Checkmate (22 page)

‘Perhaps. But she is on her way home to England,’ said Lymond easily. ‘And in any case, it does not affect the prime issue. I remain in this country, your highness.’

‘I see. Then,’ said the thin, clear voice sweetly, ‘we must be content, we suppose, with your presence. Since this is so, we may expect to see you more frequently?’

‘As often,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘as my duties and the commands of the king will allow.’

The Queen glanced at Mary Fleming, who came forward. Lymond, rising, threw her a look of mild inquiry. Jenny Fleming’s daughter saw it, but dared not answer it. The Queen said, ‘You may leave. There are some persons in the chamber of audience who wish to see you. Fleming will conduct you.’

He made her a full and graceful bow, and looked at Mary Fleming again, as she opened the door of the presence chamber. But the Queen was watching, so she said nothing; only allowed him to enter.

It was a small room. In it was a short, ruddy man with a grey beard whom she introduced as Master Michael Nostradamus, the Queen’s barber-surgeon from Provence.

The other person in the room needed no introduction, being the one young woman he trusted had left France and himself for ever.

The Queen, wilful to the end, had sent for Philippa.

For a girl of twenty to fall in love with an experienced dilettante ten years her senior was nothing out of the way. It was perhaps rarer for such a girl to make up her mind, as did Philippa in Lyon in one night of bitterest soul-searching, that such a relationship was out of the question, and that henceforth his life and hers must lie in different directions.

There had, of course, been sentimental attachments before in her childhood: to an apothecary, a ballad-monger and a boy from the Abbey who had shared the same teacher. All she remembered, looking back, was the delicious anguish, the laborious subterfuge: to be in the garden when he happened to call; to be in the market place on the day he might ride through. The smile one treasured; the box of glutinous ointment one bought but did not use, because his fingers had touched it.

The boy from the Abbey was the only one who even learned her name; and he was interested in someone else very much older. She had produced a tear or two for her pillow on occasion, and had wasted a great many hours on devious plans which came to nothing, under the impression that each tender secret was hers only. She remembered her father remarking, on finding the salve, that he didn’t know she was bad with her fetlocks. Later she recognized the loving anxiety and, very likely, the kindly hysteria with which her parents had watched all her antics.

It had been painful, but only a little. It was self-inflicted pain, teamed with excitement and pleasure and an innocent awareness that one was touching the fringe of something real which might lie round the next corner. When it came, one would know what to do with it. And meanwhile, one need suffer only as much as one wanted to. It was a game.

It had been so different, her growing interest in Lymond, that she had never connected the one with the other. Brought up by Kate, she had acquired early all Kate’s maturity: the maturity which has to do with understanding other persons and, if called upon, putting those who are understood before one’s own interests. Physical maturity, although she possessed it, had never claimed her attention.

What had happened therefore was a true awakening: a clear and
shadowless light revealing why, through all these years, the condition and wellbeing of one man should so have concerned her.

Subconsciously, she had divined what he might be. That night, turned upon herself and not outward to others, the elements of his identity had been delivered to her, served upon gold, as the bread and meat and wine of a festival.

For an hour, blended with all she could offer, something noble had been created which had nothing to do with the physical world. And from the turn of his throat, the warmth of his hair, the strong, slender sinews of his hands, something further; which had. Though she combed the earth and searched through the smoke of the galaxies there was no being she wanted but this, who was not and should not be for Philippa Somerville.

That her eyes were now open was no fault of his. The pity of it was that, since that evening, he knew it. So, she resolved in that moment, she must remove herself from his circle.

It was then five o’clock in the morning: one hour, though she did not know it, before the Paris courier would come thundering to the Hôtel de Gouvernement door. She rose and, taking paper, wrote a letter to tell Kate, her mother, that she was coming. Then she prepared for her journey home, and for the last service she could perform for Francis Crawford.

To return to Russia, Marthe had said, would mean death for him. Against that, she had only one shot in her quiver, and that so weak that more harm than good might well come of it. She could reach the end of the road in her probe into his history.

If it did him no service he would remain, as seemed likely, an exile for the rest of his life. If it restored to him pride in his family, he might consider working for Scotland. And that, thought Philippa a little bleakly, for an Englishwoman would have to be monument enough.

*

Once, a schoolgirl in Jerott Blyth’s company, Philippa had travelled up the Cisse valley to Sevigny. Riding again through the mild verdant hills, the fruiting valleys, the wide, dreamlike forests, she wondered what had prompted Francis, all those years since, to buy it. Nicholas Applegarth, maimed ex-comrade of God-knew-what battles, had managed it for him, as a Frenchman by naturalization. Now, with the dual nationality granted him, Francis Crawford was master of this and of all the other property with which she had heard the King had endowed him. The farms, the thatched houses, the villages she was passing must be his. She could feel the Schiatti nephews, gallant escorts, surveying the orchards and vineyards and assessing their value. Then they came to the gatehouse, and the avenue of trees from which, under the archangel wings of the beeches, one could see the spired blue turrets and white walls of Sevigny.

It was not, like Chaumont over the river, a stronghold. Sevigny was Italian, and built by Italians as a pleasure house, its walls decorated by bricks, by mouldings of shells, of angels, of foliage; by dormer windows whose interlaced stonework rose to embroider the sky among the slender red and white stalks of its chimneys. Behind, an arcaded terrace bordered a carp pond, beyond which the formal gardens, green and diapered, stretched to where the trees all around closed on the riding paths with arbours set in them, and statuary. There were sunflowers still, their yellow heads yearning westwards.

It had been like that, so Nicholas Applegarth said, when Lymond acquired it, and he had changed nothing, although Nicholas had husbanded it well. Indeed, even indoors there was little in evidence of Sevigny’s owner: a library of books which looked as if it had been used; a spinet which was newer than the rest of the furniture in the little parlour in which she found it. Nicholas Applegarth, pink-cheeked and grey-haired, moving unfussily with his stick in the long gown which disguised his infirmity had been expecting them, and made the Schiatti cousins welcome for the night, and saw to the quartering of Philippa’s escort. In the morning he took them riding round the pretty property. M. de Sevigny, he said, had rarely had free time in which to enjoy it. Although, of course, when he had his company it was sometimes quartered there.

They had been here when Jerott brought her along, all those years ago, and Alec Guthrie and Fergie Hoddim with them. Nicholas had told her of the disaster at Saint-Quentin, and the news that Alec and Fergie were missing. He told her also of the threat to Paris, and that M. le comte had been summoned there. In private, he used Lymond’s Christian name, and to avoid an implication which might wound, Philippa had to do so as well.

It was a frightening pleasure, but one she never again could be made to indulge in. She also made and doggedly kept other rules. Nicholas, the most gentle of hosts and the least given to gossip, was told that she was here with her husband’s knowledge, to search out his sister Marthe’s parentage. She asked no questions about Lymond, or his life at Sevigny. The new flame was already stronger than she could well bear. It would be folly to feed it.

She dismissed with real gratitude the handsome boys who had escorted her so competently from Lyon, and set herself to finish quickly the tasks which had drawn her to the Loire, and then to leave for the coast and a ship for the Tyne before anyone could prevent her. She wondered what Kate would say, and Lymond’s mother Sybilla. Dismissed, though with honour, from the Queen of England’s service, she could expect no Court appointment in this reign, although the next might be a different matter. Without the Queen’s sister Elizabeth, Lymond would never have reached the shores of France. He had more credit there than he knew of, and his wife probably also.

But none of that, of course, would matter to Kate or to Sybilla. Only
one question mattered. When is he coming home? And the answer to that might lie here, in or beside Sevigny.

Such as it was, it did not take her long to find it. With Nicholas and his servants beside her, she rode the few miles through the forest to Blois, and presented her credentials, and had opened for her the five crooked storeys of the carved wooden house known as Doubtance, with its littered forecourt and well, where Lymond had arrived, according to Archie Abernethy, after escaping from a sickbed and a conflagration which had nearly deprived him of life.

Up these twisted stairs, the Dame de Doubtance had received and sheltered him. Here had been drawn up the horoscope which, with others, had been so unaccountably missing from her other house, now Marthe’s, in Lyon. From this gallery, perhaps, he had stood and looked over the rooftops to the dazzle of the River Loire and the flat horizon of trees beyond it.

She searched the house with Nicholas’s help, stumping painfully from one low-beamed room to another. Marthe had been right. There was nothing here but mould and rotting wood and the shadows of old paintings lingering on the powdered plaster. Philippa walked down from the top of the house and closed the shutters one by one on the antique gold of the afternoon sunshine, and the green, whining motes of the mosquitoes and the bearded seed-quills which passed slowly, lurching; bearing life away from this dusty sepulchre.

The key Marthe had sent her fitted none of the big doors at Sevigny, nor any others in its smooth, tended purlieus. She had not told Lymond’s sister that her next call was to be to the Abbey of Notre-Dame de la Guiche, where, paid by Gaultier, the nuns of St Claire had reared Marthe.

Nicholas gave her an introduction to the Abbess. But Philippa made that visit alone and returned from it to find Nicholas Applegarth, anxiety on his kind face, awaiting her.

With him was a royal messenger, with the red lion of Scotland on his doublet and a polite document, which said little, in his dispatch bag. The sharpened edge of the message betrayed itself in the spoken command which accompanied it. The Most High and Virtuous Princess Mary Stewart, crowned Queen of Scotland, sent her greetings to madame Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny, and commanded her to Court forthwith, to take her place as one of the Queen’s ladies of honour.

One hoped, said the messenger smoothly, that madame la comtesse was conscious of the greatness of the honour. There was, one assumed, no question of refusing. Or such a refusal, naturally, would incline her Highness’s uncles to look askance on any favours required from her husband, in a household which they must regard as henceforth tinged with disloyalty.

She wept all night, for the meeting which now must come, and which she had trusted never to be called upon to endure. Then, being Philippa,
she rose and cleaned and tinted her face, and put on the gown and sleeves and cloak in which, she knew, she looked most assured and most elegant. Then, leaving Nicholas silent behind, she rode to Saint-Germain.

*

The repose of self-command was still there, and the impervious face and the exquisite Turkish grooming when unawares Francis Crawford walked into her presence and stopped dead, his eyes open, his thoughts dispelled, it was obvious, like a mountain torrent striking a boulder. Philippa Somerville said steadily, ‘Her Majesty was hoping, I think, to surprise you. It was not my intention to stay in France. But I have been honoured with an appointment it would have been difficult to refuse.’

There followed an interval during which no one spoke.

Mary Fleming closed the door, remaining inside it. Her Majesty, no doubt, had had the satisfaction of overhearing the initial results, at any rate, of her subterfuge. She hoped the Countess, setting aside her restraint, might now settle to gay conversation as she had done before, on her way southwards. The Queen had enjoyed her company. It would be a pity if an old man like Master Nostradamus should hamper them. Then Mr Crawford said, ‘I understand. Some invitations are more irresistible than others.’

It was all he said. His stare had shifted to the Queen’s physician. She had forgotten, like the Queen, quite how fair-skinned he was. Master Nostradamus, easing the stiff black gown over his knees, settled back in his chair and made professional conversation. ‘I hear, my lord Count, that you have been appointed a Chevalier of the Order, on which I must offer you my congratulations. Were you a patient of mine, I should warn you against over-indulgence at their banquets. I have known men attend them who have never recovered.’

‘They have not perhaps had the good fortune to discover the right physician,’ said Francis Crawford slowly. He looked down at the feathered cap in his hand and then, with a sudden sharp gesture, threw it on the small table, where it landed between his wife and the doctor. ‘I speak, I think, to the author of the most famous Centuries, the book of prophecies published two years ago?’

The comtesse de Sevigny, whose luminous brown eyes had been fixed on her husband, turned her head suddenly to look at the Queen’s doctor. ‘You flatter me,’ said the Queen’s doctor equably. ‘You have heard of my humble works.’

He was not, Mary Fleming thought, the aesthetic figure one would have thought from his reputation. Beneath the broad black cap his greyed chestnut hair flowed with his beard over the white, faintly creased collar. His nose was long; his eyes grey under marked brows; his complexion fresh and rosy as a man half his age. Mr Crawford said, ‘You
are fortunate in your printer. Proof-reading, as Estienne truly said, is to typography what the soul is to the body of man.’

‘You are right. I shall convey your compliments to my good friend Macé Bonhomme,’ said Master Nostradamus amiably. ‘Truly, a man may divorce the one from the other at his peril, and even the best are not immune to mistakes. But the wise craftsman learns from his folly.’

He remained sitting there, rubicund and cheerful, his bright gaze moving inquiringly between the Chevalier and the lady he was divorcing. Mr Crawford sat down. For the first time, Mary Fleming noticed, his eyes returned and locked, momentarily, with those of Mistress Philippa. The Countess turned to Master Nostradamus. ‘You make prophecies, sir? You are, then, a caster of horoscopes?’