Pawn in Frankincense (95 page)

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.

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.

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.

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

‘… 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.’

He looked at her, disbelieving; and then instantly answered. ‘Then it is all rightly yours.’

‘No,’ said Marthe. ‘Whatever my life holds, I have no wish to owe it to them. And wherever she is, even dead—don’t you think she would know, if we frustrate her will now? What is there will keep you in luxury.’

‘It will keep Philippa and Kuzúm,’ Lymond said quietly. ‘Like you, I have no wish to be further beholden.’

Staring down at his spent face on the pillow, Marthe’s expression was wry. ‘The wife who calls you
Mr Crawford
,’ she said. ‘The child you don’t even know.’ And as he didn’t answer, Marthe said suddenly, ‘How many souls on this earth call you Francis? Three? Or perhaps four?’

For a moment he looked at her unsmiling; and for a moment she wished, angrily that she could recall the question. Then quite suddenly he smiled, and held out his hand. ‘Five,’ he said. ‘Surely? Since last night.’

He was slow to recover, but neither Jerott nor Marthe was impatient; and only Jerott latterly became angry at his total absence of plans. If a fortune awaited him in Blois or in Lyons, Lymond repeated, it would be used solely for the comfort of Philippa and Kuzúm. For himself, he had his own way to make.

Until Jerott, exploding ill-advisedly like a soldier and not like a former Knight of St John, said, ‘Then when
are
you going back to see them in Scotland?’ And Francis Crawford said, ‘Never.’

He left the day after that, before Jerott or Marthe was awake, to keep his appointment. Before he went, he had taken leave in his own private fashion of each, though he made sure neither knew it. He had satisfied himself of their future, both immediate and distant, now siowly bonding together. And he had acknowledged, with all the generosity of which he was capable, the gift of his life and his reason.

The note he left required Marthe not to follow him, and Marthe, he knew, would force Jerott to honour it. He laid his plans well, choosing an hour when he was fresh, and able to ride, he believed, a measurable distance. He escaped from his room, left the precincts
and acquired his prearranged horse with no incident at all, and merely the expenditure, as throughout his discreet dispositions from sickbed, of a modest outlay in bribes.

One may, however, be fresh as a rose in a bedroom, and by no means the terror of mules on the road. This, he acknowledged, gravely, after a mile or two; and after five was not acknowledging anything at all except a strong impulse to vacate the saddle. None the less, he reached the crossroads near his objective at precisely the hour he had planned and, leaving the hard-beaten, uneven track, picked his way between trees to a place where another road could be discerned, this time going west. Within sight of the road, but concealed from chance travellers by the low scrub and bushes, Lymond tied his reins and slipped from the saddle.

There was nothing to unpack. He had no saddlebags with him; no clothes and no money; no food and no drink. He had his sword in its sheath and his cloak on one shoulder, and somewhere a vestige of flamboyance, which led him to slap his horse on the rump, and to watch it canter, kicking, into the depths of the wood, saying, ‘In the Name of Allah, the Beneficent, the Merciful. Let there be love.’ Lymond stood swaying for a moment, watching the road; and then subsided on to the turf.

When the heavy coach with its two horses and four armed outriders came along and pulled up, in a trembling of dust, he was lying in the short grass, its shadows swinging over his face. A blackbird, feeding close to his hand, flinched and sped away chortling as the outriders dismounted, scimitars jolting bright in the sun, and after a little searching, bent and lifted him, his head moving loosely, over into the coach.

This was little else than a cart with a Gothic arched cover, but it was more than palatial inside, with benches ranged by the luggage, and cushions on the carpeted floor. The men laid him on these, at the feet of the one other person the carriage contained, and saluting, withdrew. A moment later, to the sound of whip-cracking and the yelling of voices, the vehicle groaned into motion again.

Lymond stirred. Above him, there was a slow smile on the lips of his companion. An arm lifted, removing a veil. And a small hand, fine and soft and exactingly jewelled, stretched out to touch Francis Crawford’s fair hair in a light and pensive caress.