Pawn in Frankincense (6 page)

There was a long silence while they looked, the reflected candlelight blinding their eyes. Then the dealer said softly, ‘M. de Lymond? Will this please the Turk?’

‘My dear Gaultier,’ said Lymond. ‘It will send the Shadow of God into transports. I suppose I’ve seen objects more grisly before, but it doesn’t spring to mind where.… Twenty-four-carat gold, Jerott. Look. And studded with rubies like fish-roes.’

‘Yes. I think he’ll be pleased,’ said Georges Gaultier. For the first time satisfaction, animation and even cheerfulness rang in his voice. ‘Sickening, isn’t it?’

Jerott wasn’t sickened. He stood in silence and worked out the cost of the square Gothic cabinet whose double doors of jewels and marquetry opened on a pillared façade of Gothic fantasy plastered with gold leaf and beryls and ivory and crowned by a clock. Among the paintings, the niches, the cupboards inside the cabinet was the
drawer containing the keyboard and strings of the spinet, which Gaultier pulled out as he and Francis Crawford, in the closest amity, explored every unfortunate inch of the instrument.

Jerott stood by while it struck, chimed, tinkled tunes and shot representational articles, on ratchets, in and out of suitable orifices. Presently Lymond said, ‘Does the revolting thing play?’ and sitting on the edge of a box, ran his hands up and down the keyboard. Then he lifted them and said, ‘Yes, it does,’ and rising, strolled to the door.

‘Yes,’ said Gaultier placidly, following him. ‘She insisted on that.’

There was a pause. ‘Is she upstairs?’ said Lymond at length.

Maître Gaultier nodded. ‘She is waiting to see you. Of course. And Mr Blyth also.’

Lymond said, ‘I should prefer to meet her alone. Do you mind, Jerott?’

The tone was perfectly and familiarly final. Gaultier ignored it. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said. ‘
With
Mr Blyth. Or the lady regrets she cannot give you an interview.’

‘If it’s something personal …’ Jerott said helpfully, but not too helpfully. It was something personal all right. He’d heard of this woman. The Dame de Doubtance, they called her: a madwoman and a caster of horoscopes. Gaultier gave her house-room and men and women came to her from all the known world and had their futures foretold—if she felt like it. She had given some help once to Lymond, on her own severe terms, because of a distant link, it was said, with his family. Plainly, a crazy old harridan. But if she was going to tell Lymond he ought to find a nice girl and marry her, Jerott wanted very much to be there.

Gaultier did not come with them. Abandoning him to the spinet with its double-locked doors, Lymond with Jerott hot on his heels followed an elderly manservant to another part of the house, and up a small, winding stair. There they were led through a thick velvet curtain and left, in absolute darkness.

Jerott, after feeling about for a moment, encountered something sharp and stopped trying. The atmosphere was dire, composed largely, he concluded, of dust and dry rot and very damp textiles. Lymond, presumably somewhere in the room also, said nothing. Through a faint crack of light in the far wall voices muttered: the old fellow must be announcing them. Then the crack widened, and a voice whose sex he could not discover summoned them in. Jerott looked round once, quickly, for Lymond and found him disconcertingly at his elbow, his expression politely withdrawn. Jerott, who knew that look, suddenly felt his skin crawl. Then they were in.

The Lady of Doubtance, Jerott observed, was of the older variety of witch who liked a theatrical smack to her necromancy. The bedroom, or whatever it was in which they now stood, was lit with a
single wax candle, so placed that it illuminated only the face of their hostess—that of a woman of considerable age, whose bush of dead yellow hair was dressed in the style of high Saxon romance, its plaits bristling under the long, sagging chin. She was seated in a tall canopied chair, its feet lost in darkness; and of her body, too, nothing could be seen but a glimpse of archaic, unravelling robes, and two hands burdened with rubies, which lay like insects on her lap. The mouth opened, black in the seamed, underlit mask. ‘You are welcome, gentlemen. Come near. I rejoice in comely people around me. You note, Mr Blyth: your exquisite companion is sulking.’

From a distance of four feet, with the hair standing out on his skin, Jerott, wide-eyed, gave a stiff smile. How Lymond’s dignity had stood up to that kick in the teeth he did not know; nor did he mean to look round and find out. But Lymond’s own voice said instantly, ‘You misjudge me. I was projecting, I thought, a strong impression of patience. Kneeling like a drunk elephant at the feet of the Blessed. Melodrama makes Mr Blyth uncomfortable.’

The lightless eyes switched to Jerott. ‘Does it? Yet what more melodramatic than to join a militant order of monks because one rather commonplace young girl died of the plague? Balance your own accounts, Mr Blyth.’

‘I have,’ he said. Hell: how did she know about Elizabeth? ‘I have left the Order of St John.’

The old harridan gave a leer. ‘A blundering Popistant?’

‘If you like,’ said Jerott; and again the shadowy eyes creased.

‘I neither like nor dislike: I merely record the truth. And that is not the truth,’ said the Lady of Doubtance. ‘You left because you found corruption and intolerance against which your own faith was inadequate. You also left because of the fall of Sir Graham Reid Malett, that great Knight of Grace. What a sorry marriage you would have had of it,’ said the detached voice airily, ‘had he been christened Elizabeth.’

No one had ever been able to call Jerott Blyth a submissive young man. Violent in love, in hatred and in all his enthusiasms, he heard those words in a rising passion of outraged disbelief. Also, what was worse, Lymond had heard them. White-faced with rage in the darkness, Jerott opened his mouth; and suddenly heard in his head the lady’s cool words of a moment ago.
I neither like nor dislike: I merely record the truth
. He did not speak.

Waiting, the other two people in the dark room were aware of a long silence. Then Jerott Blyth said, ‘Then you must put on record that once I loved a girl and wished to make her my wife; and once I loved a man and wished to make him my leader. I shall never do either again.’

Beside him, Lymond did not move. In front of him, the shrewd old eyes under the grotesque Saxon wig stared unwinking at Jerott.
Then the Dame de Doubtance said, ‘These are words I have waited to hear. You are adequate to your fate, Mr Blyth. You need no help from me to find it.’

And, surprisingly, it was Lymond’s voice which said sharply, ‘You cannot debar a human being from love!’

The old face, undisturbed, turned to look at him. ‘It is easy. Who should know better than you? But what Mr Blyth has been engaged in was not love, my dear Francis. It was romance, a thing to which Mr Blyth has been very prone; together with melodrama. Whatever made you think that melodrama makes Mr Blyth uncomfortable? He revels in it.’

‘A figure of speech,’ said Lymond. ‘But now, perhaps he might be permitted to leave?’

‘Why?’ asked the Dame de Doubtance, and settling herself in her chair, smoothed out her thick skirts with one bezelled claw. ‘Dear Francis. Do you wish to ask me something so private?’

In a moment, Jerott knew very well, Lymond was going to lose his temper. Mortally relieved to be himself out of the firing-line, Jerott was looking forward to watching him do it. ‘About bastardy, perhaps?’ added the Dame de Doubtance placidly.

In all the dark room, there was no sound. Then Lymond drew breath. ‘No,’ he said. ‘Nor about anything else. We must not tire you.… Jerott?’ He had turned, without haste, on his heel.

Jerott stayed where he was. ‘What
about
bastardy?’ he said.

The dewlapped, colourless face smiled at him. ‘Ah, Mr Blyth.
You
are not afraid of ridicule, it appears. What a pity that Oonagh O’Dwyer should have been Francis’s mistress and not yours.’

To Jerott, everything suddenly became exquisitely clear, including Lymond’s motive for privacy. ‘You cast horoscopes,’ said Jerott Blyth quickly to the withered face in the gloom. ‘Can you tell us the child’s?’

‘If you can repress for a moment your spinster-like longing to meddle in my affairs,’ said Lymond cuttingly, from the door, ‘I am waiting to go.’

Ignoring this: ‘I might, if I were paid in a little courtesy,’ said the Dame de Doubtance to Jerott. ‘There is no hurry, Mr Blyth. Francis will not leave while you are still here.… What is the child’s name?’

‘He doesn’t know,’ said Lymond, answering for him. ‘He knows nothing. He is one of nature’s matrons, oozing arch curiosity. You can tell he’s a wood-nymph by the cow’s tail under those long, snowy robes. He wants to ask about Oonagh’s baby, so tell him. For God’s sake, tell him. Then he and the bloody girl can find and burp it together. If it’s alive.’

‘Oh, it’s alive,’ said the Dame de Doubtance quite calmly. ‘Vows made on Gabriel’s altar are not lightly regarded. Son and father will meet.’

Afterwards Jerott was not certain if the word ‘where?’ was spoken aloud. He knew only that it sprang to his lips, and that, silenced suddenly, Lymond framed it as well. Within the golden hair, the grey eyebrows rose. ‘How quiet we are,’ the Dame de Doubtance said. ‘It would not be good for you, I think, to be certain where. The woman, of course, is in Algiers.’

‘Oonagh?’ Slowly, Lymond had re-entered the room. A shadow in the dark, he passed Jerott and reaching the Dame de Doubtance’s old, slippered feet, dropped quietly to one knee, all caprice gone from his face. ‘Shall we meet?’

The ancient, powerful face looked down. ‘You will see her.’ A yellow nail, strongly curved, followed the line of his cheekbone. ‘You were a pretty boy; but ungovernable. You are right not to trust me.… You will see her. But your father’s two sons will never meet in this life again,’ said the Dame de Doubtance, looking at Lymond, the candle-flame in her round, predator’s eyes.

And under them, Jerott saw the fluid posture of the other man stiffen; and his stretched gaze in turn hold the woman’s, stare for raw stare, until the Dame de Doubtance laughed shortly and said, ‘Ah, Khaireddin. Of course. That was the child’s name,’ as if she had just been informed.

Your father’s two sons will never meet in this life again
. Jerott, listening, scowled. Lymond had only one brother—Richard, third Baron Culter, at Midculter in Scotland. Richard, the well-loved and reliable family man who held the family title and administered the family estates and who shared his home with his widowed dowager mother. Lymond said, smoothly, to that grotesque and brooding face hung above him: ‘Promise me that Richard will be safe.’

And the Dame de Doubtance, glibly, repeated his words: ‘Richard will be safe;’ while Jerott, at last, was brought to regretting the childish sentiment which had inspired him stay and to force this queer confrontation to an inhuman issue.

‘Put the next question,’ the Dame de Doubtance said lightly, but Lymond said, still quietly, ‘I have no more questions to ask. You wished to make Jerott your witness?’

‘How quick you are,’ she said, mockery in the thin voice. ‘You don’t ask the date of your death? I
can tell you.
’

It was suddenly too much. The old bitch, thought Jerott, falling back dazed through the boundaries of rank common sense. The crazy, senile old bitch. She ought to have a stall at a fair. And here we are, two grown men, crediting her …

She had moved; and, bending forward, was holding out that rheumatoid claw to be taken and kissed. Rising, Lymond held it in his and said slowly, ‘Then I think it had better be soon.’

And the Dame de Doubtance, smiling, shook her head as he bent over her hand. ‘Despite everything, not soon enough.’ And as
he straightened: ‘You and I will not meet again. You do not know it, but I have loved you. Mr Blyth …’ Jerott moved slowly forward. The jointed fingers snatched, and the little pearl crucifix he wore still, loose over his shirt, lay in her ruinous palm. ‘I tell you this, Mr Blyth, from my stall in the fair, senile though I appear. I tell you by this cross and by all you still believe that what I foretell will come true. Be my witness.’

He stood still, without speaking, his crucifix still in her hand. She had read his exact mind: he had nothing to add. But Lymond, in the unchanging quiet voice, said, ‘You have been kind, by your lights. For what you have done in the past, and what I think you believe must be done now, I am thankful.…’ He stopped, and said, ‘You have said nothing of Graham Malett. It may not matter.’

‘Evil matters. So does love. So does pity. My pilgrim,’ said the Dame de Doubtance gently, ‘you have still three bitter lessons to learn.’

For a moment she stood, the little cross flickering in the dim light in her hand; then she let it slip so that, swinging back on its chain, it found its home again on Jerott’s broad chest. Then she addressed Lymond. ‘What Mr Blyth needs is a large drink and some bawdy conversation, as quickly as possible. Can you arrange that, do you think?’

‘All Mr Blyth’s friends can arrange that,’ said Lymond gravely, and bowing, steered Jerott out and downstairs into the street. There, looming miraculously before them, was a familiar figure.

‘Oh,
Onophrion
,’ said Lymond, and Jerott, who had seen his face only a moment before, wondered at the pleasant, familiar pitch of his voice. ‘Onophrion, where with safety and propriety do you consider that Mr Blyth and I might go to drink ourselves senseless?’

And Onophrion, of course, knew.