Checkmate (29 page)

Not only the use of the future tense, but something in the other man’s mocking, mellifluous voice brought Austin Grey erect from the wall-stones. ‘My uncle made you such an offer. And you
accepted it
?’ Hard on disbelief had rushed contempt. He did not try to hide it.

Crawford of Lymond uncrossed his arms and rising, twitched round the tall chair so that it faced Austin invitingly. Then he approached. One could recoil. One could allow him, as Austin did, to stretch his hand and move oneself, grim-faced, to sit in it. ‘Prepare, my dear child,’ said Lymond, ‘to receive a revelation. Ham is not a Court of Love. Piero Strozzi is not a true, Christian knight and neither is God’s silly vassal, the monarch.
Muchos Grisones
, in fact,
y pocos Boyardos
. Modern war is fought by a number of strong, sweaty horsemen with constipation, who have their eyes on power, on wealth and on glory, and who obey the rules just when it pleases them. Your uncle and I understand each other perfectly. I am going to Russia. He has the information he needed. The French are going to Calais.’

Co co co co dae
. Austin Grey looked up at the man standing watching him, smiling, his hands lightly folded behind him. He said, ‘Can you trust a bargain, then, with no honour?’

‘I trust your uncle’s,’ said Lymond. ‘He has his reasons for wanting me to go to the fate which pride and lust prepare. And he seems to trust mine. I have told him all I know. I had just come back from Calais to Flavy when I was captured. The only person which stands to lose by the transaction, indeed, is yourself. Are you still in love with my wife?’

Austin Grey stood up. For a moment he remained face to face with Philippa’s husband. Then, turning, he moved to the window and stood there. ‘Ham is not a Court of Love,’ he said. ‘There is no reason why I should listen to that sort of question, or answer it.’

‘No, there isn’t, but you’ve done both,’ said Crawford. He conveyed a faint impatience. ‘I know I shouldn’t soil my lips with the name of your loved one, but it occurred to me that I could be helpful, unless, like Antisthenes, you would rather be furious than voluptuous. The young Queen Mary has made her a lady of honour, and restrained her from leaving France while I am here.’

‘At your prompting?’ said Austin. He had learned to control his face but not his colour, which had left his brown skin entirely, although he did not know it.

The other man sighed. He rambled to the table and picking up a steel pen threw it accurately into the centre of the door where it hung like a shot parraqueet, quivering. It dropped, and he hitched himself on the table corner. ‘I know,’ he said, ‘that Philippa Somerville is beyond earthly criticism. It is not her fault that I have esoteric tastes and I happen to require and consort with professionals. I have resisted, with ease, the temptation to ravish her. I have saved her for you: sweet, jolly, virginal and able to repeat filthy verses in Turkish. There has merely occurred a slight hitch in handing her over.’

‘Such as the fact that you are keeping her in France while I am fighting for the opposite side,’ observed Austin.

‘I am not,’ said Crawford acidly, ‘keeping her in France in my present situation.
Tu me verrois secher sous le poids de mes fers/Comme un troupeau que voit un berger de travers
. She may promptly depart for Scotland. There is still a slight hitch. The French bought my loyalty with an awe-bond. Unless I fight for them for a year, my marriage to Philippa will not be annulled.’

For a moment, such was his dislike of the conversation, it seemed to Austin that the arrogant, unprincipled man opposite him was asking him to abet an attempt at escape. He said, ‘The fact that you have been captured in French service could hardly …’ and broke off suddenly.

‘… be held against me? Unfortunately, the fact that I have turned informer most certainly would. There is really only one thing they can do in retaliation, and that is to make sure that wherever I go, I can never legitimately marry. A pity. My mistress, they tell me, has sold her favours elsewhere, but the Tsar had made me another and most attractive offer. You have not, I take it, any intimate acquaintance with Russian womanhood?’

Austin Grey made no effort to answer. Instead he said, ‘I think this
discussion has ceased to serve any useful purpose. I have to report to my uncle.’

‘Because,’ said Crawford, as if he hadn’t spoken, ‘you ought to remember that Philippa has been trained in Turkey and will expect certain standards if you mean to make an impression, whether as her first client or her bigamous husband. I could provide some instruction.’

Austin walked to the door.

‘Or a demonstration?’ said the other man wistfully. ‘You can’t be keeping all these randy English contented in Ham without some help from a hot-house. I’m afraid my keepers have locked you in and gone off. Perhaps they are consoling themselves. Have you ever killed anyone. Austin?’

‘No.’ said Austin. He ceased hammering on the door and swung round, his colour hot in each cheek. ‘I am an easy object for all your mockery. I have never killed a man or taken a woman, or betrayed my nation or those who are paying me …’ He controlled himself, hard. He said, ‘I have waited a long time for Philippa. I can wait still.’

‘You can,’ said Crawford reminiscently, ‘but I fear the Schiatti cousins won’t, whose willingness be the touchstone and trial of their fidelity. I should hurry … They may sell her by inch of candle if you don’t get her home soon, and simply no one can outbid a banker.’

At last, at last the idiot keepers came to the door and Austin left swiftly without speaking, his head high, controlling his nausea. An effusion, gently derisive, tainted the close air behind him.

The door of the prison chamber shut and locked. The voice, lower keyed, persisted floridly.

Austin was out of hearing. Alone, Francis Crawford continued, lightly, stubbornly with his amusement.

They were watching him through the Judas-grille.

‘Oh,
Christ!
’ said Francis Crawford on a sudden, harsh breath. His voice split on it, curiously. He flung himself off the table and snatching up the quill pen hurled it with violence this time straight for the opening.

The peep-hole door rattled shut. He subsided with force on a field-chest,
his face driven into the arch of his fingers, and might have slept, for all anyone saw to the contrary.

*

Three days later, they moved him under stiff guard from Ham to le Catelet, on his way north-east to safer detention at Brussels. Until Mr Crawford’s disclosures were shown to be genuine, my lord Grey was not fool enough to allow Mr Crawford to abscond to Russia or anywhere else.

Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale, captained the troop that took Lymond to le Catelet, past the reedy ponds and the sky-blue stitchery of the willows; the huddles of russet roofs round their spire, the apples shining like green coins in their flourish of green, the small birds swooping dark on the sky, their bodies glinting pale and short in the sun.

The prisoner ignored his surroundings. But Austin, his imagination already in the dark cell which Philippa’s husband must occupy, saw every faint detail of the journey: the verdigris grain on a dry, long-culled meadow; the stagnant pool, high and still, with lily stems twined in its cloudy green depths and the yellow petals of beech arriving and sinking, pensive leaded memorials, to their dissolution.

They rode in silence through it all: a small, swift unit of fifteen men in plate armour, bearing the red bands of England and inviting no attention from the French-held forts of Péronne and of Guise just over either horizon. The only unarmed man, engulfed in their midst, was their eminent prisoner, soberly dressed for better concealment, with his hands bound and the famous hair hidden.

Crawford had not wished to leave Ham. So much had been subtly apparent both to Austin Grey and his uncle with whom the prisoner had been called to a short, unsatisfactory interview the day before their departure. Lord Grey had pointed out briskly that there were some odd discrepancies between the garrison numbers Mr Crawford had given him and those reports which Lord Grey’s spies were delivering. Furthermore, Mr Crawford’s account of the plan for the taking of Calais appeared to be based on an odd misconception. The Ruisbank fort was not where Mr Crawford’s plan showed it.

M. de Sevigny had displayed anger when doubted. But he had not, although he spoke with great vigour, entirely cleared their minds of all suspicion. Lord Grey of Wilton had decided that the safest course was to send him to Brussels. They would look extremely foolish if the attack after all were to be directed against himself at Ham, and Crawford were to saunter out, sneering. It would be in character. Whereas at Brussels …

He had not told Austin, because the boy, he well knew, was a milksop. But in Brussels there were ways, denied to him as a gentleman, of checking whether an informant was lying. No doubt Mr Crawford, a
man of the world, was aware of them. It would more than explain his present lack of enthusiasm for the journey.

It had not been a silent cavalcade on leaving Ham. Austin Grey, with his prisoner’s reins in his grasp, had dropped from his manner all but the meaningless requirements of courtesy. Lymond was bent, on the other hand, on provoking him.

‘Why let me have it all my own way? Talk, Tancred,’ he said lazily over the hoofbeats. ‘Or are you afraid your uncle’s men will accuse you of fraternizing? But surely they know you have a mind above bribes, even when your less weak-bellied uncle is sending me to have my bones pulled and my hands broken at Brussels? After all, I have only one thing you want, and you wouldn’t find it any harder to get than any other fool with his eye on a married woman.
Toutes serez, êtes ou fûtes/De fait ou de volonté, putes.
’

He laughed at the expression on Austin’s face and was going on when Austin called his lieutenant to him and transferring Lymond’s reins to his charge, rode off to the head of the troop.

They travelled without speech after that, and no marauding band of French traversed their path; no scout from Guise or Péronne saw them vanish and rode back to try, however tardily, to rouse his fellows.

Instead, as they crossed the broad plateau between the river Somme and the Escaut, fifty men rose out of the ground where for two days they had been waiting, strung across the only possible pathway to Brussels.

Austin Grey knew who they were before he saw the white fleur de lis on the ensign, or the other standard they carried of blue and silver and red, which was quite clearly not a French blazon.

Lymond also knew. Even at that distance, he could recognize the men whom he himself had led into battle, and the four men once his own henchmen: Blyth and Blacklock; Hislop and Abernethy.

The shock of surprise drew the blood from his skin: even Austin saw it, rounding on Lymond in that first, furious second. What he missed was the suffusion of anger that followed it: an anger terrifying because it could find no expression.

Afterwards, Francis Crawford found that in those first moments all the force of his fury had turned, senselessly, towards trying to burst the immutable wire of his bonds. At the time, he sat bound on his horse, his reins gripped in Austin Grey’s hands, and said, ‘You may think you can ride over them, but they’ve got crossbows. Your men aren’t going to like that. Or swords ripping upwards as they pass. And there are trees ahead: that, of course, will be where the horsemen are. You may want to ride on, dear boy, but your men are going to think differently.…’

It was doubtful if all of it reached the ears of Austin Grey and his men, but some of it did. It no more than endorsed their own opinion. Austin had ordered them to gallop at the line of footsoldiers, but the line of footsoldiers looked far too formidable. Instead, the escort from Ham slowed, hesitated, broke gallop, and swerving, bore to the right.

Ahead of them, another line of men rose from the ground. And behind, yet another.

‘Christ,’ said Francis Crawford with interest. ‘They’ve got out two companies. You’re in a box, Austin. Your uncle will be cross, but we shall tell your mother all about ransoms. And you can learn how to bed an unmarried girl, Turkish fashion. I’ll show you, on Philippa.’

Austin Grey heard it as he thundered over the rough ground, dragging the other horse with him. His troop had split up, against all his orders. One by one, as they left him, the French bolts whined through the air and picked them off. He had tried to tell them. The French wanted Lymond. If they kept close to him, they would come to no harm.

And now he himself and only a handful of others were still gathered round Crawford, keeping the prisoner’s body between themselves and the crossbows and archers. Silent weapons, not to rouse the near-by garrisons. It had all been planned, all thought out; all most carefully executed.

A man fell on his right, and another. Two had over-ridden the French and reached safety, or had been allowed to escape since there was only one man they wanted. And it now seemed likely that they would free Francis Crawford. That he would return, malicious, triumphant to the fleshpots, to lead the French armies against whatever target they had now chosen—a target which was unlikely to be Calais. To …

‘I’ll show you, on Philippa,’
said that lascivious, bantering voice, and Grey turned, his blade in his hands as the enemy came rushing towards him, their steel out, their hands outspread for his bridle.

Francis Crawford watched the younger man’s sword coming towards him. With Austin’s hand hard on the hilt it flashed down to his heart, and then faltered.

‘You bloody virgin!’
said Lymond; and bringing his eyes up, hard and cold, added something further.

Austin had only to lean on the sword. He had only to let it follow its course and his honour and Philippa’s would be avenged; his uncle’s enemy slain, his nation preserved, his heritage vindicated. And Philippa, tied for ever to this one, hated man, would be at liberty.