Checkmate (17 page)

Their last call, in darkness, was to the ramparts. Accompanied this time by a group of officials from the Arsenal, a pair of gunners and an Italian engineer called Batiste, they walked out through the Porte Saint-Denis and, crossing the water by torchlight, took up a position by the Priory of Saint-Lazarus.

They were to see an artillery demonstration, Jerott was told, about which the citizens had been warned before couvre-feu. Against the last pale staining of sunset he could see pricks of light in the tall, turreted portals of the gate, Porte de deuil, Porte de joie, and its heroic St George and the dragon. Men, small and black, moved along the ramparts on either side among the angular barrels of the artillery.

Jerott felt unsafe, on the flat ground below. It was an unusual position from which to judge the success of a bombardment. He felt even more unsafe when abruptly, a marigold of bright fire blossomed high in the firmament and was followed by the flat clap of sound from a cannon.

Since no one else ran, he remained where he was, controlling a wince as a second, third and fourth explosion followed almost at once, and then a string of others on either side of him. The night filled with spangled grey smoke, and with whorls of flame which burst in the air, and lay and shuddered below in the ditch water.

He counted eighty cannon, and then eighty more salvoes as they were recharged and fired almost immediately. Wheeling birds filled the sky, and every child, dog, goose, sheep, goat and chicken in Paris and out of it gave tongue, but unlike the proving of Jean Maugué’s bombard, no bloody cloud of arms, legs and heads had risen to heaven:
Priés pour l’âme de Jean Maugué, qui nouvellement est allé de vie à trespas entre le Ciel et la terre, au service du Roi notre Sire
.

Lymond appeared to be pleased. The voices of his companions, thin in the deafening silence, were raised in praise and ejaculation. There was more talk, and people began to disperse. Lymond, appearing, said, ‘Having achieved the condition of una miseria di speranza piena, I think we may consider the day’s business concluded. Has thow, Foly, ane wyfe at hame? If Archie calls to tell her you are well, will you spare me a moment at the Hôtel St André? I shall entertain you with a gloss on my cannon.’

It was the invitation, seven hours too late, that Jerott had been waiting for. If he sat down now to talk about anything, he would most likely fall asleep. He hesitated. A set of fingers closed on his elbow and a voice he recognized as Archie’s said, ‘Go and hae your clack. I’ll tell Mistress Marthe you’ll come later.’

One of Archie’s more powerful hints. Removing his arm and rubbing it, Jerott said, ‘All right. Thank you. Did you say the Hôtel St André?’

Undisturbed, Lymond answered him. ‘The home of the Maréchale and her nubile daughter. It’s quite near you, on the other side of the Porte de Montmartre. As in the poem.
C’est du vin de Montmartre Qui en boit pinte, en pisse quarte.
’

They were on their way there already, with the Watch walking beside them. Archie had vanished. Since the atmosphere seemed fairly emancipated Jerott said, ‘And the Marshal is still a prisoner? Doesn’t that present certain interesting problems?’

‘I don’t know about problems,’ Lymond said. ‘It certainly presents certain interesting opportunities: the air is heady with
alacritas
. But recalling our rank, we are behaving ourselves with unimpeachable purity.

‘In any case, the d’Albon girl is at odds with her mother. She will court whom she must; she will marry where she has to; but none of the arts taught to young girls by duchesses can conceal the fact that she despises us. You, too. Archie mentioned you were coming. She thinks you have broken Catholic faith with your Order, le bouclier de la foy, le fort de la Chrestienté et le fleau des infideles, to serve Mammon in drapery. Here we are.’

‘I suppose I have,’ Jerott said. They were speaking in English. A pair of oak doors made their appearance in the lamplight whose panels, beneath the coat of arms of the d’Albon family, gave a stirring account of the siege of Troy, at which the Marshal de St André would no doubt have been present, had the event not occurred prematurely. They opened on Lymond’s approach.

‘Not at all,’ said Francis Crawford, leading the way across a magnificent tiled courtyard, past a fountain and up a flight of steps to a door which also opened before he could touch it. ‘Your troubles arise from the tenets you insist on adhering to, not the ones you depart from. If we cross to this staircase we should avoid … I beg your pardon.’

A tall young woman with unbound black hair who had been standing turning the pages of a book in the room they were traversing turned fully
round and remarked in French, ‘Please do not apologize. My mother the Maréchale is out, but you may still avoid me should you wish simply to pass through the door. Unless I can offer you and your friend some refreshments?’

She despised him, Francis had said; and that much was clear. What he had not said of Catherine d’Albon was that she was beautiful. Strong-limbed and slender with a clear, high colour, she had slate-grey eyes pure as ice-water under level black brows, and the long, straight fall of her hair on the loose brocade robe she was wearing was hazed like boiled silk in the candlelight.

At the end of such a day’s work as Lymond had devised and carried out, he was immune, understandably, to any possible impact from either her looks or her anger. Jerott heard himself being introduced; heard the damning grace with which, giving it just enough attention, Lymond refused the offer of food and asked after the health of the Maréchale.

‘She will come back later this evening. She asked me, should you return, to beg you to excuse her. Since it seems M. de Sevigny requires neither food nor entertainment at her hands, the constant presence of his hostess may not be entirely necessary.’

‘You see?’ said M. de Sevigny, opening his unfortunately metal-soiled hands. ‘I am like Time,
Li tens, qui s’en vait nuit et jor, Senz repos prendre, et senz sejor
. How can I expect my friends to forgive me?’

‘I shouldn’t worry. You haven’t got any,’ said Jerott, and smiled hazily at Mademoiselle d’Albon who smiled reluctantly back. Lymond made no effort to continue the conversation, but bowed and stood aside to let Jerott mount the circular staircase which led to his apartments.

Their luxury was what one might have expected, given the scale of the rest of the building. Recalling the girl’s eyes following them both up the stair Jerott said suddenly, his hands in scented water, ‘What did you mean? That she would court whom she must?’

‘Don’t let’s go into all that: it’s too tedious,’ said Lymond, and dropping his towel on a tray, walked across to where the table of wines glowed by the fireplace. ‘I am not going to marry Catherine d’Albon, and that is all that need concern anyone. Are you, do you think, of sober habit on this trying campaign of non-aggression?’

He looked up and Jerott, meeting his inquiry, felt the colour rising under his skin. He said shortly, ‘Have you ever known me drunk in the field?’

‘Sometimes the bedchamber
is
the field,’ Lymond said. ‘I am offering you one glass, out of moral parsimony.
As a skin bottel in the smoke So are you parcht and dride. Yet will you not out of your hart Let my commandement slide
. What news of Lyon?’ He sat down, a cup of Pedro Ximénès in his palm.

Jerott sat down too, in a tapestry chair with cord fringes, and a lugged back which held his head between the ears like a pillow. He said, ‘The troops from Piedmont should be coming into Lyon about now. Danny
means to come north as soon as they settle. Adam will wait until the Duke de Guise and Strozzi arrive. By the way … there seems to be a prevalent idea that the Italian army is about to march in to help Paris any day now. When I was in Lyon, de Guise and Strozzi were in Rome still. They won’t be here for a month.’

‘I know. The Piedmont troops will take ten days to march here at the minimum: St Laurent’s Swiss and Colonel Rekrod’s levies will take longer. And the 40,000 loyal French from the provinces will require another four weeks I fancy to muster. So, like me, you cannot sally forth yet and avenge Alec and Fergie.’

So he, too, had been thinking of the two missing officers. Who, if he had not turned them off, would be here in Paris now.

It was not a tenable subject. Jerott, catching himself in the act of draining his wineglass, arrested it and said, ‘I don’t see why you can’t march. Why not, Francis? You leave Paris impregnable, surely, behind you. De Nevers is collecting fresh troops at Laon. And the Picardy garrisons, they say, add up to quite an army.’

‘Saint-Quentin held out fifteen days,’ Lymond said. ‘It gave de Nevers time to work on the frontier and garrisons, certainly. Salignac is at Le Catelet; Sancerre at Guise, de Bourdillon at la Fère, d’Humières at Péronne, Chaulnes at Corbie; Sepois in the Castle of Ham, d’Amboise at St Dizier and Montigny at Chaulny. Soissons and Compiègne are empty. The ground round about has been burned, but there is a limit to the value of that: the harvests in the Low Countries are in, and Philip will have all the bread he has need for. The garrisons have been active too, cutting off Spanish supply lines, robbing wagon trains and taking powder and munitions and money. But the rumour is that Philip is sitting in Saint-Quentin with his eye on those fortresses. He can stay and pick them off one by one, in which case he has lost his one chance of Paris. Or he can march on us now. And, I’m afraid, take us.’

Jerott stared at him through bleared eyes. ‘With an armed garrison of one hundred and seventy-five thousand men, and a battery of eighty guns on the Porte Saint-Denis ramparts?’

‘Yes. Well, in some ways France, like the island of Zanzibar, hath a peculiar monarchy,’ Lymond said. ‘Unsurpassable for culture and courtesans, but somehat confused about fortifications. They did some work in the scare of ’23, and added a few trenches and ditches and bulwarks in ’36, but that long curtain wall by the Bastille has been building for four years and the bastions are God’s gift to a good squadron of German gunners, working for almost anybody.

‘And the University side, of course, is hardly protected at all. The general theme seems to be that it’s all much too difficult, and if things are bad, the rabble will rise against you anyway, so you might as well pack your silk coats and your candlesticks and take horse smartly for Orléans at the first sign of trouble. Half female Paris had evacuated already by the time I got here, and the men would have followed if I hadn’t tripled
the watch on the gates and the river and announced I’d hang anyone I caught leaving illicitly.

‘My greatest task has been to prevent the royal family from melting off to the Loire like refined candle wax. They sent the Dauphin away, but after that were persuaded to listen to reason, once they had brought away the Charlemagne Jewel from Saint-Denis and added four hundred archers to the King’s bodyguard. Thereby somewhat diminishing the required atmosphere of superior confidence.’

‘You let them dress in sackcloth and carry out the relics from the Sainte Chapelle,’ Jerott said.

‘Candidly, I doubt if I could have stopped them,’ Lymond said. ‘I should point out, however, that it was not an expression of panic. It was an indication that the Almighty, having observed the bared feet of the entire royal family, must now be on our side. So you think that Paris is strong? I hope King Philip and the Duke of Savoy have that impression too. For apart from digging a few trenches, we haven’t put a spoonful of earth on their inadequate fortifications since I came here. There wasn’t time for it. We had to convey, instantly, the appearance of a well-armed, well-protected stronghold, and we apparently succeeded, because Philip didn’t march on us. He may of course change his mind. In which case, the King will wish he had obeyed his impulse to rush out of Paris. And so, no doubt, shall I.’

Behind Jerott the man, who drank too much and worried about Marthe and Alex and Fergie, was Jerott the Knight of St John, the officer who had once seemed to be Lymond’s tanist. He. said, ‘Christ, Francis. You can’t do that with a city. How much was fake? The guns? Was that why no shot came our way?’

‘We have eight pieces of ordnance: that’s all,’ Lymond said. ‘The garrison is also mostly fantasy. We towed seventy thousand artisans upstream in barges and had them enter the city at night, drums beating and pennants flying. The Venetian Ambassador was most impressed.’

‘You’re feeding him false reports? Is that why you were telling him tonight about new offers of alliance with Turkey? But living in the city,’ said Jerott, ‘he must know more than you want him to know.’

‘Not much,’ said Lymond. ‘But in any case, his dispatches are most carefully edited. The version which falls into Spanish hands is not always, shall we say, the version which his secretary wrote out for him. Don’t worry. I know that a highly trained set of European statesmen and soldiers isn’t going to be deceived in quite the same way as a boatload of Algerian corsairs.

‘On the other hand, they have other weaknesses. Double spies, for example, and a willingness to believe any written material they find on dead men or in captured wagon trains. We even managed a few evil portents. You didn’t hear of the screaming devils who floated one midnight over Saint-Quentin and Cambrai? King Philip’s German mercenaries in particular didn’t like them at all, especially as they
haven’t been paid for some time. They’ve been pouring in to de Nevers at Laon ever since. I won’t risk them in Paris, but for an instant down payment, they can help protect Amiens, for example, and make themselves as much of a nuisance to their old employers as they like.

‘You see, at any rate, that we have one or two ticklish weeks still before us. If they do attack, we can do very little about it, and the monarchy will indeed have to escape south, which is one reason why I have been anxious that Polvilliers shouldn’t be waiting for them in Lyon with an evil smile and six thousand infantry. That’s all. I shouldn’t have kept you from Marthe. I only wished to explain why I should like you to stay in Paris meanwhile.’

He stopped and then said, ‘I should say, too, since you have been so unnaturally reticent, that everything possible is being done to find out what happened to Guthrie and Hoddim.’