Checkmate (25 page)

Then the swarthy face with its dark curls did turn. ‘So the fish dislikes water. You have about you a stink of Malta yet, mon petit ami. Do you spit on your grandfather, who fought all his life in France and in Italy for love of war and of Albany? And lost all his beauty for it. I saw him in Italy, with his fine yellow hair parted for him by a battle-axe. When he told you tales of his prowess, did you say,
But what were your motives?
Or have you forgotten him?’

‘I remember the scar,’ Lymond said. ‘And I remember his funeral. I was three years old at the time.’

‘Devil take you,’ said Piero Strozzi warmly. ‘You are the only man in this country who can make me forget I am twice his age, and then remind me of it like a mule’s hoof in the belly. But I forgive you. If you talk too much, you also refrained from bringing the town guard about me at Douai. Tell me one thing. For what reason do you wish to return to Russia, to become again commander of all her armies?’

There was a short silence. Then Lymond said, ‘To enforce peace.’

‘Ah. And then?’ said Piero Strozzi.

‘And then to rule,’ Lymond said.

*

They had much in common, aside from the professional gossip: the tales of other men’s mistakes and eccentricities and all the low comedy which accompanies warfare. Exchanges of such a kind carried them to Cléry where, in a neglected barn beside a burned-down farmhouse, they found fresh straw and, stored behind some rotting vegetables, a chest holding a change of clothes, a napkin of food, and a wineflask. How they came there, Strozzi did not inquire and Lymond volunteered no explanation: his intelligence service, or, if you preferred it, the number of spies he was paying were his own affair.

They left Cléry rested and refreshed, since it is a stupid man who carries a slow brain and tired muscles into danger. The rest of their journey indeed was enlivened by lurid incidents in which one or other of
the King’s trusted commanders took a fancy, it seemed, to put the whole enterprise to risk for the sake of an hour’s entertainment. On one occasion, to do with a fisherman, a smithy, and three German archers from Arras
(‘Eine Deutscher bukt wie ein bawar’)
Lymond rendered even the greatest practical joker in Italy speechless with combined hysteria and anxiety. Only later, when it was all over, did Piero Strozzi perceive that, after all, Francis Crawford was exacting retribution for Douai.

Then they were at Ardres, and ahead lay the Pale, the frontier of the English-held hinterland of Calais.

They crossed it at Leulinghen, whose thatched church once straddled the frontier, its French door in the nave, its English door in the choir. They left after early Mass by the choir door in their coarse jerkins and dusty boots, showing at Sandingfield a pass thoughtfully provided at Ardres by their host for the night. His name had been Haines, and his cousin, Lymond said, leased all the fishing in the marshes between Hâmes and Ardres. He had supplied them also with a mule and a small wicker cart containing six barrels of apples, which they collected outside the church and trundled nine miles through low hills and over the causeway to the moated walls of the city of Calais.

They showed their pass again to cross the drawbridge with the rest of the crowd at the Bullengate and made their way at a dilatory pace to the market place, displaying on the way a happy if illegal propensity to sell apples to any passer-by who requested them. At intervals the mule, a stubborn creature, chose a stance and defied all their efforts to shift it, ending in an act of total resistance at the drawbridge wardhouse of the citadel.

The tang of the apples and the sight of the red waxen mounds were too much for the pikemen on guard there. Yelling and whacking with vigour, Lymond jumped round his mule to find his fruit disappearing in handfuls behind jacks and into stuffed breeches.

He made no effort to consult his trading partner. Howling, he snatched the shapeless hat from his rough hair and jumped on it. Then, stick whirling, he charged at the soldiery.

It was afterwards revealed to Marshal Strozzi that he must have seen the approach of the Knight-Porter and his fifty armed soldiers, returning from closing the Millgate. At the time, the most distinguished muleteer in Christendom stood with the reins in his clutch, breathing stertorously, while his crazy companion ricocheted like an unwashed puppet from cuirass to mailed fist to the flailing wood of reversed and jocular halberds. A couple of hackbutters got to work with their boots and the wicker cart shuddered and tilted. With a bellow, Piero Strozzi dropped the reins and rushed into battle.

‘Bleedin’ butter-boxes!’ said with injured astonishment one of the three men he knocked sideways. ‘Bloody Flemish thievin’ bastards! Gabbling cutpurses!’ He got up, revealing the fact that he had a certain minor
authority. He proceeded to prowl up and down in front of the apple-sellers who, in the grip of seven men, had flailed themselves to a spreadeagled standstill.

‘I should make faggots of your bones, shouldn’t I, me little ugglesome allies? You lay your sticky trotters on us, who come to fight your wars for you? I think you need to be taught a little right feeling, eh brothers? So on your knees, Flemings. And prime your chops, Flemings. You’re going to lick the road clean for me and my fellows to walk on. And you’re going to pray like two English gents, while you’re at it. I’ll tell you what to pray. You say,
God save the Queen and f—— Flanders.
’

‘You bloody donkey!’ yelled Lymond. ‘D’you think I’ve been swearing in Walloon? When were you last in London? Never bloody saw it, I wager. Well, I tell you something. I was born by the Pissing Conduit at St Christopher’s Parish, and I can tell an English soldier from a parcel of hop-picking yokels from Surrey. What’s more, I know milord Wentworth.’

‘Do you, now?’ said an educated voice. The Knight-Porter and the fifty men at arms had arrived. The grip on the two apple-sellers slackened. Lymond looked up, his two-day stubble stippling his baleful, unwashed countenance.

‘That is,’ said Lymond sulkily, ‘I had an aunty that cleaned out his jakes for him. We’re honest traders, my lord. The gentlemen had no call to set on us. We sell sweet apples to those that’ll pay for them, but we’re poor men. If you take our goods from us by force, why, you take our livelihood, and that’s not an Englishman’s way. Leastways, not when I was in London.’

‘It is still not an Englishman’s way,’ said the Knight-Porter repressively. ‘Release these men. Replace the apples. Set the wagon to rights. You say your wares are for sale?’

‘Yes, milord,’ said Lymond. He dived nervously for his hat and clutched it, turning it round and round against his coarse jerkin. ‘All save a barrel bespoke for the Ruisbank.’

‘What price are you asking?’ said the Knight-Porter.

‘Two sols, milord,’ said Lymond. ‘Tuppence a pound, you would say. And fit for her highness at Greenwich, bless her dear, saintly heart.’ Piero Strozzi, rubbing his arms, let his mouth fall dumbly open.

‘We shall take them,’ said the Knight-Porter curtly. ‘And at three sols, to compensate for your pains. Can you turn the animal round, and bring the wagon into the courtyard?’

Lymond hesitated. ‘There’s a barrel of them for the Ruisbank. We made a bond on it,’ he said.

The Knight-Porter had grown impatient. ‘We shall see that you are helped to deliver it. Do you want to take my offer or not?’

‘Oh. Aye. Your lordship,’ said Lymond, ‘is a real gentleman. Milord, you’ve struck a blow for the honour of England, and when you see those dear green fields again, mind and salute them for me and my uncle.’

Later, sitting below Ruisbank Fort waiting for the ferryman to take them back across the harbour to Calais, Piero Strozzi said, ‘I have a strong objection to being described as your uncle.’

‘I beg your pardon,’ said Lymond. ‘I thought perhaps you would prefer uncle to father. It wasn’t, incidentally, the regular Knight-Porter. That was Sir Henry Palmer.’

‘Ah,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘The man who has helped to hold Guînes while my lord Grey has been away with King Philip?’

‘Yes. I knew Tommy, the older brother. He held Guînes and Calais appointments as well. Meddled in politics, however, and paid for it.’

‘I had heard. I had also heard that my lord Grey of Wilton was in trouble at the same time, but was reckoned too good a soldier to execute, even though he might lean to the Reformers. The English Pale is a useful exile, it seems to me, for the nation’s more recalcitrant citizens.’

Piero Strozzi turned and looked at his placid companion. ‘You took some trouble to get me this morning to Mass. Can it have escaped your memory that I refused a Cardinal’s hat in my youth? That Pope Leo was my mother’s brother? That I have a sister an Abbess and a brother a Cardinal at this moment?’

‘How could I forget? It was you,’ said Lymond, ‘who mentioned expediency.’ Behind them, the crenellated tower of the fort cut the sky. The garrison had been surprised to receive a barrel of apples, but delighted with it. Rumour had been correct: food stocks were low. And behind the fort lay the long line of the beach and the sea, whose murmur came to them even here, in the busy port. As he spoke to Strozzi he was filing facts as he knew the other was doing: facts about the number and size of the boats in the harbour; the position of the fishing fleet, the notorious drop in the tide, the gun emplacements along the walls and at the Watergate entrance to the city; the flood gates which controlled the intake for the moat of the citadel.

To the right, reeds in plumed, pale banks moved like drowned horses’ manes in the marshes. There was water everywhere. Save for the sand dunes the land was an endless, sludge-coloured slade, and above it, the wide pale sky, as wide and as light as in Russia.

‘I stand on neither side. I fight with Lutherans and against them. I lead the Pope’s army, and kiss his hands, if he will give me soldiers to throw against Florence. I am a man with no God,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘And you? You paid lip service at the altar. But I hear that those who would have you in Scotland have so far lit on no inducement.

‘Is it conscience which holds you? Yet I believe that the Queen-Regent allows those of the Reformed Faith to live within her daughter’s kingdom. Or is it a family quarrel? But your brother the Baron I recall as a charming, a moderate man, and nine years ago your mother the Dowager made me welcome and spoke of you as no man or woman, I can tell you, has ever spoken of me. And yet … my father was a true man. Tortured, he took his own life so that he would not dishonour
himself. He wrote on the walls of his cell, “If I did not know how to live, I shall know how to die.” ’

The rowing boat was approaching over the sage-grey reflections of the walls of Calais, with behind the sturdy stalk of the Watch Tower and the square tower of the belfry among all the steep tiled roofs and spires. On the east walls the windmills buzzed, active as thread in the stiff breeze, which made fingerprints in the pale water and had silted up every crevice and gradient around them with a thick grouting of peach-coloured sand. Lymond said, ‘I too stand on neither side but … not, I think, without a God. If I went back, I should have to choose.’

‘And is that a bad thing?’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘It is difficult. It would be more gratifying, I can see, to rule all Muscovy than a nation smaller than Paris, with Mother France looking over your shoulder. Politics and religion are no longer fingers on the same hand, and your Queen-Regent’s tolerance may not last for ever. Your country may be governed well in the name of a religion you cannot agree with; or badly by those who worship as your conscience also instructs you. You may have to choose between your God and your country. Or you may have to choose differently from your family, who wish you to come back. Is this what you fear?’

‘Part of it,’ Lymond said. ‘It is all rather more complex than you imagine.’ He got to his feet.

Piero Strozzi rose likewise. ‘And your family? If the new religion brings trouble, and your brother were to die, who will they turn to?’

‘There is no doubt, of course, of the answer,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘But considering where we are at the moment, the question perhaps is academic. May I assist you, as my aged uncle, into the boat? I have a note from Senarpont which says that at the sign of the
Trois Tetes
is a very good inn. I suggest we now go and turn our apples into sour beer and naughty doings among citizens and mechanics and other lubberly loiterers.’

As it turned out, the beer at the
Trois Têtes
was excellent. Piero Strozzi, forced against nature to remain dumb, watched his companion rapidly and expertly become drunk, thereafter striking up a bosom friendship with a number of the aforesaid citizens and mechanics, including a brewer called Pigault who described, with a nice turn of phrase, the entire sluice system from Newnham Bridge to Gravelines which, if the silly bastards at the Citadel ever opened it, would drown all next summer’s crops and let in salt water round the town that would spoil all the brewing and cause such an uprising that Tommy Wentworth and the bloody Council wouldn’t know which to face first—the French or the Calaisiens. The only soldier among them was Willie Grey, and he was away with the foreigners leaving Braying Teddy to hold Guînes, and Guînes, said Mr Pigault morosely, was a damn sight worse off than Calais.

He called King Philip a number of names, and embarked on a series of
dirty songs all of which Lymond appeared to know in several versions. The session ended when Mr Pigault, full of his own beer, slid comfortably under the table. From there, after brotherly leavetakings, the applesellers made their way to the market-place where, under the Gothic towers of the Staple, they filled their cart with cloth, cheeses and tallow and began to make their leisurely way again by Rigging Street and the Shafts and Cock Lane to the Millgate, the east door out of Calais.

Above the portals, a two-line verse had been cut, with some optimism:

When they were free to speak openly: ‘Have you,’ inquired Marshal Piero Strozzi of M. le comte de Sevigny, Chevalier of the Order, ‘ever witnessed iron to swim like a cork?’