Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  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, p
lunging 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 t
o 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.