Pawn in Frankincense (94 page)

They were probably the last words Francis Crawford heard in that place. Leaving him where he lay, Jerott walked back slowly towards Philippa and Kuzúm. He had no idea what to say.

Kuzúm, mercifully, was quiet, his head in her skirts. Philippa said, ‘Is he badly hurt?’

‘It isn’t that,’ Jerott said. ‘It’s worse than that.’ He stared at Philippa, his face blank, thinking.
Christ … he married her …
From the morning of the escape, the circumstance had left his mind utterly.

Philippa said matter-of-factly, ‘It’s the opium. He is dying?’ Marthe, her three horses hobbled behind her, had joined them swiftly, standing by Philippa’s shoulder, watching Jerott’s pale face.

Jerott said, ‘We don’t know. It
is
the opium … Archie’s terrified to move him. His theory is that even if he recovers from this exhaustion we have to cut off the drug.’

‘He won’t stand that, surely?’ said Marthe.

‘I don’t know. There doesn’t seem to be an alternative. Archie says that to continue now would be tantamount to dying of poison.’

‘He might prefer it,’ said Marthe. ‘He knew what would happen. He has laid wagers with himself, I imagine, for days: how many hours, how many miles towards safety before he has to drop out.’

It was then that Jerott told them of the ship going to Malta. And as they stared at him, silent, he said to Philippa, ‘He would want you and Kuzúm to go on it. I know it will feel like desertion; that all your instinct is to stay; but think of him and not of yourself if you can. What he is paying for now is Kuzum’s freedom,’

‘I could nurse him,’ said Philippa. And: ‘No,’ said Marthe evenly. ‘I shall do that.’

Jerott could not shake her. Immovable as she had been on the
Dauphiné
, so Marthe now had made up her mind. Archie should
go on the Venetian vessel to Malta with Philippa and the child, and from Malta travel with them to Scotland. Jerott, the former Knight of St John, should stay at Birgu with his fellows. There, when Lymond could sail—if Lymond could sail—she would bring him.

It was a plan they followed with only one alteration: Jerott had already made up his mind to stay on Volos with Lymond and Marthe. He consulted briefly with Archie, and then set off to find lodgings, while the girls gathered together what was left of all their possessions, and with cloaks and half-charred timber constructed a stretcher of sorts.

In the end, they left it behind. Jerott was back in an hour, two small mules jogging behind him, bearing a fine horse-litter of hide piled with blankets. With him on a pot-bellied donkey came a priest, his black robe trailing the dust. On a little hill to the north-west of Volos he had found a small church with a whitewashed school and almshouse and hospital. There Lymond could be cared for in peace.

The priest and Archie between them lifted him into the litter. He had not spoken again and was quite unconscious, the blood stiff on his clothes, the cavities deep under his eyes. Shortly after that, having instructed Jerott with all he knew, Archie took the road to Volos city and harbour, Philippa with Kuzúm at his side.

She didn’t cry. Her spirit felt scoured; her brain arid as if slaked in quicklime: she remembered with shame the doubts and vanities she had shown over that
mariage de convenance
whose conveniences, so humiliating at the time, were indeed a matter of life and death to so many, and whose lack of grace concealed a true grace she was only beginning now to discern.

Until their wedding eve in the Seraglio of Topkapi, Francis Crawford had been a friend of her mother’s; an adult whose alien being she did not wish or pretend to interpret.

She could say that no longer. She was his wife in nothing but name: the privacies of his nature were not hers to explore and to analyse: she kept him as far as possible out of her thoughts, and conjecture out of his affairs. Leaving him was less like leaving even the most simple of her friends in Flaw Valleys, and more like losing unfinished a manuscript, beautiful, absorbing and difficult, which she had long wanted to read.

She saw him before she left; but it did not occur to her to give him any spurious parting embrace, any more than she had expected to receive one at her wedding.

Yet he himself had bestowed one, on Khaireddin. It was, perhaps, the most disturbing of all the things she had seen him do.

Kuzúm liked the boat.

They kept Lymond in the crowded ward of the hospital until he recovered consciousness. Then they moved him to one of the almshouses, a small, self-contained building with a low common-room and, above, one small cell with a bed.

This became his. At first he lay there, his eyes closed, while the nursing brethren spoke in whispers to Jerott. Such stillness was what the overstrained body required. Pray God it would last.

Downstairs, Jerott unleashed his anxious irritation on Marthe. ‘They know it can’t last. Why don’t they admit it?’

‘They are kind. They are innocent. They believe God is merciful,’ said Marthe.

From the moment of Lymond’s collapse, the supply of opium had been cut off completely. This isolation and privacy were what Archie had advised, and the priest in charge of the sick man endorsed it, his wise eyes turning from Jerott to Marthe. ‘Have you seen one thus afflicted when the drug is withdrawn? There is acute pain, intestinal and muscular, with intense weakness and tremors and nausea. That is in the body. In the spirit, there is also a peculiar anguish and isolation, a madness I can compare only with the frenzy of total bereavement. This young man has a strong and resilient body. Pray that this may be true of his mind.’

He was strong-minded enough, when the time came, to send the nursing monks packing. It was the first sign of trouble: the priest on duty descending the stairs from the sickroom, his robe dragging on the rough unfinished wood, and walking over to Jerott. ‘I fear I and my brothers can be of no further help.’

At first Jerott believed they were abandoning Francis. Then he understood that it was the other way round. ‘He does not wish us to attend him. It is not wise, but it is understandable,’ said the priest. ‘Indeed, there is nothing we can do that you, his friends, cannot now do better.’

One could not argue with that. Jerott was silent. It was Marthe, accepting it, who said, ‘I shall sleep here then, if a bed can be made up in the common-room. I suppose one of us should be on call.’ And Marthe who, when the arrangements had been made, walked upstairs with the first tray of bouillon and entered the sickroom for the first time.

There was little in the room but the bed, placed between the door and the two small windows pierced in the outer wall of the courtyard. And it was the bed, its clean, coarse linen in a rucked, disembowelled heap, which held her attention: that and the fair hair and twisted
robe and claw hands of the man tangled within it, his face buried unseen. Then Lymond stirred, breathing sharply, and after a moment abruptly changed his position. His face came round, heavy-lidded: written over and over with desperate suffering; and his eyes opened full upon Marthe.

He had no more colour to lose. Instead, he took a short breath like a man hit in the face, and stayed where he was, with hauteur, in all that humiliating disorder. Marthe put down the tray with a small jolt, which she had not intended, and said evenly, There is soup for you. If you want anything, ask for it. Jerott and I will do what we can.’

Thank you,’ said Francis Crawford. His voice was cynical, and almost as steady as hers. ‘
The origin of pain
, says Buddha,
is the thirst for pleasure; the thirst for existence, the thirst for change. Destroy your passions as an elephant throws down a hut built of reeds: the only remedy for evil is healthy reality
. You are my healthy reality. I am indebted to you. But as I have already told the hospital brethren, I need no further attention.’

‘You need food,’ said Marthe. ‘If we do not bring it, then the priests must. It is a time for logic, not vanity.’

His lashes were wet and the pillows sodden with sweat. He said, ‘And a time, I suppose, for revenge.’

Her hair, drawn back in its shining silk coils, was the same gold as his: her face, pale and high-boned and controlled, came from the same mould. She said, ‘I am not here to mock. Ring the bell if you want help. Jerott will come if he can. If not, you will have to put up with me.’

To Jerott below, she said merely, ‘It has begun.’

Once under way, the illness gained weight like an avalanche, and the next time Jerott climbed the stairs he found the door locked and, listening, realized that Lymond was up somehow and roving the room, the light footfalls buffeting up and down, backwards and forwards, round and round. Jerott spoke through the door, and knocked, but received no answer then or later; nor did Marthe on the same errand. They alternated like clock weights, said Jerott with bitterness, through the entire dreary day until evening, when Jerott lost patience and threatened to kick in the door.

A moment later the key turned and the door crashed back open as Francis Crawford, turning back inside, sat on the bed, his head in his hands. He said, without looking up, ‘Do what you have to do, and get out.’

Jerott banged down the milk he had brought. ‘Look. If you are having pains, scream. If you are seeing thousand-pound elephant birds with reinforced iron nests, tell us and we shall believe you. If you want to climb up and jump from the roof, let me tell you that we feel exactly the same. Only don’t lock your door like a maiden aunt with the gravel.’

Lymond moved suddenly, and then was still. ‘I agree in principle,’ he said. ‘Only, if I did begin screaming … you wouldn’t like it.’ He added abruptly, ‘I don’t want Marthe. Send her away.’

His brows drawn, Jerott looked down on him. ‘She could have gone with the others. She stayed behind to look after you.’

‘Oh, Christ.
I don’t
…’ began Lymond and broke off, stopped by a long, shuddering yawn, the circles brown-black under his eyes.

‘You don’t need help?’ said Jerott with desperate sarcasm. ‘Or I don’t need help?’

Like a man lifting a great weight, Lymond looked up. With the same terrible effort, he said flatly, ‘Every time that door opens … I start counting. And I go on counting until it shuts again. Otherwise I should be on my knees, crying for … what I want. If you want to help me … keep out. If you want to shame me, send Marthe. She and I are … unmerciful adversaries.’

Jerott’s breath caught at the top of his stomach; but this time he knew what must be done; and he did it.

‘You and she are brother and sister,’ he said.

Francis Crawford gave a small sigh. His face, already stripped to the bone by extreme physical stresses, looked suddenly as if it had been pushed apart, flesh and muscle, by some grisly, slow-moving stamp. He said, ‘If she says so … she’s lying,’ and, raising himself with shaking hands from the edge of the bed, stood for a moment staring unseeing at Jerott. Then one of the great waves of cramping pain took him, and he turned and grasped at the window-ledge, gasping, his brow on the glass.

Jerott went forward and put his hands hard on his shoulders, but Lymond stayed there, his throat knotted, and would not turn round. After a long time, he spoke. ‘If she comes in here again, I shall kill her.’

Jerott let his hands drop. ‘She won’t come,’ he said curtly. ‘And neither shall I, if I can help it. There is a bell, if you want me.’ And he left abruptly, closing the door; leaving Lymond to face whatever was coming as he wanted, alone.

He did, in his own fashion; nor did he ring all that night. As the new day dragged its way on, the watchers below were able to follow, by sound, the steadily rising violence of the whole onslaught until as the sun reached its height a voice above joined the uneven footsteps; softly at first, and then in outbursts of noise, stopping raggedly and starting without warning and rising to strange rhythmic climaxes before falling to a murmur again.

Her eyes on Jerott, Marthe rose and went upstairs; and after a while Jerott joined her where she sat in the passage above, outside Lymond’s room, her cheek pressed to the cold wall. When Jerott made to speak she held up her hand, and he took his place beside her in his turn, and, in his turn, listened.

If I screamed, you wouldn’t like it
, Lymond had said. And because the anguish could now no longer be borne, and because he would not scream, he was using the uncontrollable voice, the trumpet of suffering and conduit of impossible sorrows. And he had dressed it, as a burning ship sets out her fragments of bunting, with the trappings of poetry. Agony spoke in the ringing, uneven voice, but decently transmuted into the words of the poets, flowing onwards and onwards, verse after verse, tongue after tongue.

He spokç each poem through to the end, and beside Jerott, Marthe’s lips moved, following. Sometimes the hard-pressed voice, uplifted, made no sense of the words it spoke. Then when the violence died would come relief, and the voice would pick its way again:

Sometimes the voice trailed into silence, perhaps even into sleep for two minutes or five. Then it would leap into life, footsteps treading the boards back and forwards accompanying it, and a little thicker, a little more tired, it would go on with its recital, rising, holding and failing to a tide not its own.

Jerott stood half an hour of it and then left, suddenly, his face white, walking straight through the common-room and out into the faint golden sunshine where he sat, his hands over his ears.

Marthe stayed. She stayed until the voice, now roughened and slow, found trouble at last in sustaining that uneven flow of beauty and other men’s wisdom and stumbled, spinning the fabric of poetry too thinly to conceal what was lying beneath. Then she opened the door, and went in to him.