Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Not that it was cold. The morning sun filled the wide, pleasant chamber, and through the tall double diamond-paned windows the fretted south wall and spire of the Cathedral stood biscuit-coloured against the blue sky of September. An aproned woman who had been seated in the window embrasure rose as the Dowager entered, and a short, bearded man in black cap and robes left the side table at which he was working and came forward, drying his fingers on a napkin.

  Jerott said, ‘This is Michel de Nostradamus, who has had the ordering of the sickroom over the past week. The Dowager Lady Culter, Master Nostradamus, and my lord count’s brother, the Earl.’

  ‘Lady Culter and I have met,’ the astrologer said. He stood, the napkin folded between his hands and looked at them with an expression, oddly, more of anger than sympathy. ‘I have no good news to give you. His injuries are great, and he is already far on his journey. Do not fear to go close, Madame. There is nothing you can do that will disturb him.’

  The high bed on which Francis Crawford lay had no curtains at its foot, so that between the bare pillars there was an uninterrupted view from every place in the room of the virgin sheets and the white, creaseless pillowbere and the coverlet, smooth as fresh-fallen snow on a casket. Sybilla, with Richard behind her, walked to the head and looked down on it.

  All the linear delicacy of the boy he had once been stood exposed now in the still, blindfolded face of her son. The clinging yellow hair, orderly on the white linen, was the same silk that had veiled her rings when she had smoothed his pillow in childhood; the cheekbone under the bandage had once, fresh and firm, been pressed to her own; the beautiful hands, lying loose on the damask, belonged to him and also to another man, whom she had placed before all others, and always would.

  ‘And so I am punished,’ Sybilla Crawford said aloud, and stood looking, with tears silently running down her colourless cheeks.

  Richard said, ‘Why are his eyes covered?’ And then turning suddenly from the bed, rounded upon the physician, standing with Jerott silently at the far end of the room. ‘Why are his eyes covered? How can you tell if he is awake or if he is dead? Are you doing nothing for him?’

  ‘Put your hand on his wrist,’ Nostradamus said quietly. ‘As for the bandage …’ He glanced at Jerott.

  But Jerott, his face frowning with sleeplessness, was looking at Richard, this powerful man with the brilliant grey eyes who had not contemplated bereavement with stoicism but was rebelling, as Sybilla was not rebelling, against what he had found. He said, ‘He was already ill when he went to Dourlans. It was why he went.’

  ‘Why?’ said Richard. ‘I know the face of the drug addict. I know the face of the drunkard. You cannot tell me that what I see on the pillow is either of those.’

  ‘No,’ said Jerott. ‘That is the destitute face of the sightless.’

  For a long moment, Richard did not speak. Then he said, ‘It isn’t possible.’

  ‘It is,’ Sybilla said. She was holding herself, very carefully, by the back of a chair. ‘It is Nature’s way—Nature’s most unforgivable way—of preserving a machine past its breaking-point. Tell me …’

  But although she began it, she could not frame the question she wanted to ask. Jerott said, ‘It began eighteen months ago, Lady Culter. He has tried to end his life twice. Once Archie brought him back. Now I have done the same. We have interfered in what doesn’t concern us. He belongs to himself and is at his own disposal. Or else what are we?’

  Richard Crawford, his brother’s wrist in his hand, laid it down gently and turned to him. ‘We are,’ he said, ‘at least no less than the animals. We are members of a race, and of a kingdom, and of a family. The world has borrowed his strength often enough: can we not lend him ours when he needs it? What can be done? What is wrong?’

  The black-robed doctor answered him, the ruddy, chestnut-bearded face full of a curious intelligence. ‘There has been a monstrous loss of blood, my lord, with flesh wounds and burning. Also there is a hurt to the head. The extent we cannot tell, but it has brought a stupor so deep that nothing will rouse him. He cannot move, although what liquids we give him can be swallowed. We bring him what ease we can.’

  Richard said, ‘You must engage his will. Does he feel pain? Do you speak to him? There must be something he would answer to.’

  ‘My lord,’ said Nostradamus. ‘You have heard. He has long sought this gateway, and at Dourlans he found it. He is not going to come back now, for me, for you or for anyone. This time he has found the boatman, and the boatman has taken him over.’

  *

  At the end of life, parent and kinsman are as a blind man set to look after a burning lamp.

  Because, it seemed, the river was wider than anyone knew, he lived in that way for ten days, in a room always peopled with his friends. Between them Alec and Fergie, Jerott, Archie and Danny covered the twenty-four hours at his bedside, with or without sleep, and every day Sybilla was there.

  Afterwards, leaving the silent bedside, she would walk out into the free, scented air and pass under the portals of the cathedral, with its pairs of saintly, confiding figures upon whose heads the blue-grey pigeons roosted, preening their malachite neck-feathers. Within, she would not pray, but moved from place to place under the light-dappled vaults of the ceiling, pausing sometimes beside the busy carvings: the handsome, apple-cheeked burghers with their curling beards and draped hats and shoulder capes, where could be read again the sad tale of John the Baptist: En prison fut Sainct Jhan decapité, Poir avoir dict et presche verité.

  Even here, people came up to her to ask how Francis did. A good lord, so brave, so sweet, so very debonair. She came here not for comfort, but to do penance, for she knew the sin she was paying for; she had watched his love die; she had been constrained, in her fear, to turn his own knife against him at Dieppe and thus simply add to a burden which, in the end, had grown too great to carry.

  She was in the ambulatory one day, waiting for Richard to come for her, when a cool, contemptuous voice fell on her ears.

  ‘Are you mourning? Seneca says a wise man lives as long as he ought, not so long as he can. You should be pleased. At last Francis has managed to follow his own misguided path without the rest of us consuming time and energy on setting him right.’

  Sybilla turned.

  Beside her was the face on the pillow, save that here the eyes were open and clear, the lips rosy, the bright hair drawn out of sight beneath the hood of a travelling cloak.

  It was Marthe. The hostile, heavy-lidded eyes gazed at Sybilla, and then altered a little as, stepping forward, Jerott Blyth’s wife caught the older woman under the arm. ‘Or, I can see, you have been consuming more strength than you should. Sit down. I have no business with you. I have come to help your son, if I can.’

  ‘And how can you help?’ said Richard Crawford from behind her. Marthe looked round. And so for the first time, Richard Crawford stood face to face with his grandfather’s daughter.

  And before her, with open disdain, Marthe saw the brown-haired Scottish countryman in whom the titles and honours of the first Baron Crawford were now vested. A man who, no doubt, could manage a leech or a ploughman: who kept his fishings and cornfields and coney-runs, but had never touched a pen, or a lute, or a brush; or seen an ikon, or a masque in the making. A man to whom the law had given all that she might have been born to, as much as the half-brother who had taken Güzel from her.

  Güzel, who was dead.

  Richard said, ‘I was told that you looked like my brother.’ The colour, sapped from his face by the last week, had receded before the same shock as Sybilla’s. With some fortitude, he continued, ‘I am glad that you have come, but I am afraid that no help is possible.’

  She raised her eyebrows. ‘But that, as I was saying, is no matter surely for self-reproach. Let the statemongers mourn him. I hear that John Erskine and the Queen’s brother are in Amiens wringing their hands. Soon there will be no Protestants left except pregnant Abbesses.… You haven’t thought of sending
for Philippa?’

  Sybilla said, ‘She couldn’t possibly get here in time. Nor could it help matters under the circumstances.’

  ‘I see,’ said Marthe, ‘that Austin has edified you also with the circumstances. And what is this other story, of blindness?’

  Sybilla said, ‘That appears to be true.’

  ‘Perhaps,’ said Marthe. ‘But I can tell you something interesting. The attacks stopped at Sevigny.’

  For a moment, Sybilla was silent. Then she said, ‘I think he made a great effort at Sevigny. The affliction afterwards was possibly all the worse for it.’

  ‘Is that all it means to you?’ Marthe said. ‘To me it means there is no disease. It means it’s curable, provided you root out the cause of it. Is it not worth an effort? No one would bring back a man doomed to blindness, but what if he isn’t?’

  Sybilla’s blue gaze on hers was long and steady. ‘Then tell me,’ she said. ‘How would you reverse the process that brought Francis here?’

  ‘I?’ said Marthe. ‘What have I to do with it? You are his mother.’

  Richard said, ‘You are raising false hopes. If you could offer my brother paradise upon earth tomorrow, you couldn’t tell him so. Do you think we haven’t tried to rouse him?’

  ‘But if you could reach him,’ Marthe said, ‘there might be some arguments he would listen to?’

  ‘If I could reach him,’ Sybilla said, ‘I could keep him alive.’

  They both looked at her, Marthe without astonishment, and Richard with a kind of impatient tenderness. Marthe said, ‘I think you can waken him. I think you know you can waken him, but are afraid to attempt it. Am I right?’

  ‘For God’s sake,’ said Richard. ‘What are you saying? She has sat hour after hour, talking aloud by his bedside. There is nothing we haven’t tried.’

  ‘No,’ Sybilla said, and straightened her back. ‘There is one thing.… How did you know? There is one thing I haven’t tried, because it may not rouse him at all. And whether it does so or not, it may kill him.’

  ‘He is going to die anyway,’ Marthe said. ‘I can’t reach him, you see, as she did.’

  ‘As who did?’ said Richard.

  The edge returned to Marthe’s tone. ‘I was brought up by an old crone who read fortunes in Lyon. You met her once. She had certain skills. She is dead now.’

  ‘But he has to be awake,’ Sybilla said. Her eyes were on Marthe, but she spoke as if she had not been listening. She added, suddenly, ‘You came to me, as soon as you heard about Francis. I told you once, I think, that you would need me.’

  ‘Oh, I do,’ said Marthe carelessly. ‘If only to persuade my furious husband that I haven’t butchered your son by driving his devastating Philippa out of the country. You were right. I should really never have gone back to Jerott. Intolerance drunk is bad enough, but intolerance sober is quite insupportable.’

  *

  The house of opium has many rooms, which may be visited every night after the key is first turned in the lock, and every night after it is withdrawn again.

  Behind the last door is oblivion. Standing before it, one can go forwards or backwards; but beside it are not the places of exquisite pleasure: the faces of pure ones confined to pavilions, reclining on green cushions and beautiful carpets amid thornless lote-trees and banana trees, one over another; for these have gone with the smoke of the opium.

  What remains, four years afterwards, are the haunted rooms of the departed: of a young, vigorous man with red hair and an old man left in his blood in a bothy; of a henchman dragged from his horse with an arrow in him, and another, darker of skin, dead of fighting in a Greek courtyard. Of a man returning from perilous seas to drown, seeking his son, near his homeland; of a girl dying blind behind yellow silk curtains, and another burning at night in an African pavilion. And a child, a son … an only son … playing with shells at the feet of the father who shortly would kill it.

  One does not, of set purpose, linger long on such a threshold. Sooner or later, the chains must give way; the accusing, querulous voices cease; and the insistent, imperious summons, saying over and over, ‘Aucassins, damoisiax, sire! Ja sui jou li vostre amie, Et vos ne me haés mie!’

  He had almost broken free when the tapers were lit: the tall candles set all round the high bed, their wax soaked with the same mandragora that long ago had burned round another bed where he lay ill, between sleeping and waking, with a black-haired woman bending over him.

  The scent, the evocative, insidious scent thickened in the still air of the room. The tapers burned, lighting the watching faces: of mother and brother and sister, of sister’s husband and familiar spirit: the staunch servant who was the bridge between the room in the Hôtel Moûtier, Blois, six years before and this silent, night-filled room today at Amiens.

  Archie Abernethy walked to the bed and looked down, in greeting, in farewell, in pain, with a strange and searching curiosity at the peace which lay there now in the empty carapace of a being who, like the Athenians, had never known rest himself, nor had allowed others to know it. Then he lifted a taper and walking back, held it out to Sybilla.

  She did not, as Archie had done, look down at the tranquillity on the pillow. She took the candle and, thrusting it forth, touched into flame all the hangings about her son’s bed.

  *

  The voices screamed, calling his name. The scented smoke filled his senses: the brooding presence above him changed and shifted, now to black hair, now to yellow. Someone, thinly mocking, said, ‘Sleep well.’

  But that was the reality, and this was the dream. Or had that been one of the nightmare furnishings of his opium, revisited again and again, and was this real?

  In his dream she had stood by the door, her black hair on her shoulders, mocking him. And he had fought the drugged tapers with fire.

  There was fire close to him now. The sound of it beat across the voices like a strong wind, obliterating them; the smell of sweet opiates had been pushed aside by stronger fumes; the hypersensitive surface of his body, long since lost to his awareness, recorded for him, hesitatingly again, the sensation of a dry and hovering heat.

  So it was happening now, and the Dame de Doubtance was waiting for him.

  Francis Crawford unclosed his eyes.

  The flames were there, like glistening silk, rippling up through the curtains and canopy about him, red and gold as the tall swirling fires of a Moroccan sunset.

  He had defied her then, and must escape. In his nightmare he had been wounded, and strapped to the bed. He remembered the pain, as he tried to pull himself to the side.

  But that had been only a dream, for now he was not conscious of pain when, summoning his willpower, he ordered his body to move. Instead, holding him immobile was a lethargy as unsurmountable as the bonds of his imagination. He drew a short breath and tried once more, aware again of a shouting; a clamour of voices that used his name, over and over, except for one, which simply said, ‘… damoisiax … sire!’

  And that was the one to whom he must respond. He said, without sound, ‘… com me plairoit Se monter povie droit …’ and release came. His hand, moving, caught the edge of the bed and he turned his head, slowly, into the pillow to follow it. Then, it seemed, of no volition of his own but brought by many hands, he was unravelled from the high blazing theatre of his isolation and supported, his head on someone’s arm, among the shifting airs and cool shadows deep on the floor.

  The last time, as now, there had fallen a sudden quiet. Against a pattern of sounds one did not need to interpret, of struck wood and falling water and the pleasant, domestic hiss of a Russian calidarium he was again in a place of silence and falling darkness. The effort was over.

  A branch of candles, thrust to within an inch of his face made him, with reluctance, reopen his eyes. The last time, he had been left alone.

  The kneeling woman holding the candlestick was not Oonagh, nor the Lady from the same chamber, the chamber which held his dead. It was a face from another room: the room w
hich held the living well of his torment and which, since he left the waters of the Authie, he had not been made to revisit.

  It was the face of Sybilla, with upon it an expression he had never known.

  The door to the present stood open. All the dark waters of the well rose and moved, deep and glittering towards him. In grief, in fear, in supplication, in total rejection, Francis Crawford closed his eyes. And Sybilla struck him.

  The blows jarred Jerott’s pillowing forearm and thighs. The force of them, sweeping open-handed first on one side of her son’s face and then on the other was shocking because of the lack of resistance. Even the bloodless skin offered no responding colour. Only the bright head turned and the dark-stained closed eyes were no longer tranquil, but lay below clouded brows, awaiting her pleasure.

  Sybilla said, ‘Francis. My poltroon son. My sickly son. My poor-spirited runt of a scabbed flock: look at me. If, of course, you have the courage.’ And laying down the candlestick, she rose to her feet.

  So, when he opened his eyes he had to look up and up, to a face that none of them had ever seen as they stared at her: Marthe who had known her only as a well-bred, quick-witted enemy; Archie who remembered her as the dignified hostess of Midculter; Richard who had known her treat only two men with such harshness, and both of them because they had threatened the security of this, her younger son.

  Jerott, his throat rigid, watched Francis look at her and saw Sybilla lower her cold gaze on him, snaring his attention. She said, ‘I hear you tried to cut your throat—or was it your wrists?—on another occasion. Your childhood is over now, Marshal. Mankind can survive very well without an intimate study of your susceptibilities but not, unfortunately, without your other functions and talents. Do you think I bring any child into the world to live for himself alone?’

  ‘That is unfair,’ Richard said hoarsely. Marthe said nothing. Nor, his black gaze unwinkingly on his master’s face, did Archie Abernethy. And Jerott, watching Sybilla, saw that the words did not even reach her, even more than they did Francis, his eyes open still on her face.