Checkmate (26 page)

‘No,’ said the comte de Sevigny soberly. ‘But Nature’s laws are beyond a simple man’s reckoning. If I were asked to wager, I would say that before the new year, iron will swim; and Englishmen with it.’

They left the cob and wagon at Ardres and slept at Cléry in the same ruined barn, where the food and drink had been replenished and a sum of money added, divided into two purses. Healthily tired, with beer, with laughter, with riding, Marshal Strozzi slept instantly.

Lymond was later in quenching the candle. Waking at first light, Piero Strozzi found by his pallet a neat stack of paper, closely written, with beside it some cards bearing intricate plans: of the Citadel; of Fort Ruisbank; of the four gates and the bulwarks of Calais. He was examining them when Lymond came back into the barn fully dressed, and picked up his sword.

Strozzi said, ‘I may be old enough to be your unfortunate uncle, but I have my powers of memory yet. Why waste a night’s sleep? I shall, if you wish, applaud your skill as a cartographer. My little friend Nicolas de Nicolay produced a plan of Guînes just as pretty. You were his pupil?’

‘I was taught by an Englishman. The notes are an aide-memoire, that’s all. You will have a great deal to add. I wished you to take them because,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘you are going straight back to Compiègne, and it will be two days before I can join you. I have some business in the country to attend to.’

‘So!’ said Piero Strozzi. He sat very still, his broad naked shoulders, stuck with straw, glistening in the dim light. ‘A woman?’

‘I said business,’ said Lymond. ‘Remember? The intellectual passion that drives out sensuality.’

‘Then a little more spying?’ said Piero Strozzi slowly. ‘You are in bad country for it. You had better tell me where you are going. Dressed like that, you will be killed: you will not be taken prisoner.’

‘Private business,’ said Lymond. ‘I know the risks. If I don’t return,
you may give Monseigneur de Guise my deepest apologies. I enjoyed our excursion. I have translated into Italian, by the way, the song you didn’t understand. If you ever come face to face with King Philip, you can sing it to him.’

Piero Strozzi roared, ‘Body of God, I shall!’ and stood up, and slapped the other man on the shoulder and watched as he swung into the saddle and set off through the low scrub on a track which seemed to lead south-east, between Péronne and Saint-Quentin.

It was not a direction Piero Strozzi fancied. A stretch of flat, ravaged farmland punctuated by strong forts: some held by French and some by the varied troops of King Philip. It had been their plan to return to Compiègne via Péronne, where a troop of pioneers and hackbutters under the man Hislop had been given work to attend to. Escorted by this band, it should have been simple to escape or outface the enemy.

The crazy Scotsman had taken no food or wine with him, which meant he was not going far. His motives could not be treachery. They were almost certainly, in spite of his denials, to do with a woman. Which meant untidy watch-keeping. Which meant possible capture and confession, and the end of all their hopes of Calais, unless M. de Sevigny had the will power of Philippe Strozzi, which was unlikely.

Cursing, Piero Strozzi dressed, packed and left very soon after his companion, but unlike his companion, did not give a wide berth to Péronne. Instead, he recruited six men, including Danny Hislop, and set out to track down his imprudent late fellow-traveller.

The journey upon which Francis Crawford was embarked had indeed to do with a woman, but was one which he made with no prospect of pleasure or profit, but solely for the sake of a promise. Because an extraordinary degree of self-control in public and in private through the years had become second nature to him, he made it without deviating and without weighing the consequences; or indeed anything but the obstacles which lay before him.

These were not few. Before he had been riding ten minutes, he had to dismount and hold his horse silently in a tangle of dew soaked undergrowth while a troop of mercenaries clattered by, the red cross plain in the lavender haze of the morning. For some reason, King Philip’s troops were moving early. After that, he crossed open fields only when it was necessary, taking shelter at the first sound of men’s voices, or the chime of bridle and spurs, or the vibration which meant hooves beating a way over mud-clods.

There were very few ploughed fields. Wagon trains had spent the autumn rolling through Picardy, and wheeled cannon, and ensigns of armed men on thick Flemish horses. At first, no doubt, they had paid for the apples they took from the orchards, and the hay from the barns, and the cabbages from the kailyard and the nets of onions hanging from the thatched eaves. They had even paid, perhaps, for the daughters and sisters they tumbled.

And then, of course, however skilled the command and however well-intentioned the discipline, they would cease to pay. The farms were deserted; even the bigger ones, built like a fortress, with walls and towers enclosing the pond and the barns and the farmhouse. Many were blackened with fire. Others, the stage for some bitter encounter, had been reduced by both Spaniards and French to a haphazard pattern of stone, picturesque as grey Mauresque fretwork against the red fire of rosehips and the ashen drift of seeding blossom from the shelves of marauding black creeper.

He moved from place to place down the swampy track of the River Somme, wary of the flights of small birds; crouched behind some garden
wall close to the pale yellow of charlock, or a bed of forgotten pansies, gold and red and dark, bloomy grapecolour; or again, in the rushes beside one of the marshy ponds which glittered through all the flat country, with moorhen tracking its jade lichened surface. By then, he had freed and sent off his horse. With the country alive with movement such as this, he was better on foot.

It took him until midday, using all the more primitive skills he was master of, to get himself just north of Ham, the new-taken fortress occupied by King Philip, and the seat of his army in Picardy under the Duke of Savoy, his chief general. Except that the flag flying now from its square tower was not the personal standard of Philip, by the grace of God king of Spain, England, Sicily, Naples and Jerusalem. The distant trumpets, the frantic marching and counter-marching were all now quite explicable. Philip, last to make his stately entrance upon the battlefield, had that morning become the first to make his stately exit. In case, one week later, he would be forced to leave at a gallop.

It was news, Francis Crawford recognized, to lift Strozzi’s heart. It meant his own intuition was correct in thinking the time had come to plan this push against Calais. It meant that de Guise and Strozzi together could force it to a conclusion. Senarpont, the Governor of Boulogne, was a good man, and would see to the detail. In the long stretches of waiting that morning, when thought like a madman in a quarry had to be manacled, he had seen quite clearly the whole possible sequence of action, down to the last company of Schwartzreiters; the last flamboyant eruption of ambitious noblemen.

And now, so close to his destination, he must think of the business at hand. He must try to find the farm of the woman Renée Jourda, who had once been a village girl of Coulanges and who, ten years before he was born, had left her home to follow to Scotland the lady adored for her wit and her beauty called Sybilla Semple, who had broken short her stay at the nunnery. Who had married Gavin Crawford, the second Baron of Culter. Who had given birth to Richard her heir, who now held the title in Scotland. And who had brought himself up with joy, with laughter, with care, as her second son; although it appeared … it was certain, that he was not. A circumstance with which, not being a child, he would come to terms, no doubt, presently.

There were only three farms round the ruins of Flavy-le-Martel, and two of them were empty, except for a starved dog tied to a ring which cried at him as he freed it, its bones arching through its stretched skin. It ran to a pool of green mud and devoured it, before sliding off into the undergrowth. Francis Crawford watched it, and then moved out and on to the last.

The faded sign said
Proyart;
but that meant nothing. If Renée Jourda the village girl had a farm, it was because she had married.

Whoever had married the master of this domain had not led an easy life. Once, a fence might have surrounded it. Now it was fenced only by a
ring of dark trees, and the steep, tiled roofs which crowded round the unkempt yard and marbled pond were gapped and ribbed like unravelled jersey-cloth. Lymond walked quietly forward.

The trees in the orchard were not ripe yet for robbing. They stood, brooding and ancient above their rotting wickets of poles, upholding their fruit like green lanterns; and behind them, a row of dry spires strung on withies showed where the vines had been. The house itself was closed and shuttered and cold and the well bucket had dust and dead leaves in it.

A sharp rattle made him look round. A wood pigeon high over his head had flown to its hole above the hayloft door of the barn, paused for a moment, and then vanished inside. Now that he stood still, he could hear the muffled throaty rou-couling. It made him walk to the barn and try the door, whose bolt had been driven home recently, before the webs which muffled the windows had had time to form again over it. He drew it aside slowly and stepped over the threshold.

It smelt of cow. There was no fodder inside but the dung of many weeks, mixed with filthy straw; and in one corner a stack of wood: not the well-mannered cradle of logs one saw outside every yard in Compiègne but boughs hacked and torn and covered still with a shawl of dead columbine. The blunt axe which had cut them stood still against the wall. Outside somewhere, an animal cried out in pain.

But not, this time a dog. And with a call which he did not need to live in a castle to analyse.

With a gesture Jerott would have recognized, Francis Crawford drew off his shapeless hat and threw it high to hang on the topmost twig of the thorn boughs. Then, walking over the yard, he wrenched the bucket free of its framework and swinging it, made for the coppice.

When he came back, the yard was quite silent. Even the pigeons had ceased their low murmur. Above the pond-water a haze of mosquitoes trembled and fussed in the sunshine. Lymond walked to the low windows under the wavering eaves, and laid down the pail. Then, slowly and firmly, he rapped on the worn, sun-bleached shutters.

‘Madame,’ he said. ‘I have brought you milk from your cow.’

Silence. If anyone was there, it must be a woman. A man would be dead, or would have escaped. A man would not have been reduced to cutting that pitiful bundle of firewood, or have tethered the little dun cow where she could graze concealed, and wait for her mistress. If it was Renée Jourda behind those closed shutters, she must be seventy years old, or over.

But that would be highly unlikely. Out of three farms, Renée Jourda need not belong to this one. She had probably been taken away long ago. Or had died, taking her young secrets with her. He tapped again on the shutters and said, ‘Madame, I come from Compiègne, and not from the Spaniards. I wish to help you. Come to your window, and I shall give you your milk.’

Nothing stirred. He was talking, it seemed, to himself: to an empty
house, in the autumn sunshine, in a land where any soldier could claim a king’s fortune for taking him.

I have your mind in my palm. I will crush it
. A shiver ran through his nerves and his skin tingled, as if fine wires had moved beneath it. The light, familiar throb in his head, paired with his heartbeats, began to come thicker and faster. He took a moment, breathing quietly, to subdue it; then gripping the edge of the shutters with hard and powerful fingers, he wrenched them both open.

Framed in the lozenged window behind was a face, grey and blurred as if printed on muslin. A face which dwindled, its mouth a dark square as his hands laid their grasp on the windowframe: which emitted, without shape, a long wavering wail as he broke the catch and opened the windows, so low that he knelt to look through them.

It was a small room inside, bare of comfort and almost bare of furnishing. The used air of old age and sickness came lingering out from the window. Below the sill inside was drawn up a pallet, the linen sheet stained and wrinkled, the coverlet sagged on the floor. The woman who had been lying there stood now, her knotted hands gripped white together; her face, framed with soiled cap and tangled grey hair turned to the window; her eyes round and pearly as frog-spawn.

It could be no one but Renée Jourda. And Renée Jourda was quite blind.

Realization withdrew from him the power of movement. He bent his head, and when it returned, and she had fallen silent he said, his hands motionless on the stonework, ‘Madame Jourda, I am not here to harm you. I am alone. If you like, I shall throw my sword at your feet, and you may take it.’

Renée Jourda said, ‘Give me your sword.’

He had hoped she would not ask it, but there seemed to be no alternative. So he unbuckled the blade and holding it carefully, cast it through the open window so that it fell beyond the bed, on the broken tiled floor of the chamber. The old woman bent. Her hand, moving straight to the sound, uncoiled like a willow wand and touched, warily, the metal pommel. With both hands she lifted and couched the sword on the only tall chair in the room, standing still with the wall at her back and the point of the blade aimed straight and true at the window. Then she said, ‘You may come in, Mr Francis Crawford.’

He paused again, momentarily, before easing himself deliberately through the casement. His headache had begun again. He said, speaking distinctly, ‘You are not well. Keep the sword, but sit in the chair. I shall bring you some milk, if you tell me where I may find a pitcher. When did you last eat?’

‘Yesterday,’ I think,’ said the old woman. She hesitated; then after a while lifted the heavy sword tremulously from the chair and supporting herself, moved round and dropped into the worn seat. ‘They brought a piece of seethed fowl the day before, and some ale, and some cut bread.
Today they must have forgotten. I have not been well. It was too far to milk Lisa.’

‘Don’t they milk her for you?’ said Lymond. He had found a vessel of sorts, and dipping it into the pail, brought it dripping from the window and knelt before her. ‘Keep the sword. I shall hold the cup for you.’

But after a moment she freed a hand and took the cup from him, drinking greedily but drawing, at the end, a ragged handkerchief from her sleeve to wipe her sunk mouth. A streak of raw colour had come into her cheeks. ‘Without my friends, I cannot keep tidy,’ she said. ‘The men mean well, but they are rough. And of course, I have not told them about Lisa. A cow, to a Spaniard? They would have her to Ham in a minute.’

‘The Spaniards are looking after you?’ Lymond said. There was no food in the house. On the other hand, he knew where to find some fat pigeons. He went to the window and lifted in the pail of new milk, drawing the shutters nearly closed once more behind him.

The sudden dimness made no difference to her. She looked in the direction of his movements, a little snatch of fright on her face and said, ‘Yes. To an old woman, all foreigners are kind, are they not? All I miss is a fire. When they are here, I have a fire, and it warms me. The evenings are cold.’ The sightless eyes fixed on him. ‘Would you light one?’

The fire was ready laid on her hearth: neatly set, as a soldier would do it. And beside it was a rack of fine logs, their white faces clean-cut by a woodsman. In one respect, the foreigners had looked after her. He said, striking tinder and lighting it, ‘How did you know my name? Because I called you Madame Jourda?’

‘That is my nom de jeune fille,’ said the old woman. ‘M. Proyart died twenty years ago. My neighbours were good.’ A stir of merriment, for a second, moved across the seamed face. Forgetful, she loosed her grip on the sword and when it fell, stiffened for a moment. But then, when nothing happened, she smiled again and left it there. ‘I should not be entertaining a young man. You are a young man? If you are Mistress Sybilla’s son, then you must be.’

The fire was burning well. ‘You remember Mistress Sybilla?’ Lymond said, without turning.

The thin voice had turned to anxiety again. ‘She didn’t blame me,’ said Renée Jourda. ‘When I said I must leave Scotland, she didn’t blame me. “Renée,” she said, “France is your homeland, and you miss it. We shall see each other again. Perhaps, if I need your help, you will come to me.” … But it was not Scotland I disliked. It was her husband. Gavin Crawford is a name to be loathed. She hated him. And Leonard Bailey, his kinsman. Half the evil in that house came from Bailey. I would not stay at Midculter.’

‘So you came back to France,’ Lymond said. ‘And you did help Mistress Sybilla again. Did you not? Ten years later?’

She smiled. Firelight, blossoming in the worn darkness, gave her face for a moment the thin, pretty shallowness it must once have possessed
when she left her home to follow a wilful young mistress back to her wedding in Scotland; and then homesick, had abandoned her to settle here, with M. Proyart and those good neighbours who had now abandoned her.

‘When she had the baby?’ said Renée Jourda. ‘Such a baby! The father had bought her a jewel of a house, there in Paris. It was where they stayed when he was free, and when she could come from Scotland. She was to arrive for the birth of the child. She wrote to ask me to come to Paris. My sister Isabelle who was widowed was already there. She was housekeeper to them both from the start, and kept the house clean and warm, and saw to the bills. She still does it.’