Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘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, peg
asus 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.