Checkmate (10 page)

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.

‘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.

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.