Checkmate (14 page)

Philippa Somerville shoved her hair under her cap, stuck her hands on her hips, and without budging a step, stood and glared at him. ‘Do I appear,’ she inquired, ‘crazed with lust?’

His eyes flicked wide open, Lymond considered her. Then he bent his head, and she could not tell if he was smiling. ‘Very seldom,’ he said.

‘Or artless? Or addled? Or excitable?’ She was getting angrier. ‘Is that why you keep recoiling as if I was a line of armed cavalry?’

He was not smiling. He looked up slowly and met her gaze, his own level. He said, ‘I beg your pardon. I didn’t know I was giving quite such an insufferable impression. I think I forget sometimes …’ He hesitated, choosing his language.

Philippa finished it for him. ‘… that I am aged twenty, and Kate Somerville’s daughter; and sensible? For Sybilla, I am willing to involve you in any kind of genealogical embarrassment. But you really needn’t have fears of the other kind.’

‘I don’t. I know that perfectly well,’ Lymond said. ‘I am trying, I believe, to avoid offering you the kind of attentions which would be expected by Madame la Maréchale.’

He did not cite Güzel, she noticed. Who had the same training she had. Touched with remorse, Philippa said soberly. ‘Since we’re being frank … Wasn’t that foolish? The Queen is going to offer you the Maréchale’s daughter in marriage. It might well be what you need.’

‘What I
need?
’ said Lymond. Then he said, ‘Oh, I see. But you haven’t seen Madame la Maréchale in
her
chemise.’

With commendable patience, Philippa made no rejoinder. By mutual
consent, they had begun walking rather swiftly towards the gate to the bridge-head. After a moment he went on. ‘I knew Catherine d’Albon was being sent south to meet me. I don’t want her. That is why I did what I did with her mother.’ He hesitated again, and then said, ‘What I told Marthe tonight was not strictly true. I am already pledged, and not only to the nation of Russia.’

Behind the cobbler’s apron unpleasant changes took place in Philippa’s abdomen. She ignored them. ‘To Güzel?’ she said steadily.

He shook his head. She saw that, looking ahead in the fog, his profile contained a curious and suspended calm, the smiling mask of some state far from peaceful. ‘Not to Güzel,’ he said. ‘But for my lifetime.’ And walking still he offered her, smiling again, four lines of verse, lightly spoken.

‘I didn’t know,’ Philippa said. It was a half-truth. Subconsciously, she supposed she had always known, since she was a schoolgirl. She said, ‘It’s my turn to beg your pardon. I only wanted to assure you that I have nothing to tender but friendship. But if you want it, there is a great deal of that, going cheaply.’

He slowed, with the intention perhaps of confronting her. But on second thoughts he said only, ‘Then the cost should not be beyond me. The pledge, without Latreia or Douleia, is simple friendship?’ He had begun once again to walk briskly.

Rousing herself: ‘The pledge,’ said Philippa, tartly, ‘is friendship. Simplicity is not, you will agree, one of your prominent attributes.’ They had passed through the gateway and turning left, mounted the rise of the long eight-arched bridge crossing the Saône. The fog was still thick on the bridge, concealing all but the first pair of flambeaux, but a current of air, winding through it, revealed the Fourvière heights for a moment, black against a starlit sky with the chapel lights bright on its summit, and the roofs of lamplit houses with their feet in the fog at its foot.

Dancing red in the haze, one of the bridge torches swayed in its socket. Gazing at it, Philippa was aware that she had been ungracious. She said, ‘But if you’ve no objection to fish scales, I’ll shake on it.’ And Lymond, to her gratification, accepted the hand that she offered him.

He did not shake it. He took it in a grinding and sinewy grip and dragged her sideways until she was running. Then he released her, spinning, to sprawl on the cobbles. His sword hissed from its scabbard. And gasping, she sat up and stared at him.

What she had seen was not the bridge flambeau swaying. It was a torch in the grip of a burly man with a fierce, swollen face and a patch of
raw flesh two inches wide running down brow, cheek and jawbone. A man who strode out of the fog on the crown of the bridge, axe in hand and stood, holding the torch high and grinning. ‘Well met, M. de Sevigny: I might have been in the boat if your little bitch hadn’t blocked the traboule with Renaud’s knife-grinding wheel, and left it running. You may put up your sword. There is a line of men awaiting you at the other end of the bridge, and another line closing the bridgehead behind you. You would have met them if you had come out of the rue Mercière. As it is, you came by the quay gate, and this makes me very happy, and also my friend Octavien beside you. Only, where is the little bitch?’

He never did hear the answer, for Philippa stabbed him from behind with her husband’s poniard. She dragged it out as he fell and stabbed him again, gritting her teeth, in the area delineated in white paint by the black eunuch who instructed the princes’ class in the seraglio. A staccato hack of steel, interspersed with an outbreak of retching, told that the man Octavien had flung himself on Lymond. She caught up the fallen man’s torch and lifted it.

In a flare of yellow, the blade of an axe parted from the haft and whistled out of their sight in the darkness. The owner, the stock still in his hand, was in Lymond’s grip and Lymond’s hand was over his mouth, stifling his cries and forcing his head back with an expertise which Philippa saw was swift, impersonal and utterly final. As Lymond lowered the dead man to the ground she uttered neither comment nor commendation. It could hardly have been otherwise, man to man; or Octavien would have been fit to lead armies, and Lymond to be a third-rate paid assassin.

But from this point onwards it was not man to man, but Francis Crawford and herself against an unknown number of men at each end of this bridge. And although she had joked about swimming, there was no escape that way. Below the bridge was swift current and a tumble of rocks that would kill them. Lymond’s voice very quietly said, ‘Christ, Philippa: I won’t ask where you learned that. Now prop up the torch and come and give me a hand.
Si leonina pellis non satis est, assuenda vulpina.
’

‘Or,
Si Dieu ne me veut ayder, le diable ne me peut manquer
,’ said Philippa valiantly. ‘I am listening, mon compère. As a drunkard believes a drunkard, and a madman a madman.’

Very soon after that, the chain of five men at the Fourvière end of the bridge heard break out again, and closer, the clash of sword blades in the vapour. This time they could also hear voices, including the screams of a woman.

Their orders were to remain where they were. But it was galling to stand by and listen, when it was clear that the King’s emissary and his lady had been quite overthrown by the ambush. Presently, the girl’s screeching voice rose to a shriek: there was a shout, and a thud and a splash from the river bed. A moment later, the foreigner’s cries were cut
off also. Then, speaking their own patois, an indignant voice, presumably Octavien’s, said, ‘Don’t be a fool! Get the rings at least before he goes over!’

After that, it would have been foolish to stay. One of the five men began to stroll forward, and was overtaken by another. In a moment, all five were running headlong for the parapet, where the smoky light of a torch flared on the jewelled points and rich doublet of M. le comte de Sevigny, encasing a very dead body already dangling half over the handrail. Boots and laces and buttons were already torn off in ten grasping handfuls before the first of the five men realized that the body was not that of M. de Sevigny. And when, whirling round, they thought to dash back the way they had come, the two people they sought were already running, softly and fast for the bridgend.

Because Lymond was steering his wife by the arm, they both saw the obstacle in their path just before they cannoned into it. It was large and lukewarm and soft. Fending herself off, Philippa’s hand pressed against buckles and leather and then, stumbling, she recognized something else—the unyielding steel of plate armour.

A horse and rider, both dead. With others, she suspected, lying beyond them. Lymond’s voice said, ‘Run to the end of the bridge, turn right, and hide yourself in the porch of the Customars’ house.’

As a madman obeys a madman, and a drunkard a drunkard. Asking no questions, she did as he told her.

So their escort had been waylaid after all. No quartet of men at arms had arrived back at the Hôtel Schiatti or at Lymond’s lodging: no one even knew that she and Lymond had left Jerott and Marthe. Instead, their attackers were more numerous and better organized than anyone had expected. They could cordon off the bridge on the chance that the Captain-General had escaped from the quayside. It was equally possible that the roads to Lymond’s destination and her own on this side of the river were watched.

Hence her instructions. Instead of running on she turned right, along the rue de la Pescherie as far as the church of St Eloi. Then facing uphill and away from the river, she turned round the back of the church and into the tall, jutting porch of the Custom-house. Inside, the studded door with its wrought iron hinges was firmly locked, and the windows were dark.

Lymond had not told her to knock. And indeed, the noise would bring their assailants sooner, in all likelihood, than the customars. She waited therefore, breathing hard, with sweat drops, erratic as mice, straying over her neck and her temples, and listened for the footsteps which meant Lymond was coming.

She never did hear them. Instead there struck on her eardrums a sonorous sound, hardly deadened by fog, of another calibre altogether. The alarm bell on the bridge had been set swinging.

For perhaps eight strokes it rang deeply and loudly. Then, shaking
lightly, it came to a halt, revealing a ground-bass of excited men shouting.

Lymond, in his shirt-sleeves, shot into her hiding-place breathlessly. ‘They’ve cut him down. Hell.’ He listened.
‘I
was afraid they’d seen us. The fog is going. This way. Traboules, my knife-grinding Philippa. With your invention and mine, it will really go hard if we can’t lose them.…
Wake up, you bastards!
’

She could hear running feet now, as he had done. But even so, he stopped in his stride and scooping up first one stone and then another, hurled them with a vicious crash straight through the Customars’ windows. Then, catching up, he caught Philippa under the arm and plunged through and under the first of the rows of tall houses which climbed the steep hillside in front of them.

Fear had gone. He had touched her. He had admitted her to the sexless friendship she had asked of him. She had been treated at last as a partner and adult. She was free, as he had said, to join her invention to his; to expect and give co-operation without fear or favour, as might be done by Adam or Jerott or Danny.

A heady experience, for an only child accustomed to single-thread happiness, and not to the moment of creation that occurs when the warp is interlocked with the weft. When the singer is matched with the sounding-board; the dream with the poet. When the sun and the fountain first meet one another.

Side by side they were evading, she and Francis Crawford, a pack of men who intended to kill them. To escape them would be a miracle. To try to escape them with wit and grace and all that civilization could add to an occasion essentially barbarous was her care, her delight, and her intention. And the outcome he had foreseen touched her in its terrible proximity not at all.

So they fled into the night-black traboules: up the steps, between the pillars, over the courtyards and again into the twisting broken-backed tunnels, with the thudding of feet always tracking the darkness behind them.

Since the flight from Greece when he had been sick with opium, she had never seen unleashed, for such a span of time, his strength, his gaiety and his physical charm.

Every circumstance conspired, like a merchant, to display them to her. Swooping like birds from space to space of the tall houses scaling the hillside, they used what fortune suggested to defend themselves with. Baulked by a locked door, they took to a high, sprawling staircase whose galleries overlooked a nest of different courtyards: as their pursuers swarmed after them he bombarded them blithely with geranium pots, chanting:
‘Ding
ye the tane and I the uther’ as she helped him, so that children screamed and dogs barked and a man in his night shirt, opening shutters, discharged an arquebus into the night air and dislodged an entire family group of Jupiter, Ganymede and the eagle from a cornice.
‘A sangre! A fuego! A sacco!’
sang out Francis Crawford; and seizing her hand, set off running again.

He talked, indeed, all the time, breathlessly, with snatches of verse and of laughter and a flow of frequently ribald comment which only ceased, now and then, in the cause of evasion. To begin with, also, he guided her, until she showed him there was no need for it. Philippa Somerville had spent a childhood competing with schoolboys among the woods and streams of north Tyneside, and in her cap and apron and sensible shoes was as agile as he was and, she wished to prove, not without invention.

They clambered over the cold nested clay of the pantiled roofs and crossed a narrow street on a ladder, because Philippa insisted on it. They sprang from niche to balcony and swung between pillars. They arrived at ground level and freed a mastiff and unshackled the door of a pig sty: at first floor, and found looms and a great roll of silk which streamed and bounded, calendaring all their assailants; at second and third and fourth floors and found sacks of flour to upset, or a bucket of slops or a wallsconce to send flying downwards, first from her hands and then from his, watched by the winged lions and griphons on the ceiling bosses, the angels guarding the windows; the fanged faces grinning from corbels or spewing open-throated from gutters above them. Decoration Gothic and classical heaped its profusion around them: shell and pilaster, acanthus and ballflower, bas relief and statuary in niche and fountain and rooftop as they crossed the road on a plank and began again, in the next house above them.