Lymond said. ‘And a sacrifice. Where was the Dame de Doubtance buried?’
‘By the Roman Amphitheatre,’ said Jerott. ‘Apparently. She arranged it herself beforehand.’
‘Not in hallowed ground? Why?’
‘Not because the Church stopped it,’ said Jerott. ‘They never proved that she practised black arts; only that she cast horoscopes and sometimes performed acts of healing. It was because of the way she wanted to be buried. And even that was better than her first choice. She was mad. She wanted them to embalm her enshrined in her baldachine chair.’
Without moving further into the room, Lymond lifted the flame in his hand. The light fell on a small, tapestried room, simply furnished with a coffer, some stools and a plain hooded fireplace in which the ashes of its last fire still lay, overlaid with a shroud of grey dust. On the coffer stood a group of wire cages, empty and open. And on the floor beside it, another tall cage lay on its side, with husks and sawdust and bird droppings strewn about it.
Lymond said, ‘She wanted her creatures buried with her? I suppose she would. No one would care for them. Gaultier was dead. Marthe hadn’t returned yet, bringing Jerott. They wouldn’t resist. Perhaps they sensed she was dead. Only the dog didn’t want to die.’
‘What?’ said Jerott; and Lymond, moving forward at last, let them walk past the door and see what was lying behind it.
Stretched where the free air of the four seasons over and over had moved past the weight of his muzzle were the delicate ruins of a tall, noble dog, dead so long that the dry smell of his passing had grown part of the other queer smells in the fabric around them: of faded herbs and fine woods and lost incense.
The tail, long and silky and fronded, lay with pride and with elegance on the soiled floor: the pearly coat and the long, slender shafts of the legs were of a breed unknown to both Jerott and Philippa. It was Lymond who said, ‘It was an Arabian gazelle-hound. He must have hidden when they came to slaughter him, and they went away, thinking perhaps he had escaped.’
He bent and rose again with a small, dusty dish in his fingertips. ‘He might have lived for a few days on what was left in the cages, but the water would spill or evaporate. The house was said to be haunted. No one would come to his barking.’
‘Poor beast,’ said Jerott. ‘We could open the grave, if the Lady set store on having him.’
‘Oh, no,’ said Philippa. Her throat was painful, but no stupid tears came to disgrace her. She said, ‘He led a separate life. He ought to be buried separately. If he was a creature of hers, he would have gone where her body went.’
‘Perhaps he wasn’t a creature of hers,’ Lymond said. The door to the bed-chamber was shut. He laid down the small dish and turning right, touched the door which Marthe had said belonged to the study. It was not even latched but gave at once to his hand and entering, the three of them began the long walk through the Dame de Doubtance’s suite.
No one spoke, least of all Philippa. In these rooms, four years ago, had begun that long journey to the Levant in which she and Francis Crawford had become man and wife, and she had rescued a child for her mother to care for. On that journey, Lymond and Marthe had met for the first time and attained the guarded truce, based on mistrust, whose fruits they were seeing that evening. And Jerott, meeting Marthe, had fallen in love with her and made her his wife, to end here, walking silently beside her. On that journey, they had all met again the great courtesan called Güzel, by whose favour they had escaped with their lives from Stamboul, and with whom Lymond had then travelled to Russia.
Had it all been foreseen? Had the Lady known that undreamed-of power was waiting for Lymond in Russia: that he and Güzel, by the side of the unstable Tsar, might hold the future of a nation in their hands? Or that, sent on embassy back to London, Lymond would find himself overmastered by his friends and conveyed for his own safety to France and now to this house in Lyon where, although she was dead, the Dame de Doubtance lived in every corner?
A woman whose grotesque appearance and dominating habit had induced people to think her a witch, in spite of her bond with the usurer Gaultier, her wealth, her two houses, the importance of her customers.
What was her true name? No one knew. No one knew how long she had lived in Blois before the presence of the child Marthe was discovered but never elucidated.
The Lady whom Francis Crawford had met only twice, and yet who, dying, had left him all she and Gaultier had owned. Call it an old woman’s whim, Philippa thought, but you still had to explain the similarity between Lymond and Marthe. And once you admitted the possibility of a relationship, you had to believe that somewhere in this queer house there must be a record of it, which would dispose once and for all of the ignorance which had now severed every tie between Lymond and his mother and brother in Scotland. And not, of course, for Francis Crawford’s sake, but for theirs.
So Philippa, her head up, her rigid hand gripping her candlestick, walked through the study which was not a study, but was hung with charts and long, pleated record-rolls, and whose carved desk and heavy tables were laden with papers held down with brass instruments beside a litter of broken quills and crayons and rules, pounce-box and abacus, hour-glass and oil lamp.
There was a torchière with half-melted candles still standing cold in the sockets. Under its still light Lymond went through the papers quickly and neatly, and then ran his fingers, grimy with dust, over the scrolls and the tall, leather-bound books on the wall-shelves, singing under his breath as he did so.
‘Atant la gent Camile apele
Il fist les pucelles venir,
Lor Dame lor fist descovrir.
Ele estoit tote ansanglante …
That’s odd,’ said Lymond. ‘Where’s Jerott?’
‘Gone into the next room. He couldn’t stand the Tomb of Camille,’ Philippa said. ‘What’s odd?’
‘Shouldn’t there be more books? The armoires under there are mostly empty. And look at the gaps on the shelves. I can think of half a dozen works which should be standard for anyone making a living from medicine and the casting of horoscopes, yet none of them is here. Wouldn’t you expect some mysterious papyri, for example, from Memphis and Busiris and Hermopolis? Think of Jíwaka, who gave an aperient to the great Buddha himself in the smell of a lotus flower.’
‘I think of him constantly,’ said Philippa shortly. She tried, and failed, to lift a bronze inkstand, two feet high, in the shape of Mithras surrounded by bulls with gilt garlands.
‘It wasn’t theft,’ said Lymond absently. ‘There’s a Cîteaux Bible over there among other things.’ He resumed singing:
‘D’eve rosade l’ont lavee,
Sa bele crine l’ont trenchiee,
Et puis l’ont aromatiziee;
Et basme e mirre i ot plente,
Le cors an unt bien conree
Talking,’ said Jerott, ‘of embalming: you should come and see the Oratory.’
In the candlelight he stood in the doorway like a piece of good, sturdy carving, hand-tinted in white lead and flesh colour. Lymond wandered towards him, his soiled hands curled limp at his sides. ‘To dispel doubt and error, one must exercise the light of supreme wisdom. You didn’t imagine it would be an Oratory?’
And of course, it wasn’t, although a tinge of aloes and myrrh still lingered in the dead air and a bronze font, flanked with marble, stood where perhaps once an altar had been. Now, there were shelves laden with jars, their mouths stopped with parchment; with retorts and horn flagons; with mortars, crucibles and alembics. And funnels, beakers and ladles lay on tables below the dried herbs—hellebore, plantain, clubmoss, centaury, camomile—which hung in faggots from the low rafters.
The stand of candles Jerott had lit glimmered on ovens; on a tall figured ewer of blackened silver and a situla, banded with jewels and peopled with patient religious. There was a lead casket, inscribed, on a prie-Dieu. Lymond lifted it.
Inside, pink as a nude human body, was a plant root. ‘A female ginseng,’ said Lymond. ‘Guaranteed to bring back youth and beauty … She had something, didn’t she, for every contingency? Foxglove, laudanum, strychnine; roots of hemlock, dry pepper, valerian … Unicorn’s horn.’ He took down a glass jar and opened it. ‘Ivory dust? Or narwhal, more likely. The Lord created the medicines of the earth, and he that is wise will not abhor them. There should be a cauldron.’
‘Here it is. The font.’ Philippa pointed.
‘But of course!’ said Lymond cheerfully. He leaned on the rim and breathed into it. ‘Wings of a screech-owl, entrails of a wolf …’
‘Medea,’ said Philippa. ‘I thought you were occupied with Camilla the Volscian.’
‘I was. I can’t think why,’ said Lymond. ‘Or I can. It was the painting of Amazon arms in the anteroom. The myrtle shaft, the golden bow, the darts, the sling, the javelin. Oh, God, there’s nothing here; and call him that doubts it a gull. I am not entering another astrologer’s workshop. Ne sui pas abandonè A chascun qui dit “Vien ça”.’
But the other rooms were only bedchambers, hung with ancient fabrics, their painted friezes lurking over the candlelight in an appled procession of furred haunch and scaly shoulder; their tarnished treasures crowded on tables draped with time-stiffened embroideries, their mirrors blind, their blackened coffers striated already with virgin clefts of sprung wood.
Only one room was in any way different, and there, the funeral obsequies of Camille suffered another interruption.
‘D un drap de soie d’Alma rie
Fu la meschine ansevelie,
Et puis l’ont mise an nne biere
Qui molt fu riche et molt fu chiere.
… Li liz fu de coton anpliz
Et desus fu mis uns tapiz,
Qui covri tote la litiere …’
Philippa, following on Lymond’s heels into the bedchamber, stopped when he stopped, and then bit back an immature hiss of pure panic. The blockish shape of a naked man stood erect just inside, facing them. It was made of worn wood with a head of blackened silver: the jutting lips were crudely gilded.
And behind, the weaves on the wall were from a world more ancient than that of the Lady, and the vessels and goblets, the statues and ikons, the winged chair and the golden-pawed leopards which upheld the tall ebony bed stirred a memory in Philippa of things she had put behind her: a memory she was just, with pain, bringing to light when Jerott saw the statue and exclaimed, ‘Christ, Francis. What in God’s name is that?’
Lymond walked into the room without answering. There was a swan-necked oil flagon of tinselled glass on one table: he unstoppered it, and filling a silver lamp, set it alight. Not until he had finished, did he turn to them both. ‘It is a statue of Perun,’ he said. ‘A Slavic pre-Christian idol. The door was a little open. The dog must have come from this room.’
Philippa said, ‘You knew there was oil in that flagon!’ and Lymond answered from where he was searching, quickly, discreetly, knowledgeably as in all the rooms they had entered.
‘I have another like it in my house at Vorobiovo.’
Philippa felt Jerott stir. She said quickly, ‘I told you I met Güzel here once. The Dame called her cousin. Did you ever ask Güzel about the connection?’
‘The occasion never arose,’ Lymond said. ‘Güzel was Dragut’s mistress, and Dragut on occasion sent expensive gifts to King Henri, as the Sultan himself did. That would be how Güzel’s visits were made, and how the dog came here, I fancy “cousin” was a courtesy title.’
‘Will Güzel come back?’ Jerott said.
‘No. I rather think, in this Jeu de Prophètes, her part has been played,’ Lymond said. ‘I told you I thought there were some books missing. I have another mystery for you to ponder. Where are the horoscopes?’
They stared at him. ‘With her clients?’ said Jerott. ‘We’ve seen the charts and the room where she worked on them. If she kept any back, they’d be stored there.’
‘The commissioned ones, of course, with her clients,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘But she was a mischievous, meddling woman. The interesting horoscopes in this house would be the uncommissioned ones. The horoscope of the King; the Queen; the Constable; the Duchess de Valentinois … Of all of us, since she took such an interfering interest in our lives. We have one room to search yet. Will you do something for me? Will you let me search it myself?’
His sleeves blackened; his wine-ruddy face smeared with dust, Jerott viewed his former commander. ‘I was going downstairs anyway,’ he said with hauteur. ‘If you don’t need my help any longer. Philippa?’
‘I’ll come in a moment,’ said Philippa quietly. And as Jerott took his candle and left, she added, ‘I should like, as a safeguard, to wait in the anteroom. Would that worry you?’
Jerott’s footsteps receded. Philippa heard the stair door open carefully, and then firmly close. The tread, still truculent, diminished in sound and than vanished. Lymond said, ‘… For it is full of serpents, of dragons and of cockodrills, that no man dare dwell there. For whose safety? Mine? And from what?’
‘The beastly snare,’ said Philippa tartly, ‘of over-confidence. A certificate for social ingenuity isn’t going to carry much weight in that bedchamber.’
Lymond beat the dust off his hands and quenching the flame in the lamp, lifted the triple candlestick which had lit his part of their journey and led the way, undisturbed, past the rooms they had just explored. ‘You forget. I am in such high favour, the Lady left me all her fortune. And here I am—All sall de done, fair lucky Dame—to obey her. I think you should go downstairs.’
They had reached the antechamber, closing the last door behind them. In the stilled flame of the candles, she turned and faced him. Behind the well-mannered authority she wondered if there was a thread of tension: an echo of the tightness she felt in the air, in her head, in the quality of the silence about them. The windowless room wavered in shadow; the dog, its long head laid where it had last breathed, seemed to stir as if the woven princes had called it. Philippa said, ‘I smell what you smell. I smell danger.’
Surprisingly, he gave her his attention. He said, ‘Shall I seal the last chamber, and leave it?’
There was a long pause. Then Philippa shook her head slowly. ‘I brought you here; but the knowledge of what you must do should come to you, not to me,’ she said. ‘Go in, if you must. I shall wait for you.’
‘Yes, I must,’ Lymond said. ‘If I run out barking, you may commit me with her other familiars. There is the candlestick. I shall light another to carry. Do you know the rest of the poem?’
‘What? No!’ said Philippa, taken aback.
‘It’s very beautiful,’ Lymond said.
‘Camile vestent de chemise,
De fin blialt de balcasin;
Corone ot an son chief d’or fin,
La cepre tint an sa main destre,
En son piz tint la senestre.
Enmi la volte fu asise
La tumbe ou Camile fu mise …’
‘Why are you chanting?’ said Philippa. ‘To warn off the spirits, or to bring them?’
Lymond picked up his fresh-lighted candlestick. ‘Because it seems appropriate,’ he said. ‘Or I have been made to think so.
‘Une liste ot d’or el tonbel,
Letres i ot fait a neel,
Son epitafe i fu escrit.
La letre sone, li vers dit:
“Ci gist Camile la pucelle,
Qui molt fu proz et molt fu belle
Et molt ama chevalerie
Et maintint la tote sa vie.…” ’
The door to the bedchamber was bronze, hung between twisted stone posts, and the handle was a grinning horned head with a shining bronze ring in its mouth. Philippa watched Lymond’s hand closing on it; saw him press; saw the heavy door stir on its hinges.
It began to open, on darkness. When it was wide enough to admit him and no wider, Francis Crawford released the ring and walked past it into the chamber.
*
Because he had been here before, he knew what to expect: the windowless cathedral with its silent worshippers of wood and marble and metal; the falling black gauzes of mouldering colours; the dead precipitation of incense; of damp; of decay. The statues, culled from every age and every civilization, still glimmered within the weak measure of the candleflame: the hawk-head of Menthu; the axe of Rama; the bow of Eros; the four stone mouths of Svantovit from their niches above the pale sarcophagi, the tables of bronze and of marble, the chests with their labyrinthine friezes of clutching hand and smooth eye.
Flanked by seraphim, the four golden pillars of the bed, shrouded in membrane, glimmered far to the right. Ahead, drowned in tapestried shadows, the tall chair of state stood empty now on its dais. The canopied chair with its crocketed spires where the Dame de Doubtance had sat, austere as a worn silver monstrance within the Saxon gown and the gross yellow plaits, saying, ‘You don’t ask the date of your death? I can tell you.’
Holding high the candlestick, Francis Crawford made his way through the room, his tread quiet on the figured tiles; his attention on the empty chair. He approached, as if he had measured the place, to a spot at the foot of the dais and then, resting the candelabrum on a low column, stood in silence, his hands lightly clasped before it.
Gryphon, pegasus and hippocamp stared unmoving back at him. Nothing had changed. On the right of the chair stood a papal candlestick ten feet high, mitred and peopled with penitents. On the left, on a low Roman table lay a chessboard. The pieces of rock crystal and silver digested the candlelight, translucent and bulbous as lenses. A gilded ring-dove, fixed high in one cornice, bore in its beak a silver gilt chain from which a jacinth lamp hung next to the canopy.
In the candlelight it flared like a poppy. Lymond glanced up, drawn by it. At the same time, a breath of air, light as a chimaera, moved against his skin and extinguished the whole of his candelabrum.
Lymond stood perfectly still, his hands at his sides; his eyes open on darkness. Nothing moved. Weighted and waxen, the old fabrics were silent; the closed and untenanted chests had no voices left: the gods in their alcoves were beyond reach of a whispered awakening. He waited for what, even to himself, seemed a very long time, and then, moving softly, drew out tinder and relit the candles.
Beyond them, on a table, stood an oil flagon, the third of its kind; identical with the one he had just opened in the room which had once been Güzel’s. As he noticed it, the candleflame again wavered.
Before the draught could strengthen, he had lifted and unstoppered the oil flask. Then, drawing the lamp chain gently down on its light pulley, he filled and lit the lamp and raised it once more, so that its mellow glow touched the tarnished fringe of the heavy canopy and burnished the breast of the ring-dove. Then, taking up the candlestick, he turned his back on the chair and began, with infinite pains, the task of searching the bedchamber.
A task from which an imaginative man might have excused himself from superstitious fear, or from revulsion. An exercise which a sensitive man would have abandoned at the outset, attuned to the pagan spirits within the chamber: the sense of dim, faded anger; of resistance, even, as the coffers were persuaded open and the gowns, the hangings, the linens, the caskets of contorted rings and filigree necklaces and turned wooden girdles were deftly investigated.
Francis Crawford embarked on his search and completed it, neglecting nothing; and if he had any natural feeling, none was visible. Even when, as he was finishing, the candles finally expired he showed no surprise, but closed the last drawers in a marquetry desk without hurry, and turned in the shadows to look at the long crowded room and the high chair at its end, still illumined by the small fiery star of the oil lamp. Across the dark spaces the monumental candlestick shone dusty gold, and the chessmen glimmered like moonstones.
Less bright than either were the folds of brocade which charged the seat of the chair and fell from it. Tarnished brocade, which stiffly coped the still kneecaps it covered, and lay in stony scrolls about the slippered foot on the dais. The half-open hand on the bliaud held no sceptre, and there was no crown on the regal head which stared from the canopied blackness; only a hennin set on two coarse golden plaits which lay within the red veil of the lamplight.
The Dame de Doubtance’s chair was once more occupied. And the cold, running drenching through all the room, told of anger as the lightless eyes, without movement, stared straight into Lymond’s.
His hands closed. Then, his back very straight he walked slowly forward until he stood, as before, in front of the dais.
There he halted. In the dim ruby light his hair glowed like silk seen through a wine glass. A breath came from the chair, bearing speech with it.
‘Aucassins …’
‘I am here,’ Francis Crawford said softly.
‘And not afraid?’ The whisper was harsh.
‘Of many things. But not of the grave.’
Within the cavity of the chair nothing moved but sound, and that barely. ‘Li beaus, li blonz … Of what are you afraid?’ came the whisper.
‘Search my mind,’ Lymond said calmly. ‘It is open to you.’
The chair was silent. Below the threshold of hearing the other dead forms in the room, touched by air and by warmth seemed to stir faintly, waking. The man, unmoving, gave no appearance of heeding them.
So it seemed untoward that presently he should flinch without warning, and that his chin should lift and his face harden, like that of a man threatened by enemies. From the chair, loud and harsh and not in a whisper at all came a long, contemptuous cackle of laughter. Then the whisper said, as if nothing had happened, ‘You are foresworn. You should fear me.’
This time he did not answer at once, and when he did, it was carefully. He said, ‘I am here because you willed it.’
‘I willed,’ said the seated figure, ‘that all I owned should be yours. You have wronged me.’
He said gently, ‘Had I done otherwise, I should have wronged Marthe. Who is Marthe?’
Like a powerful snake coiled and striking within the chair, the voice hissed and cried, loud as a street-call: ‘Sotte! Putain! Trafiqueuse! Have I died for this?’
He did not speak. The lamp burned. Then softly the voice said, in the old threadbare whisper, ‘Marthe is a vagabond. You have learned pity. You have met evil. What, Aucassins … What of love?’
This time his voice of its own accord was quite steady. ‘I have learned love as well. For a nation,’ said Francis Crawford.
‘For no person?’ said the voice from the shadows.
‘For no person,’ said Lymond, assenting. ‘If Marthe is a vagabond, who is Güzel?’
A snigger came from the chair. Then the whisper said, sharply, ‘The mistress of Dmitri Ivanovich Vishnevetsky.’
‘And what,’ said Lymond softly, ‘is your name?’
The room all about him stopped breathing. Then from the chair rose a singing vibration, like the note of a tuning fork, or a voice humming in madness, or pleasure. When it came, it was the loud voice that spoke, coyly muted. ‘You know … You know. You see, you cannot quite keep me out. You know. Ah!… that it is Camille the Volscian.’
He said abruptly, ‘I know. You will harm her.’
And the voice, threadbare again, said, ‘You speak in riddles. What would you ask me?’ And then, loudly, ‘He will not ask. He is afraid.’
‘I will ask,’ Lymond said, ‘who is my sister?’
The faint voice, sighing, answered him. ‘You wish to know who you are? Many men go to the grave without that favour. You are the husband of Philippa Somerville and under cursing, will remain so. Do you hear me? Do you hear me, both of you?’
‘She is outside,’ Lymond said.
‘She is at your elbow,’ said the whisper from the canopy. A voice laughed harshly. His face blanched, Francis Crawford swung round from the dais.
Behind him, Philippa stepped from the murmuring darkness. The distant light textured the floating brown hair and drew glints from the absurd fluted stomacher. Her face, high-browed and burnished, looked up at his without fear.
‘I am of the loyal cranes,’ she said, ‘that stand round the King at night holding stones in their feet. Love, fear and reverence: write these upon the three stones of the cranes.’
She smiled at him gravely and, turning to the tall chair under the ruby lamp, spoke to it. ‘Accident joined us. Why should any such marriage be binding?’
The young, fresh, practical voice rang through the room. Round the chair, the air became dead. When the next words came, they were slow and faint, and addressed to Lymond. ‘I have promised your grandfather.’
Lymond said, ‘My grandfather is dead. And what did you promise concerning the marriage of Marthe and Jerott?’
The voice was cold. ‘Did the woman Marthe promise love?’
‘She promised kindness,’ said Lymond. Behind him the room spoke, in a sound as fine as the stretch of a ligament.
‘Jerott Blyth has had kindness,’ said the still, sexless voice; and chilled them with the breath of its disdain. It deepened. ‘Have you learned nothing? You should have died with the dog.… The bond will endure. Swear to it! The marriage will stand. Swear to it! Speak my name!’
‘Camille,’ said Lymond. Behind him there came again, far away, the small sound of movement.
The voice rang. ‘Keep me with you.’
‘I am with you,’ said Lymond. The sound came again, louder. Philippa looked at him.
‘Then swear!’ The voice altered and rolled, rebutted from corner to corner. ‘The marriage will stand. I have your mind in my palm. I will crush it.’
‘Then do so,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘I renounce the bond and the marriage. I defy you, Camille. Do us harm if you dare.’
‘No!’ said Philippa suddenly. A wand of pale light, dropping through the powdery air, fell slanting beside her and accepted the contours of cabinet and ewer and ciborium. Her hands on her skirts, she swept round and saw what had caused it.
Jarred by a monstrous and uneven thrust, the bronze door behind her had begun to swing out on its hinges. It opened slowly, shuddering, and the boom of it rose and fell like a mustering wave in a sea cavern, gathering resonance with its momentum.
Philippa heard. Lymond shout, pitching his words through the clamour; but she did not hear what he said.
Nor did the man on the threshold. Wide-shouldered and powerful, silhouetted against the flickering light of the candlesticks Jerott Blyth found the resonance, in his wrath, of Assurbanipal. But fiercer even than that was the shrieking voice from the chair, overpowering it. ‘Swear! Swear! The marriage stands, or I curse you! Francis Crawford!’
Then the swinging bronze door reached its terminus. It thundered into the wall; and the shock of it rolled through the room like the hoofbeats of the Volscian’s squadrons, splendid with brass; and clashed in the skull like its bucklers.
‘Francis Crawford!’ said the powerful voice. ‘In fire is your friend; in flood is your foe; in powder is your release. Remember me!’
Then Jerott set foot in the chamber.
Philippa faced him. Francis Crawford ran like a deer in the other direction. Before Jerott was well inside the room Lymond was half-way to the dais. As the echoes diminished, he reached it. The flame from the jacinth lamp streamed in the draught, plunging the mouth of the chair into darkness. The light from the doorway, rimming Jerott’s striding legs and broad shoulders, played on other limbs that were also moving: golden limbs, sweetly poised below the pure childish face and outspread wings of the Eros.
Jerott stopped. Philippa cried out. Only Lymond, unheeding, pitched himself headlong at the dais as the singing silence was marred by a rattle.
The bolt had sprung from the bow of the statue. Bright as fire it swam through the air to where, rosy-breasted, there swayed the golden ring-dove with the silver-gilt chain in its keeping.
The bolt struck. The dove hung on the air, a tinselled cloud of white powder. And the chain, whipping back through its pulley, sent the carmine lamp flying downwards, streaming flame and hot oil, to the canopy.
Before it reached it, Lymond had rammed the tall chair with all the force of his shoulder. The canopy broke in a spray of webbed dirt and splinters. The chair heeled and lingered under his pressure. Then it toppled, almost dragging him with it, and the blazing lamp dropped where it had rested.
There was a table carpet near Philippa, its surface burdened with treasures. She wrenched the mat from beneath them and fled with it. Lymond, jumping down, had already done the same with an altar cloth, and disregarding the complaining angels, had flung the thing on the spreading flames and was trampling on it. Side by side they twisted: thrashing, stamping, stifling the seeded fires sprung up all around them.
The head of Kuan Yin, her fingertips streaming fire, lay on Philippa’s shoulder as she swaddled her, and Lymond beat out the last of the flames and addressed her.
‘Et chi est la fins dou Roumanch. It pays to study one’s Gothic romances,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Perhaps you will allow me to handle this. As you say, we are going to need more than a certificate.’ And turning, he made his way through the smoke and the debris to where the felled chair still lay motionless.
Caught up in the crisis, Philippa had almost forgotten what led to it. But Jerott had not. Unmoved by the flames as if they had no true existence, he had occupied himself with bringing in light. The candelabra from the antechamber were now inside the room, and beside it Lymond’s candles, all burning. He had found and touched off others too, and it was with his hands full of light that he strode now to where the splintered throne lay on its side, in a tawdry tangle of spangles and buckram.
Beside the rucked cloth lay a slipper, of a fashion long since disappeared; the velvet toe narrow and pointed, and the laces tied with a jewel. And woven into the tumble of fabric was something else: a long plait of coarse yellow fibre tossed with a sheet of pale silk which divided, moving, into shining ribbons of young, living hair, combed back from a face which, recumbent and dust-smeared, still contrived for her husband a stare, looking up, of contempt and anger and bitterness.
The moment of surprise for Jerott was long over, but he still spoke her name, looking down, the candles bright in his hands. ‘Marthe.’
And Francis Crawford, walking over, said gently, ‘Touch not mine anointed, and do my prophets no harm. She could have died, Jerott.’
‘Who would have mourned?’ Jerott said. He was breathing heavily. He said, ‘You know her. To get what she wants, she’ll do anything, hurt anyone. Even …’ He stopped and then said, ‘Most of all, me.’
‘Was this to hurt you?’ Lymond said. ‘I don’t think so. For some reason she wants me to hold by my marriage. I don’t know why. Perhaps, if you ask her, you’ll find the old woman wanted it. At any rate, Marthe had nothing to gain by it. And she took the greatest risk, knowingly. Anyone aware of that poem would guess what was going to happen. The Dame de Doubtance was mad. But she tried to ensure that if anyone usurped her shadow, it would be one of her own kind, who knew the danger and was prepared to withstand it.’
Marthe moved. With the golden light bright on her hair she began, slowly and smoothly, to free herself from the broken chair and its canopy, saying nothing and ignoring the hand Lymond held, kneeling, to her.
Jerott, standing, made no move to help her at all. Instead, he said, ‘She had something to gain. By maintaining your marriage, she keeps you beside her.’
Martha stood upright. ‘For carnal pleasure?’ she said, and laughed wildly. ‘Like unto Uranus and Gaea? It hadn’t occurred to me. On the other hand, it is a gift of Francis’s to fill his house with sons bred in incest.’
Jerott lifted his hand. Lymond caught the powerful wrist in his fingers. Philippa choked, and Francis Crawford spoke softly to the lovely woman he had called his step-sister. ‘He who strips the wall bare, on him will it fall.… You knew of the trap. Why not dismantle it?’
‘Because,’ said Marthe, ‘that was the instruction the Dame de Doubtance left for me. I am cursed enough, I sometimes fancy, without incurring her further displeasure. The trap was to be sprung only by you.’
‘Why?’ said Lymond. At his side he gripped Jerott’s wrist still.
‘Is this why?’ said Philippa, her voice reaching remote over the chamber. And the three others turned.
With eyes of copper, of stone, of crystal, the images in the room gave back unchanged the stare of its invaders. Only, the painted leather panels of the wainscotting had all, as in a galliard, changed places. Where they had been was a chequer of pigeon holes: neat recesses in black from which, here and there, gleamed a scroll-end of slender, rolled paper.
‘The horoscopes?’ said Lymond. He let Jerott go.
‘And other things,’ said Philippa, a trifle austerely. Her legs were trembling. ‘If she didn’t actually use a broomstick, there were one or two things she preferred to keep out of the way of the Consulat. They’re filed by Zodiac symbols. What sign were you produced under?’
‘I haven’t the slightest idea,’ said Lymond shortly. ‘But I’m sure, whatever it is, you will find the chart before anyone. Jerott, come with me. Marthe, your stock in trade is lying all over the floor. I suggest you begin to pick it up and leave the genealogy to Labour here, with a vine in her hand. Did you reach the chair through a door in the panelling?’
‘Yes,’ said Marthe. Her bearing was still one of contemptuous amusement but she also had begun, if you looked very closely, to tremble. She said, ‘Are you going to tell me that you guessed who I was from the beginning?’
He looked at her. ‘Not from your appearance.’
‘How, then?’ Where another woman might have been tearful, she was angry.
‘You spoke … in words,’ he said.
‘So did she!’
‘So did she,’ he assented. After a moment he said, ‘What did you mean, In fire is my friend?’
Marthe said, ‘What?’ She looked both upset and defensive.
‘In flood is my foe? In powder is my release?’
But Marthe’s fair face remained blank. ‘It doesn’t matter,’ said Lymond. ‘I suggest you stay here until I come back, and that you govern your tongue. You are unlikely to drive either Philippa or myself to the wineflask.’ He turned away without looking at Philippa.
Jerott did not want to leave the room. It was a commentary on his lack of trim that Lymond was able to compel him, and quickly, leaving Philippa and his step-sister together.
Philippa was pleased to see them go. Disregarding instructions without hesitation she crossed to where Marthe stood, her ruffled head bent, studying a chipped Isnik dish without seeing it. Philippa said, ‘There’s blood on your arm. Are you hurt anywhere else?’
‘No,’ said Marthe. She watched as Philippa tore a neat strip from her shift and then folded it. She allowed her arm to be taken. ‘A flank attack? Your tactics are a little more subtle, at least, than your husband’s.’
Philippa, baring the gashed forearm, began deftly to bind it, a smear of dust on one tinted cheek. She said, ‘Do you know you spoke in two voices?’
She was so close, she saw Marthe stop breathing and start again. Lymond’s step-sister said, ‘I tried to sound as she might.’
‘You succeeded,’ Philippa said. ‘I think you need to be careful. In any case, he doesn’t give anything away, whoever he thinks he is speaking to. You ought to know that. It only upset Jerott and made him fling out those fatuous accusations. Anyone with any sense can see that you have no more romantic interest in Lymond than I have.’ She completed her task and glanced upwards.
Even to Marthe, born of guile, the honesty of that severe, painted brown gaze must have been palpable. She said, ‘It’s true? You have no interest in him? But everyone either abominates Francis Crawford or longs to possess him. I wonder why you alone should be immune. And if you are … Why are you wasting your life in this tedious search for our parentage?’
Philippa released the bandaged arm. ‘Madame la Maréchale also diagnosed it,’ she said, ‘as a case of Irene and the Emperor Leo. But it’s very much simpler and duller. Mr Crawford’s family think his proper place is at home in Scotland. I agree with them. And while his birth is in doubt, he won’t go there.’
‘I didn’t suspect him,’ said Marthe, ‘of such childishness.’ She no longer looked contemptuous; only thoughtful. ‘Then for yourself, you do want to remarry?’
‘Well, I should prefer not to remain a lifelong spinster,’ said Philippa tartly. ‘But as I said before, I am in no great hurry. Mr Crawford is. There is literally nothing he will not do to have his marriage dissolved, as you notice.’
‘It seems a pity,’ said Lymond’s step-sister. ‘So far as I can see, this marriage should be as convenient for him as any other. Why break it? He can find elsewhere all the pleasures he wants: I take it you wouldn’t grudge them to him? Or does lack of love not exclude jealousy?’
Cornered, Philippa considered her answer. One could remain silent. One could claim, without truth, to be jealous. One did not say, to Marthe or anybody, that since one was a schoolgirl of ten, one had watched the deepening bond between Francis Crawford and one’s mother.
‘Would you have married M. Gaultier?’ said Philippa shortly.
*
By the time Lymond came back, alone, she had completed her search of the panelling and had spread her chief discoveries on a long coffer cleared for her by Marthe, her self-possession once more in evidence. It was, appropriately, a wedding chest, chastely painted with garlands, cupids and large-nosed persons engaged in prenuptial activities of unlikely but harmless intention.
Lymond heeled the door shut and stood watching her.
Marthe straightened, her arms full of silver. ‘Where is Jerott?’
‘Where hast thou hung the carlish knight? And where bestow’d his head? Drunk as a wheelbarrow,’ said Lymond. ‘I thought you would approve. And it’s ever so much kinder than handcuffs. What have you discovered?’
Before Philippa could answer: ‘You will find him on your doorstep tomorrow,’ Marthe said. ‘Begging to be re-admitted to the great corps of St Mary’s.’
‘As the gentleman said, Though you were not roasted, madam, it was a pity you had not been a little scorched,’ Lymond remarked. ‘He has asked me already. I have told him that he may join me, on condition that he brings you along with him. I see no reason why your inconvenient responsibilities should fall on my shoulders. What have you found?’
With regret, ‘Almost nothing,’ Philippa said. ‘Again. Some of the books you might expect. A few drug pots and nasty packages. Some horoscopes of well-known nonentities. All the signs of the Zodiac. If you’re the first of November, you’re Scorpio. A large reporter of his owne Acts. Prudent of behaviour in owne affairs. A lover of Quarrels and theevery, a promoter of frayes and commotions. As wavery as the wind; neither fearing God or caring for Man.’
‘Better,’ said Lymond coldly, ‘to be stung by a nettle than pricked by a rose. What does your panegyric say?’
‘I’m not going to tell you,’ said Philippa. ‘But although the horoscopes are mostly missing, she kept a ledger of subjects and birth dates. You and Marthe are both in it.’
‘Well?’ said Lymond. ‘New gripes of dread then pierce our trembling breasts. Tares or wheat?’
‘No information at all except birthdates. You and Marthe aren’t twins. She was born in ‘24, two years before you. But there’s no sign of a surname for her.’
It was obvious that he did not care. But he said, ‘And no clue therefore to Marthe’s parents, or the Dame de Doubtance’s family?’
‘None,’ said Philippa. ‘There was a nephew of the Lady’s called Cholet, but the branch seems to have died out. She doesn’t seem to have thought it worth including their horoscopes.’
‘Whereas,’ said Marthe, ‘she thought it worth while including the Crawfords. Don’t force him to ask. Read the dates out.’
But Philippa had given the book already to Lymond. ‘Look. There are seven names under Crawford, but you and Richard and your mother are the only ones living. The splendid first baron, of course, born in ’75 and his wife, born 1477, Honoria Bailey. Then in 1495 his son, the nasty Gavin, second baron Crawford of Culter, who married Sybilla Semple, born in ’88. And then Sybilla’s three children, of whom you are one. That, at least, we are sure of.’
‘Are we?’ said Marthe with interest.
Lymond, running his hands through the ledger, left Philippa to answer. ‘We talked downstairs about trying to trace three witnesses. We heard of these people in England. What they witnessed …’ She stopped, glancing at Lymond.
‘Go on,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I am unlikely, under the circumstances, to be discomfited.’
‘… what they witnessed was a pair of deeds by Sybilla, declaring that Mr Crawford and his young sister were hers, but not born to her husband.’
‘Bastards?’ said Marthe. Her eyes were shining. ‘But brought up as if they were Gavin’s?’
‘You have it,’ said Lymond. ‘At the end of the day, look what divine bounty we bring you.’
‘And the true father?’
‘No one knows. But look, there are the entries,’ said Philippa. ‘Richard, the eldest son, born in 1516 and legitimate. Then in ‘26, Mr Crawford. Then, three years afterwards, Eloise, the young sister who died.’
‘You should make a Jesse window of it,’ Marthe murmured. ‘So that is what you are looking for? The name of Sybilla’s lover? Then I wonder perhaps if I have found it?’
She had, at last, Lymond’s fullest attention as well as Philippa’s.
‘Where?’ Lymond said. He laid the ledger aside.
‘Inside the dais,’ Marthe said. ‘Come and see.’
There on its side lay the baldachine chair. Beside it the blackened carpet, felted with dust, had been lifted.
Below were the boards of the dais. And cut through the boards a deep cavity, within which something lay, wrapped in bandaging.
Marthe said, ‘The moving chair tripped some sort of lever. I saw the carpet had sagged and investigated. I haven’t taken anything out.’
She hadn’t taken anything out, Philippa thought, because she hadn’t yet resolved to reveal it. Until just now. Until she had the pleasure of knowing that Francis Crawford, too, had no lineage.
She watched Marthe lift the package, and Lymond receive and unwrap it.
It was small, and inside were only two objects. One of them was a key. The other was a folded sheet of thick yellow paper, with the name Francis Crawford in an unknown hand above the deep-printed wax of the signet.
The key, large enough to fit a main lock, was finely made: for a house, one would say, of no mean size or quality. ‘It doesn’t belong here,’ Marthe said. ‘It might suggest the house of Doubtance at Blois. Or perhaps Sevigny. Or of course, some house here in Lyon, for that matter. I could take it, if you like, to a locksmith.’
‘Thank you,’ said Philippa sourly. She ought, she knew, to be grateful that they had a large door to find, instead of a box or a drawer or a casket. What could possibly be behind it defied her jaded powers of conjecture. She said to Lymond, ‘And the epistle?’
He lifted the letter.
She gave him a paper-knife but he did not use it. He broke the seal with a single impatient movement which tore the sheet and sent the splintered wax flying. Philippa swallowed a cry and sat like a dog as he read it. And Marthe, without speech, did likewise.
He was, of course a volatile spirit. And no doubt, in their overt concern, they looked ludicrous. His eyes lifted, and switched from the brown to the blue gaze devouring him. Then he said, his voice hoarse, in a whisper:
‘His children let be fatherles
Hys wife a wydow make
Let his offspring be vagabondes
To beg and seke their bread:
Wandring out of the wasted place
Where erst they have bene fed.
And so let hys posteritie
For ever be destroyde
Theyr name outblotted in the age
That after shall succede …’
They relaxed. ‘What is it?’ said Marthe impatiently.
‘A record of death,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘The death of an unbaptized male child in Lyon: parents unspecified; date of death November 20th, 1526. Signed by a physician with an unreadable signature. Witnessed by the same priest who attended my mother and who, as we know, is dead also.’
There was a pause. Then Philippa said, ‘Did the child have a name?’ He was smiling.
‘Yes,’ he said; and tossed the torn sheet in her lap. ‘Can’t you guess? It was called Francis Crawford.
‘I do not exist. What you have in your hand is my death certificate.’