Queens' Play

  She came back and looked down, her voice crisp. ‘I dislike being coerced. I decided that if you lived, I should bring you away. You were fortunate, lying near the foot of the Tower, and I had a boat waiting in the fog, and two to help me.’

  ‘How long is it since then?’

  ‘Have you really no idea?’ She laughed. ‘You have been helpless for five days, Mr. Crawford.’

  Five days! His brain recorded the surprise, and then deadened under the thundering onslaught of pain. The room had gone again, and the face above him was queerly detached, the painted leaves filling her hair. But he met her contemptuous stare and held it as long as he could, until he began to cough, the iron stale in his throat, and the dark came quickly and coldly again.

  The next time he woke to the light of a different day. The straps round his body were still in place; but the windows were wide on a sunlit balcony and the candles, sourly smoking, had been freshly doused. From the violent paradisaical dreams he remembered, and the heavy, throttled sense of incipient pain, he knew that the taper fumes had been used to keep him asleep.

  The peace it had brought him was probably the best treatment his abused and broken body could have had. But it had been done, of course, for her own ends. Nothing had ever deceived Lymond about Oonagh O’Dwyer. He watched her now as she sat, unaware of him, by the fire where she and O’LiamRoe had talked before his own unforgivable serenade, her cheekbones shadowed, her high, full brow bright with clear light; the two fine half-arcs of sleeplessness, of high-tempered strain, like a tread in snow beneath her two eyes; her hard, mobile lips shut. He said, his voice carefully preserved, ‘Who are you waiting for? Your aunt?’

  Her hands closed together, a cage of white bone. Then, leaning back, she settled her gaze on the low, temporary bed, the bracing only visible in the brittle line of her jaw. Worn by solitariness and unconceded fears and an absence of sleep she was more than ever a beautiful woman with no time for beauty. She said, choosing her words this time with cold care, ‘If it were, you would be dead.’

  There was no sound from inside the house: no clanking of pails, no kitchen chatter, no footsteps on the stairs. It was an empty house, then, and her aunt did not know. Beyond the balcony, the cast of the rooftops was familiar. He thought of the Tour des Minimes and wondered what the tale of injured had been; but decided against wasting questions. He said, ‘You and the gentleman attempting to kill me have parted company?’

  Oonagh smiled. ‘You might say that we disagreed on a minor point,’ she said. ‘But don’t run away with the idea that you’re going to be freed. For his purposes and mine you are as well imprisoned as dead; and what he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.’

  Lymond lay still, trying to think. A long time ago, in Scotland, Mariotta had told him about Oonagh O’Dwyer. Even before Rouen and O’LiamRoe’s shame in the tennis courts he had been wary; yet she had resisted every effort to draw her, while hardly troubling to conceal that she knew who Thady Boy was. The man she had wished out of the way had been O’LiamRoe. Robin Stewart and his master, too, had tried to assail O’LiamRoe in the belief that he was Lymond. She knew better, but she had not enlightened them.

  But then, Stewart had been allowed to discover Lymond’s identity and, it must be assumed, had told his principal; the accident at the Tour des Minimes had resulted. And Oonagh, who disliked coercion, and whose prevarication over O’LiamRoe had just come to light, knew of the scheme and had decided in advance, typically, not to save him … but to rescue him if he lived. So that the gentleman whose demands she resented, and Robin’s master, were the same.

  Who? She had not said. Think again. Her aunt did not know of the rescue. If he himself was lying, as he guessed, in the empty Hôtel Moûtier, Oonagh could not be free to come here very often. And the only servants of her own were an elderly maid and two grooms. She did not propose to risk freeing him, yet now he was awake, how could she keep him? Delicately he tried her. ‘Are you not afraid that your gentleman friend will discover your act of mercy and even trace us both here? My disappearance from Amboise must have had its element of mystery. Dead bodies don’t walk.’

  ‘Sick people talk too much,’ said Oonagh. ‘And so do the habitually intemperate. The mind of my gentleman friend, as you call him, works on well-defined lines. He thinks you have disappeared, I would guess, because your own people have taken a step or two to protect themselves from exposure. He would think it an act of God in his favour.’

  ‘Do I take it,’ said Lymond, ‘that he will transfer his attentions now to my brother?’ He was not employing much finesse.

  There was, he noted the briefest pause. Then she said, ‘He is unlikely to move in any direction until he has traced Robin Stewart.’

  And that meant that Stewart’s disappearance had surprised his own principal, surprised and worried him. Was he afraid Stewart would betray him? Or had he merely been counting on Stewart to blame if any future scheme went wrong? And how had this unknown gentleman—God, he must beg this woman to tell him his name—how had he learned that Stewart had vanished?

  The pain, drawing together its forces, began to concentrate in a kind of white haze. He said disingenuously, ‘But Stewart, surely, should be due back by now?’ and knew instantly, by her face, what her rejoinder would be. She smiled. ‘Oh come, my dear. George Paris serves anyone who will pay him. Did you think your little interview at the Isle d’Or was going to be exclusive?’

  Her voice was thin; the sunlight darkening. There was not much time. Sacrificing everything to precision, his voice spiderlike in his own ears, Lymond said, ‘If this man is exposed, he will drag you down with him. If he is not, he will turn on you sooner or later in self-defence. Tell me his name and let me deal with him. This is my training and my vocation; and no one else can do it. I promise you that. Give me your discretion. You have a unique power. You can do something here and now that will give you in hundreds and thousands the posterity you will never have of your own. If you wait, you lose everything. I promise you that, too. And losing it, what will you be?’

  She had risen as he was speaking, a lighted spar in her hand. Shielding it with her palm she crossed to one side of the pallet, then the other, and delicately lit the fine tapers. A sweet and sickly odour stirred in the room. Then she stood, head tilted, and looked at him, the heavy coiling black hair all bronzed by the light.

  ‘… What shall I be? Like Thady Boy Ballagh, surely,’ she said in her worn, bitter voice; and lying open-eyed and still under the smoke, Francis Crawford did not reply.

  At the door, Oonagh turned. ‘I would sooner let Phelim O’LiamRoe deal with any secret of mine than I should entrust it to you. You will stay here until I bring someone to see you, and whatever he thinks fit will be done. If you escape to your Scottish friends, I shall inform the French King where you are. If you escape to your French friends, if you are seen abroad in the street, if you move from this room, you will be tried for heresy, theft and high treason. The catch-thieves have been searching Amboise and Blois for you since last week. Every boat leaving Nantes has been watched. They have indisputable proof that the trip-rope accident at the Tour des Minimes was conceived by you. They have found royal jewels in your room and are already questioning your identity. Even without further evidence, the slightest investigation into your credentials will be enough to have you hanged for a spy. A fascinating situation. Think it over next time you are awake.… Good night. Sleep well,’ said Oonagh O’Dwyer.

  She had made only one error. The news she had just given him roused nothing but a sense of challenge and an instant, reluctant admiration. But what she had said just before had set free his cold, quick, terrifying temper. His legs and left arm were strapped down to the bed, but his right arm, slung because of the collarbone and wrist, was quite free. Violently, belabouring the pain for one instant back from his senses, he pulled the arm from its sling and struck the nearest torchère at his side as hard as he could.

  It succeeded better than he had blindly hoped. The
floor had been left piled thick with dry rushes. The oily tapers, rolling, bestowed a rosy carpet of fire which lit all the bright waxen wood, and the wrench of the cracked clavicle, sagging with its own weight, forced him, gasping, into blackness. Oonagh, no more than two steps from the door, saw the dark head buried in the dragged linen, the hand falling, lit by the fire. Then she screamed, once for her groom, and plunged back into the room.

  The flashing pain, as they cut his strappings and dragged him free, roused him for a moment; and he opened his eyes on her angry, feverish face and laughed. Then they had him through the door. Behind, the room had become golden red, a fierce and beautiful monochrome, with detail of bed and chair and table, hangings and woodwork in frail skeletal tracery of gold on gold, red on red. The fire, as they came downstairs, was beginning to show on the ceiling below.

  The house was built of wood, and so were many of its neighbours. Already the street was roused: from the burning balcony black smoke rolled over the courtyard. Outside, someone smashed the lock of the gates and, bucket in hand, ran for the well.

  The house was supposed to be empty. Oonagh could not be found there with Lymond. Nor, carrying him, could they escape unobserved. Under cover of the thickening smoke they abandoned him near a door, in a wing untouched as yet by fire, with Oonagh’s cloak for a blanket. In a heap, flung there where she brought him from Amboise, were the clothes he had been wearing that night. For a moment she checked, then picking up the Aztec mask she tossed it into the courtyard, to influence fate as it would. Then breathlessly she turned, and slipping through the thick smoke, escaped unseen with her servant to melt into the gathering crowds in the streets round about.

  Behind her, Lymond lay still. Oddly, he could hear very well: a single, conscious sense left to him, like the threadlike limb of a crane fly, trapped under a stone. As he lay on the stone flags every sound from the courtyard reached him with great clarity: slippered feet running on the cobbles, the squeak of the pulley, the thin, silvery sound of spilled water jolting from a full pail. Voices shouting. Windows creaking. The rumble of a handcart bringing more water, at speed. A dog barking, very high and fluting, like an owl. And near him, the hollow roar of the spreading fire, spitting and exploding on its fissile diet, extinguishing the home of Hélie and Anne Moûtier.

  Just before the roof fell, two pillagers bolder than the rest managed to enter the Hôtel Moûtier from the back, and found what they took to be a fellow plunderer overcome by smoke. Kicked awake out of a simple curiosity, the stranger offered them what appeared to be an excellent proposition: a large sum of money in exchange for a private trip in their handcart to a certain address.

  Since there was nothing worth taking, the two men lost no time in arguing; which was lucky for them. Between them they had no trouble in getting the fellow doubled up under sheets in the cart, and were trundling off down the packed street, away from the fire, just as Tosh, without seeing them, picked his way up it.

  The house called Doubtance in the Rue des Papegaults had no signboard; its trade was well known.

  Above the usurer occupying the ground floor, lived the Dame de Doubtance, of whom he was her keeper, some said, or her owner; an unredeemed pledge like the others which heaped and lined all his rooms, naked and mouldering like picked mice in an eyrie.

  The Dame de Doubtance was old; but her private world was even older: the world of France three hundred years before when chivalry was in flower, and the troubadours sang. Moving, in her mediaeval robes, from books to lute to embroidery, she never emerged into the raw, humanist light of sixteenth-century Blois; but many people came visiting her for the out-of-the-way things she could tell them, if she chose. Sometimes, if she did not choose, they came stumbling down the steep stairs of Doubtance with a scratched arm or the graze of a thrown vase on one cheek. For she was not a mouse; but rather a tall, half-plumed predator, pale-spot eyes glaring, mouth flatly downturned into the jaw. And she had a temper.

  The usurer Gaultier she never assaulted. Periodically, his clients repaired the deficiency. It was a risk of his trade. Small, opinionative, shrewd, he was no more rapacious than any merchant in Blois, and loved the rough and tumble of business with a passion almost Italian-ate. He also had a true eye for workmanship; and a fine piece of statuary, once in his hands, rarely found itself redeemed.

  It was his treasures which he first thought, naturally, of saving, that grey February day when fire broke out at the top of the road. With his clerk and an apprentice to help, he began loading his wheelbarrow, stopping often to engage his clerk in raucous arguments about workmanship and costing. Soon the wheelbarrow was full and dispatched down the steep road to the river, already crowded with the womenfolk and possessions of the richer and wiser residents.

  It was the only conveyance he had, and he could do nothing until it returned. Maître Gaultier went back alone to his dark nest of bric-à-brac and, fierce-eyed, began to cull his other favourites therefrom. As he emerged for the sixth time to his threshold, bearing a clock dear to his heart, he saw a miracle coming towards him in the flurried bustle of the street: a four-wheeled handcart, propelled by one heated individual and steadied by another, which bumped down the steep incline of the street, headed straight towards Doubtance and stopped flat beside Master Gaultier’s astrolabe clock as if scenting its destiny.

  Almost before the owners of the cart had pushed it into the forecourt and had uncovered and explained the unconscious man inside, Georges Gaultier had bought the cart and its contents and had dismissed the disreputable pair. He had no time just then to consider the implications of what they told him, or even to do more than compare briefly the face of the man they had brought with a description once given him by Archie Abernethy. The moneylender was accustomed to job lots. Drunk or not drunk, the less important item could wait. With a deft heave, Georges Gaultier removed the senseless man lumbering the bottom of his precious conveyance, and stowed him out of the way under the stairs to recover.

  Stacking the handcart after that, Georges Gaultier from time to time looked all around him; he at least had no quarrel with his fellow men.

  Once, imagining a stirring behind, he turned his head on his shoulder and said practically, for the benefit of anyone who might be listening; ‘My friend, you will need to put on a better face than that before your wife sees you. If you go upstairs, Madame will clear the fumes from your head. The fire will only come this way should the wind change, and men walk faster than clocks.’

  In the end, he snatched time from his labours to turn indoors, and grasping the man’s singed and dusty cloak, lifted him six steps out of the way to the first quarter landing. The fellow opened his eyes. Master Gaultier grinned, and raising his pebbly voice, addressed the inhabitant upstairs. ‘Madame! A visitor!’

  They were the first coherent words Francis Crawford understood since leaving the burning house up the street. Dimly, he remembered the plunderers who had carried him out; the bargain he had made in the hope that Gaultier, knowing his history from Abernaci, might pay; the subsequent bumping journey in the cart to this house whose address Abernaci had given him, long ago. And now a voice, hoarse and offhand, bawling, ‘Madame! A visitor!’

  And by then Lymond, with a kind of brutal persistence, had got himself upright. His good hand, groping, felt the cold wood of a stair rail. He leaned on it, all his weight on his serviceable leg, and looked up, straight into the pouched eyes of a woman, whose papery skin, in soft, unfolded swags, hung from her brittle, down-peering bones. Two long braids, thickly plaited and impossibly gold, dangled gently swaying from a wimpled headdress out of fashion a century ago. Her robes were long, flat and flowing, without a farthingale, and her nostrils above the creased and confident mouth were antique and wide.

  There was a pause, which Lymond occupied at some cost by standing straight and still, his head thrown back and his breathing nicely controlled. The Gothic face in the gloom far above him seemed to smile. ‘Aucassins, damoisiax, sire!’ the Dame de Doubtance observed, in
brisk mediaeval quotation; and Christ! thought Lymond, thrown into mild hysteria by the greeting. And hazily he sought an apt quotation in return.

  He never did recollect much, except in nightmares, of the subsequent exchange; although he never felt quite the same again about the ballad Aucassin and Nicolette. At one point out of dire necessity, he was driven to saying, ‘Hé Dieus, douce créature.… If I fall, sweet being, I shall fracture my neck; and if I remain here, they will take and burn me at the stake.’

  And after a moment, thinly autocratic, her voice had observed, ‘Aucassin: le beau, le blond.… You are hurt: le sang vous coule des bras. You are bleeding in fifty places at least.…’ And at last, collecting her skirts with smooth deliberation, the woman began to move downstairs towards him even as he spoke.

  ‘Douce suer, com me plairoit

  Se monter povie droit

  Que que fust du recaoir

  Que fuisse lassus o toi!

  … How I wish to be up there:

  Up there with thee!’

  Afterwards, he remembered looking up at her, the brocade robe hooked over her arm, her old, ribbed ankle in its pointed slipper two steps above. Remotely entertained, even then, by the crazy parallel between his affairs and the ballad, he remembered trying very hard, halfway into a thorough faint, to pay her the obvious compliment: ‘And thus the pilgrim was cured.’ He did succeed in saying it, but that was all; and of his final journey upstairs to the Dame de Doubtance’s bed he had no recollection.

  He wakened twice: once out of a feverish dream to the sound of virginals. He was then in her chamber, a dark, thick-walled cave filled with old books and embroidery, watching her yellow, high-nosed profile as she played. He seemed to be strapped up again; under the bandaging the pain already, surely, seemed to be less.