Pawn in Frankincense

by Dorothy Dunnett

  She saw him before she left; but it did not occur to her to give him any spurious parting embrace, any more than she had expected to receive one at her wedding.

  Yet he himself had bestowed one, on Khaireddin. It was, perhaps, the most disturbing of all the things she had seen him do.

  Kuzúm liked the boat.

  29

  Volos

  They kept Lymond in the crowded ward of the hospital until he recovered consciousness. Then they moved him to one of the almshouses, a small, self-contained building with a low common-room and, above, one small cell with a bed.

  This became his. At first he lay there, his eyes closed, while the nursing brethren spoke in whispers to Jerott. Such stillness was what the overstrained body required. Pray God it would last.

  Downstairs, Jerott unleashed his anxious irritation on Marthe. ‘They know it can’t last. Why don’t they admit it?’

  ‘They are kind. They are innocent. They believe God is merciful,’ said Marthe.

  From the moment of Lymond’s collapse, the supply of opium had been cut off completely. This isolation and privacy were what Archie had advised, and the priest in charge of the sick man endorsed it, his wise eyes turning from Jerott to Marthe. ‘Have you seen one thus afflicted when the drug is withdrawn? There is acute pain, intestinal and muscular, with intense weakness and tremors and nausea. That is in the body. In the spirit, there is also a peculiar anguish and isolation, a madness I can compare only with the frenzy of total bereavement. This young man has a strong and resilient body. Pray that this may be true of his mind.’

  He was strong-minded enough, when the time came, to send the nursing monks packing. It was the first sign of trouble: the priest on duty descending the stairs from the sickroom, his robe dragging on the rough unfinished wood, and walking over to Jerott. ‘I fear I and my brothers can be of no further help.’

  At first Jerott believed they were abandoning Francis. Then he understood that it was the other way round. ‘He does not wish us to attend him. It is not wise, but it is understandable,’ said the priest. ‘Indeed, there is nothing we can do that you, his friends, cannot now do better.’

  One could not argue with that. Jerott was silent. It was Marthe, accepting it, who said, ‘I shall sleep here then, if a bed can be made up in the common-room. I suppose one of us should be on call.’ And Marthe who, when the arrangements had been made, walked upstairs with the first tray of bouillon and entered the sickroom for the first time.

  There was little in the room but the bed, placed between the door and the two small windows pierced in the outer wall of the courtyard. And it was the bed, its clean, coarse linen in a rucked, disembowelled heap, which held her attention: that and the fair hair and twisted robe and claw hands of the man tangled within it, his face buried unseen. Then Lymond stirred, breathing sharply, and after a moment abruptly changed his position. His face came round, heavy-lidded: written over and over with desperate suffering; and his eyes opened full upon Marthe.

  He had no more colour to lose. Instead, he took a short breath like a man hit in the face, and stayed where he was, with hauteur, in all that humiliating disorder. Marthe put down the tray with a small jolt, which she had not intended, and said evenly, There is soup for you. If you want anything, ask for it. Jerott and I will do what we can.’

  Thank you,’ said Francis Crawford. His voice was cynical, and almost as steady as hers. ‘The origin of pain, says Buddha, is the thirst for pleasure; the thirst for existence, the thirst for change. Destroy your passions as an elephant throws down a hut built of reeds: the only remedy for evil is healthy reality. You are my healthy reality. I am indebted to you. But as I have already told the hospital brethren, I need no further attention.’

  ‘You need food,’ said Marthe. ‘If we do not bring it, then the priests must. It is a time for logic, not vanity.’

  His lashes were wet and the pillows sodden with sweat. He said, ‘And a time, I suppose, for revenge.’

  Her hair, drawn back in its shining silk coils, was the same gold as his: her face, pale and high-boned and controlled, came from the same mould. She said, ‘I am not here to mock. Ring the bell if you want help. Jerott will come if he can. If not, you will have to put up with me.’

  To Jerott below, she said merely, ‘It has begun.’

  Once under way, the illness gained weight like an avalanche, and the next time Jerott climbed the stairs he found the door locked and, listening, realized that Lymond was up somehow and roving the room, the light footfalls buffeting up and down, backwards and forwards, round and round. Jerott spoke through the door, and knocked, but received no answer then or later; nor did Marthe on the same errand. They alternated like clock weights, said Jerott with bitterness, through the entire dreary day until evening, when Jerott lost patience and threatened to kick in the door.

  A moment later the key turned and the door crashed back open as Francis Crawford, turning back inside, sat on the bed, his head in his hands. He said, without looking up, ‘Do what you have to do, and get out.’

  Jerott banged down the milk he had brought. ‘Look. If you are having pains, scream. If you are seeing thousand-pound elephant birds with reinforced iron nests, tell us and we shall believe you. If you want to climb up and jump from the roof, let me tell you that we feel exactly the same. Only don’t lock your door like a maiden aunt with the gravel.’

  Lymond moved suddenly, and then was still. ‘I agree in principle,’ he said. ‘Only, if I did begin screaming … you wouldn’t like it.’ He added abruptly, ‘I don’t want Marthe. Send her away.’

  His brows drawn, Jerott looked down on him. ‘She could have gone with the others. She stayed behind to look after you.’

  ‘Oh, Christ. I don’t …’ began Lymond and broke off, stopped by a long, shuddering yawn, the circles brown-black under his eyes.

  ‘You don’t need help?’ said Jerott with desperate sarcasm. ‘Or I don’t need help?’

  Like a man lifting a great weight, Lymond looked up. With the same terrible effort, he said flatly, ‘Every time that door opens … I start counting. And I go on counting until it shuts again. Otherwise I should be on my knees, crying for … what I want. If you want to help me … keep out. If you want to shame me, send Marthe. She and I are … unmerciful adversaries.’

  Jerott’s breath caught at the top of his stomach; but this time he knew what must be done; and he did it.

  ‘You and she are brother and sister,’ he said.

  Francis Crawford gave a small sigh. His face, already stripped to the bone by extreme physical stresses, looked suddenly as if it had been pushed apart, flesh and muscle, by some grisly, slow-moving stamp. He said, ‘If she says so … she’s lying,’ and, raising himself with shaking hands from the edge of the bed, stood for a moment staring unseeing at Jerott. Then one of the great waves of cramping pain took him, and he turned and grasped at the window-ledge, gasping, his brow on the glass.

  Jerott went forward and put his hands hard on his shoulders, but Lymond stayed there, his throat knotted, and would not turn round. After a long time, he spoke. ‘If she comes in here again, I shall kill her.’

  Jerott let his hands drop. ‘She won’t come,’ he said curtly. ‘And neither shall I, if I can help it. There is a bell, if you want me.’ And he left abruptly, closing the door; leaving Lymond to face whatever was coming as he wanted, alone.

  He did, in his own fashion; nor did he ring all that night. As the new day dragged its way on, the watchers below were able to follow, by sound, the steadily rising violence of the whole onslaught until as the sun reached its height a voice above joined the uneven footsteps; softly at first, and then in outbursts of noise, stopping raggedly and starting without warning and rising to strange rhythmic climaxes before falling to a murmur again.

  Her eyes on Jerott, Marthe rose and went upstairs; and after a while Jerott joined her where she sat in the passage above, outside Lymond’s room, her cheek pressed to the cold wall. When Jerott made to speak
she held up her hand, and he took his place beside her in his turn, and, in his turn, listened.

  If I screamed, you wouldn’t like it, Lymond had said. And because the anguish could now no longer be borne, and because he would not scream, he was using the uncontrollable voice, the trumpet of suffering and conduit of impossible sorrows. And he had dressed it, as a burning ship sets out her fragments of bunting, with the trappings of poetry. Agony spoke in the ringing, uneven voice, but decently transmuted into the words of the poets, flowing onwards and onwards, verse after verse, tongue after tongue.

  En un vergier lez une fontenele

  Dont clere est l’onde et blanche la gravel

  siet fille a roi, sa main a son maxele

  en sospirant son douz ami rapele …

  Still under the leavis green

  This hinder day, I went alone

  I heard ane mai sair murne and meyne

  To the King of Love she made her moan …

  I pray thee, for the love of God

  Go build Nejátí’s tomb of marble …

  He spokç each poem through to the end, and beside Jerott, Marthe’s lips moved, following. Sometimes the hard-pressed voice, uplifted, made no sense of the words it spoke. Then when the violence died would come relief, and the voice would pick its way again:

  Unlike the moon is to the sonne sheen

  Eke January is unlike to May …

  Sometimes the voice trailed into silence, perhaps even into sleep for two minutes or five. Then it would leap into life, footsteps treading the boards back and forwards accompanying it, and a little thicker, a little more tired, it would go on with its recital, rising, holding and failing to a tide not its own.

  Jerott stood half an hour of it and then left, suddenly, his face white, walking straight through the common-room and out into the faint golden sunshine where he sat, his hands over his ears.

  Marthe stayed. She stayed until the voice, now roughened and slow, found trouble at last in sustaining that uneven flow of beauty and other men’s wisdom and stumbled, spinning the fabric of poetry too thinly to conceal what was lying beneath. Then she opened the door, and went in to him.

  Lymond was beyond attacking her now, and almost beyond reasoned thought. He stood between the two windows, his back to the wall, and his face was nothing but eyes, blue and lightless and dead. Staring at her, he looked like a man crossing a chasm on a fine skein of silk; who has seen its strands fray, and now watches an enemy untie the whole.

  ‘Whom have ye known die honestly without the help of a potecary?’ said Marthe. ‘We can do better than this. Turn your back to me, and listen.’ And paying him no further attention, she sat down on the ruin of his bed and recited, hugging her knees.

  J’ay bien nourry sept ans ung joly gay

  En une gabiolle

  Et quant ce vint au premier jour de may

  Mon joly gay s’en vole …

  In the next verse his voice chimed in wildly, and because he was entrenched by the wall, his eyes closed, he did not see her eyes fill up, sparkling with tears, though her voice barely faltered.

  Two voices ended the poem and started the next and the next, following Marthe’s lead through verse half known and forgotten, kept fresh and exact in her strange, precise mind.

  Hast thou no mind of love? Where is thy make?

  Or art thou sick, or smit with jealousy?

  Or is she dead, or hath she thee forsake …?

  La Sphère en rond, de circuit lassée

  Pour ma faveur, malgré sa symétrie

  En nouveau cours contre moi s’est poussée …

  Ysonde to land wan

  With seyl and with ore

  Sehe mete an old man

  Of berd that was hore …

  Mis arreos son las armas

  Mi descanso es pelear

  Mi cama, las duras penas

  Mi dormir, siempre velar …

  She stayed all afternoon and evening, and all through the night. Sometimes he couldn’t keep up. Sometimes, when the attack was at its height, he broke off, the breath dead in his throat, and crouched gasping with pain by the bed until, girder by girder, he built up his courage again and, rising, wrapped the voice of his torment once more in the words Marthe brought him.

  Throughout it all, she never attempted to touch him; even when, towards morning, he was so tired that he slept sometimes where he knelt until, driven upright again, unstrung and suffering, he would lift his eyes and, looking out of the blank greying panes, begin all over again.

  But sleep, this time, was coming. Each spell of quiet had begun to last longer: the frayed voice, dropped to a whisper, told over its verses with less and less violence. At last, as the light slowly brightened and he stood, swaying a little, his back to the wall, he began, without her, a poem Marthe had not chosen.

  I have a young sister far beyond the sea

  Many be the dowries that she sent me

  She sent me the cherry withouten any stone

  And so she did doo withouten any bone

  She sent me the briar without any rind

  She bade me love my leman withoute longing

  How could any cherry be without stone?

  And how could any doo be without bone?

  How could any briar be without rind?

  And how could I love my leman without longing?

  Somewhere in the white shell of his face, there was a lost spark of a smile, for Marthe. Speaking softly, Marthe answered it.

  When the cherry was in flower: then it had no stone

  When the briar was unbred: then it had no rind

  When the doo was an egg, then it had no bone

  When the soul has what it loves: it is without longing.

  ‘… You see,’ said Marthe. ‘I am not here to mock. I have worn out my revenge. You have guided me into a world which has been closed to me all my life. You have shown me that what I hold by, you hold by and more. You have shown me strength I do not possess, and humanity I thought belonged only to women. You are a man, and you have explained all men to me.…’

  His eyes were closed, nor did he give any sign that he had heard her. Marthe smiled and, moving closer, laid her hand for the first time on his. ‘Francis. It is morning. Come and sleep.’

  She had made the sheet smooth, and the pillow in its place was fair and downy and deep. She held the bedlinen back while he came to her; and when he lay still and delivered in its cool depths, she folded it round, barely touching him. He was already asleep.

  The stairs were dark and uncertain, and she walked down them trembling, her icy hand gripping the rail. Below, in the grey light, Jerott was standing, his face white and strained and full of a queer and difficult grief.

  He opened his arms and Marthe ran into them crying, and stayed there weeping as if she had just learned of madness; and been informed of the nature of death.

  It was the turning-point. Lymond woke in exhausted peace, flat on the pillows, and allowed Jerott to do what he wished.

  Later, when Marthe went to his room, he received her with unclouded tranquillity, and quoted her own words back at her as she sat at his side. ‘Whom have ye known die honestly without the help of a potecary?’

  Marthe, searching his face, drew a breath. ‘Last night you called me something else.’

  His face was grave, but the smile had not quite left his eyes. ‘I called you sister,’ he said. ‘Was I right?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Marthe. And hesitating: ‘What made you sure?’

  ‘The luggage of poetry you carry,’ said Francis Crawford; and far down in the tired eyes the smile lingered still. ‘Your other burdens I can also share.’

  ‘I want no ties,’ said Marthe. ‘I need no help.’ As an afterthought, she added, ‘You have made free enough with your name.’

  His thin-boned hands, lying loose on the counterpane, drifted slowly together and folded. He said, ‘Are you sure it is my name you should bear?’

  In the little silence that followed she could hear
clearly the tick of a clock. Like him, she knew too much poetry.… Uncivil clock, like the foolish tapping of a tipsy cobbler. A blasphemy on its face; a dark mill, grinding the night.… A nerve flicked, like a thread, at the side of his mouth and was gone.

  Marthe said, ‘No, I’m not sure. I know the names of neither of my progenitors, nor have I any longing to know. To me, the matter is nothing.… My first recollection was of my convent at Blois: my only relations have been with the Dame and Georges Gaultier. And they answered no questions.’

  Lymond said, ‘Gaultier is dead,’ his rising tension betrayed by his voice.

  ‘So is the Dame de Doubtance,’ said Marthe. ‘Your meeting with her was the last one: did she not say so to you? Surely you felt her beside you when you chose Kuzucuyum? Surely you knew she was with us last night? She died when you slept, at daybreak this morning.’

  He didn’t ask how she knew. He accepted what she had said because he had reason to do so, and said only, ‘She died, knowing your parentage?’

  Marthe shrugged. ‘The secret died with her. It would trouble her little. She had breathed life into her puppets: you and I to discover what in ourselves we still lacked. Philippa to be gilded as befitted her spirit. Jerott … to be taken from you. And my lover and I to be parted.’

  For a while Lymond did not speak. Then he said, ‘What do you believe she wanted for Jerott?’

  Marthe’s hands also were interlaced; her firm chin was high, her eyes dense and steady. ‘Kindness,’ she said. ‘He will have it.’ Then she rose, quietly because he had had more than enough, and said, ‘You will rest and get well. Jerott tells me you will not go at once back to Scotland. What then will you do?’

  His slow voice was wry. ‘Earn my living. And that of my … new dependants.’

  And Marthe turned at the door, her pale fall of hair alight with the sun from the window; the tired della Robbia face, so like his own, reflecting his irony. ‘There is no need. You are a rich man, brother,’ she said. ‘All of which Gaultier died possessed was bequeathed to the Dame de Doubtance, his patron. And all she had in each of her houses was willed, so long as I have known her, to you.’