Checkmate (35 page)

And he … he had killed, and enjoyed it.

‘I wonder,’ said Austin Grey, ‘that you are not crowing with joy at the comedy.’

From the parapet one looked across the bloody ditches choked with dead to the bright banners of the French princes streaming beyond: Piero Strozzi and the three brothers de Guise; d’Andelot and de Thermes, Roche-sur-Yon and Tavannes, Montmorency and de Bouillon, de la Brosse and d’Estrée. Banners which had flown long ago in Scottish air too: whose owners knew no other trade and had been born only for this; nursed amid trumpets; rocked in helmets; fed at the spear blade.
As appetite therefore moveth and not as reason persuadeth, men run after vanitas
. ‘It will make a good story,’ Lymond said. ‘So did the Constable’s bêtises before Saint-Quentin. It is not advisable to crow. It might be oneself next time.’

Austin Grey stepped to his side at the parapet. He said, ‘Warfare and trickery. It is your natural element.’

‘You despise it?’ Lymond said. ‘Montluc would argue with you.
What would a brave and noble soul turn to, if not war? Who would crush the power of the Grand Seigneur? Men would amuse themselves in palaces, and though naturally of good heart, with time become cowards.
’ He paused, and then added, without rancour, ‘I began, as you did, by defending my country. Then, disinherited, I had to follow the only profession I knew. There are only two roads to power: the Church, and the army; and there are villains in both. It is a moot point which does the most harm. You didn’t consider the cloister?’

Austin said, ‘The army was our tradition.’

‘And so you sacrificed your principles to Allendale vanity. While I,’ Lymond said, ‘have become ensnared by a lucrative talent for simple organization. We can offer each other some consolation. Without warfare, there would be no chivalry. The weak would be overturned; nations put to the sword; tyrants flourish. I have spent some time, myself, killing Tartars and Turks as well as Englishmen. One may say, If I do not do it, another will. There is a standpoint from which to retire with a farm-book or a breviary seems equally craven.’

Until he provoked it, Austin had been unaware that this had been what he required: a defence of war, in the mouth of the man best suited to proclaim it. Less well defined, these were the thoughts he had sheltered behind, in the night of his defence of the bulwark.

It was a strange source from which to receive unwitting comfort. Austin said, ‘And what do you say to men who kill, as they hunt, for a pastime?’ His body, despite itself, was shivering.

‘I try not to speak to them,’ Lymond said. ‘They generally don’t survive very long, anyway. We should go in. You are tired. You know that, when we leave here, you are to be my prisoner?’

‘I didn’t know,’ said Austin Grey.

‘And Lord Grey will belong to Piero Strozzi. So that, until your ransom is paid, you can court Mistress Philippa in comfort. I had hoped to find her back in England, but they tell me she is still at Court in Paris.’

A talent for organization.
Toutes serez, êtes ou futes/De fait ou de volonté, putes
. He had forgotten, for a moment, the words Crawford had used to him, on the unfinished journey from Ham. ‘You want rid of your whore. So you are content,’ said Austin, ‘that an English poltroon should have her?’

A moment passed. Then Lymond said, ‘My words at Ham. I apologize. I had a purpose, as I remember, in baiting you. If I thought you required any assurance whatever about her character or her person, you would be dropped from the leet of fiancés. Your uncle may or may not have told you. I owe a long-standing debt to her family.’

‘Her mother is rearing your son. But Philippa,’ said Austin Grey, ‘will be greater than Kate.’

‘I am glad you think so. It is for you then,’ said Lymond, ‘to provide her with her setting. She has wealth. You have position. Between you, you might make of Allendale one of the great political centres of England. You have only to win her.’

‘I thought,’ said Austin, ‘you were doing that for me.’

‘Only the groundwork,’ said Francis Crawford with affability. ‘Does he need me who daily walkest and is conversant among women, seest their beauties set forth to the eye, hearest their nice and wanton words, smellest their balm, civet and musk? Therein is fruit, and palms hanging sheathed in clusters, and the grain with its husk and its fragrance—which of these bounties of your Lord will you reject?’

‘None that come from the Lord,’ said Austin Grey evenly. ‘From the comte de Sevigny, I have no mind to accept either guidance or favours.’

*

That evening, released by a magnanimous enemy, the men of Guînes marched from the citadel. They left bearing their weapons and armour, and every man had a crown in his purse. But they marched in tingling silence, without tuck of drum or music of trumpet, and without the brave dance of their colours, for their flags, like their leaders, had been left captive in French hands behind them.

For the French, it was the end of a campaign which would take its
place in history. ‘The loss of Calais,’ said the Pope, ‘is the only dowry the Queen of England will receive for her marriage to King Philip the Second. Such a conquest is preferable to half the kingdom of England.’

Silent in their tents, Grey of Wilton, the three cousins and all their captains heard through the night the tumult of the French camp’s celebrations. In the small hours, the sconces were snuffed in the Duke de Guise’s gold and purple pavilion. But the lights under the blazons of Strozzi and of Sevigny continued rather longer than that; and so did the outbursts of music and laughter, of talk and singing and the constant coming and going of men, gay and drunken under the chill ruined hulk of the fortress.

Archie Abernethy watched it all, reclined cracking a bone by the wine barrel. He saw them all come to the warmth: d’Estrée and Senarpont and Roche-sur-Yon, lingering, who had known Francis Crawford six years before. Tavannes and de Thermes. The Sieur d’Andelot, whose wife the comtesse de Laval had cause to thank Mr Crawford, and who took him aside and talked to him, holding him close, until he became too drunk to enunciate, and laughing, sprawled and drank some more instead. Piero Strozzi who, his arm round Lymond’s shoulders, refought every battle from Sainte-Agathe to Guînes and kissed him, several times, and offered him a choice from his selection of available women, invitingly detailed which, solemnly, Lymond found it politic to refuse.

That night Lymond, too, broke free from the prison he had made for himself. He drank of intent, until one by one the barriers crumbled and let run loose all those qualities he possessed, like Alkibaides, of a tarnished and insolent profusion, to set alight in his fellow-men that killing flame of excitement, of passion, of pleasure.

Jerott, released by wine and dizzy with unstopped emotion, argued with him and sang, forgetful of Lyon and Marthe: Danny Hislop, intoxicated wholly by words, plunged in delirium from lascivious songs to long, explicit, unanswered dissertations; Adam Blacklock, barely tipsy at all, looked at Lymond’s vivid face and carefree movements and open, brilliant eyes and recognized, as Archie had done, that the shadow had lifted.

If you thought about it, there was no magic in it. War had given Francis his respite, and success had brought him his final reward: the freedom he wished from his marriage. The licence, if he desired it, to go back to Russia. The knowledge, one supposed, that, severed from Philippa, he could allow the past to lie in peace, and cease troubling him.

So, in the end, Adam watched them all leave and himself departed, smiling through the tent doorway at Archie, as he exchanged hazy farewells with his master.

Francis Crawford let him go and then, walking slowly inside, put his hand on the tent pole and surveyed, in his turn, the small mahout.

‘Archie?’ said Lymond. ‘It is half past four o’clock in the morning, and
I am exceedingly drunk. Do you suppose these two statements have anything to do with each other?’

‘No,’ said Archie tolerantly. ‘And neither will you, come the morning.’

*

Some time after that, the last lights in Guînes were extinguished; the last random shot fired; the last catcall uttered; and only the feet of the sentries could be heard, treading round the encampment.

In an open tent with a Florentine banner Lord Grey of Wilton kept his private vigil, gazing out upon the indigo sky and the fresh-dug graves and the marshes which for over two hundred years had been England’s care, and for nearly thirty years, off and on, in his keeping.

And in another tent at the same moment Archie Abernethy began a well-earned night’s rest in good conscience, for Francis Crawford was sleeping already beyond him, his guard relaxed, his breathing quiet, his scarred wrists lying free in the blankets.

He was sleeping still when far to the north, dawn arrived in an east Scottish estuary; and with it, a fleet of small ships, come to bear her noble Commissioners to Queen Mary’s wedding in Paris.

On an elevating cloud of Eleatica the French Army for four weeks continued its triumphs and indeed consolidated them, although for the whole of that period none of its officers was perfectly sober.

The fortresses of Guînes and of Hâmes were razed to the ground, thereby releasing three hundred cannon of brass alloy, three hundred of iron and a prodigious quantity of munitions, much to everyone’s retrospective alarm. The fortified châteaux of d’Herbemont, Jamoigne, Chigny, Rossignol and Villemont were attacked and captured. The king of France, in company with the Dauphin, the Cardinals of Lorraine and de Guise and all the non-combatant nobility of the French Court, made a Triumphal Entry into his new town of Calais and handed out money, preferment and property to all his brave generals. The Duke de Guise was given the great house of the Staple in Calais. Marshal Strozzi received the gift of Lord Grey, a tract of crown lands worth fifteen thousand crowns’ rental, a favourable marriage for an unremarkable daughter, and an appointment to the Privy Council, which was worth all the rest put together.

The comte de Sevigny was also given land, notably a stretch adjoining the property of the Marshal de St André outside Lyon. There accompanied it an undertaking by the Cardinal Legate that the bill of divorce already placed before the Pontiff should be approved and ready for its final ratification by my lord count and his wife on the day following the Queen of Scotland’s forthcoming marriage. To enable him to entertain as was now fitting, the crown was pleased to give him also possession of the Hôtel d’Hercule on the corner of the rue des Augustins, Paris.

It was one of the great royal mansions of France, and once housed the Queen of Scotland’s young father, twenty years before also a bridegroom. The comte de Sevigny’s friends were not overawed. ‘It’s known as Plumbago Corner,’ said Jerott in a lofty welter of consonants. ‘You have to produce a ticket of entry that says you’ve fought all the statues.’ Jerott was drunk as a Templar and happy. Neither he nor Danny nor Adam had had a care in their heads for a fortnight, other than prosecuting with uninterrupted efficiency all the affairs of their companies and ensuring, under the unwinking supervision of Archie Abernethy, that Lymond was never alone.

But then, it transpired that he had no particular desire to be alone, being occupied in congenial company in various activities which happened to satisfy him. The golden optimism, the dreaming absence of stress that followed the campaign of Calais communicated itself to those at Court also. To Philippa it drifted like a temporizing incense above all she did in the four weeks before Lymond came back to Paris.

She made no attempt to obtain her release and go home as he had asked her. To Kate, inquiring guardedly about her non-return, Philippa replied that she saw no reason to miss the momentous spectacle of the Dowager Lady Culter embracing the entire bewildered court of France, if not her difficult son.

In this she spoke the truth. However able, however superb the elements of the family Crawford undoubtedly were, individually they were going to require someone’s help before this prospective visit to France was completed. She had promised herself to stay with the Queen until she saw some hope of rapprochement between Catherine d’Albon and Francis Crawford. She had hoped to find, before now, a thread of history, however spurious, which might reconcile him to Sybilla his mother.

In this she had been unsuccessful. If Lymond had been right, and his betrayal at Ham had been at the hands of Leonard Bailey, Mr Bailey had made no other baneful appearances. The only unhappy accident occurred at Court in the first weeks of February when, kept indoors by the snow, the Dauphin shot out the eye of M. de Bouccard his equerry in the course of an afternoon’s games, and the King had to ask M. de Bouccard’s pardon. His royal bride-to-be watched in smiling commiseration, her jewelled hands hardened together. The most excellent princess Mary, Queen of Scotland, had forgotten her concern for M. de Sevigny’s marriage.

The Cardinal of Lorraine, as it happened, had not. Shortly after his return from the faintly delirious celebration at Calais he had a long, flattering talk with the comtesse de Sevigny about her talented husband and received, with baffled admiration, the same artistic degree of response which Mistress Philippa had learned to allot the Head Eunuch. Considering that nothing but compliments were extended on both sides, it was hard to say how she also made him aware of the fact.

She was not short of employment. The two cousins Schiatti were in Paris still, and the Duke of Lorraine et Bar, and young Paliano, and Arthur Erskine, and a handful of others ready when she might have a free moment to throw snowballs from the town walls, or skate on the ditch, white as tables of Phrygian marble.

Indoors, she indulged the cast of mind she now knew was her own. She listened to Thevet, the Queen’s almoner, talk of his travels. She spoke of the Far East to Postel of the Collège Royal; she sat elbows cocked at a table, watching Nicolas de Nicolay design a new map. She listened to Jean Bodin, not yet thirty, talk of politics and astronomy, philosophy, magic, the Talmud.

The answers she carried to Catherine. Already agreeably trained in all the gentle and scholarly arts, Catherine d’Albon received in this interim a new and specialized education in all those areas of the mind in which her prospective husband had chosen to roam.

The daughter of a Marshal of France, destined from birth for highest station, did not admit newcomers to easy friendship. But sitting murmuring over her sewing with this slender girl with the clear skin and brown eyes and coiled chestnut hair Catherine d’Albon found herself moved to converse not as to another girl, but to a tutor. A tutor who brought her not only news and opinion and discoveries but songs and poetry and books, dearly bought and freely given for her to study; so that for part of the day at least her mind was turned from its treadmill. When would he come back? Would he speak? Or would he allow the divorce to take place before he would approach her?

But of that, and the person who filled both their minds, neither of them ever said anything.

The Queen of France was less discreet, or had less need to be tactful. With unerring swiftness she had discerned what Philippa preferred to pass unnoticed: her gift with children. The Princesses Claude and Elisabeth, aged ten and twelve, were brought to her notice; and then Charles and Henri, aged seven and six, and Marguerite, four. Attending her mistress in the Royal Audience Chamber in les Tournelles, Philippa found she spent a large part of her time on the floor with her lute, entertaining and wiping the noses of small royal children. The King’s sister Marguerite often joined her. And once, when the Queen of Scots had been called unexpectedly from the room, Queen Catherine crossed from her chair of state and seating herself on a stool said, ‘But you play as charmingly as your husband. You have no regrets about dissolving this marriage?’

‘None, your Majesty,’ Philippa said. ‘Marriage requires more than two lutes in counterpoint, felicitous though that may be.’

The young woman, the Queen had noticed before, had a delightful voice: clear and mellow, and allied to the kind of strong nerves which camouflage any falsehood.

However, if that was a lie, she had gone to a great deal of trouble to make sure of her husband’s next bedfellow. The Queen of France said, ‘I know the Demoiselle d’Albon has formed a great affection for the young man. I should like to learn if his feelings are engaged?’

‘I believe … not yet, Madame,’ said the comtesse de Sevigny.

‘Then will he marry her? She is already an heiress.’

There was a little pause. Then the girl said, ‘He is, I understand, in no great want of money.… At the same time, his friends would be well pleased if he abandoned his present plan to go back to Russia.’

Catherine de Médicis, Queen of France, settled back on her stool with a certain satisfaction. ‘He has sensible friends. I agree with them. It seems a case, then, of encouraging M. your husband to form an attachment in
that quarter. I take it he is capable of doing so. And he is, I am sure, a man of honour.’

She raised her eyebrows. Philippa, who had put this precise point only a short while before to her sister-in-law, felt a dim sinking within her. She said, ‘Your Majesty knows better than I do, Mademoiselle d’Albon’s undoubted attractions.’

The Queen smiled. ‘They are considerable,’ said Catherine de Médicis. She leaned forward and picked up two gold buttons which had burst from Charles’s doublet, and then plucked a third one from Henri’s right ear. ‘But it is for the rest of us—and you and I in particular—to create for them the opportunities.’

*

The next time she spotted the red-headed man of Applegarth’s following her, she drew her valet into a doorway and stepping out suddenly, caused her pursuer to recoil with a yammer.

‘You’re not very good at it are you?’ said Philippa. ‘I thought the idea was not to attract notice.’

That was what Adam Blacklock had said when she had complained first about the presence of a perpetual bodyguard, and then had tried, soft-heartedly, to have him asked into the kitchen when the weather got cold. It was a point. If the Court knew the Sevignys had been threatened, they would instantly want to know what they were being threatened with. She stared at the man.

‘I wasn’t attracting notice,’ said Applegarth’s man rather sulkily. ‘Not until you stopped me, anyway.’

‘And how is Mr Blacklock?’ said Philippa.

‘I don’t know, milady,’ said her bodyguard. ‘There’s a man in town pays us. Mr Blacklock’s in Artois. So they say.’

So she had to ask, after all, quite directly. ‘And M. de Sevigny?’

His face changed, like a cushion with a fat man sitting on it. ‘In Abbeville still, I expect. Did you hear what they did on the ice?’

‘No,’ said Philippa.

‘Put the cannon on sledges and hurdled over them. Eight broken legs and four arms that first day, and a culverin fell through and had to be drawn out by horses. Signor Strozzi won eight hundred écus.’

‘And M. de Sevigny? said Philippa with shaming monotony.

‘Oh. He put his cap on a weathervane and bet M. Strozzi he couldn’t knock it off with the cannon. He couldn’t either, so M. de Sevigny got his eight hundred écus back again. Then he took some of them that had been with him in Russia and showed them trick riding. Of course, they’re used to the snow.’

His face was shining. She had been a bad-tempered harridan. On an impulse, Philippa put an écu in his hand, smiled, and turning to her valet, continued on her original errand.

It hadn’t become any better: not a bit of it. Every day of the long separation had only sunk the well deeper: printed the long, detailed record of his looks and his words, like the dials of the oak, more inexorably into her being.

But to bear it, and in silence, was her privilege. She shared it with many others. Nor was she vain.

*

He came back on Wednesday, February 16th, and put up for the last time with his suite at the empty Hôtel St André, where he found a message from the Prévôt des Marchands awaiting him. It bade him, as one of the victors of Calais, present himself with his comtesse at four after midday on Thursday, to receive the accolade of the city upon the Duke de Guise’s great triumph.

With it was a note from the royal maître d’hôtel with the arrangements for the order of ceremony.

Underneath that, was a note from his current wife Philippa.

To Hercules from the Queen of the Amazons. The Cardinal decrees that Monsieur and Madame de Sevigny appear at the Hôtel de Ville banquet together tomorrow. I shall call on you at three of the clock after midday, smiling as doth the crocodile, which hath many rows of teeth but no tongue. I recommend to you Dathan and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed quick
.

He laughed aloud when he read it, but sent no reply. On the other hand, when Philippa arrived at the Hôtel St André next day, he was waiting on the stroke of three in the Maréchale’s parlour to receive her. And behind him was Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale.

*

It was five months since she had seen Francis Crawford. And in spite of her resolution, it was at him only that she looked.

He met the look, which he had not done in September. All that she remembered was there and something else: a presence bright as a newly sheared diamond. He had about him the hard resilience and the longsighted vision she recalled from other men on hard-fought campaigns, although he was clean and scented and his hair was fresh-cut and shining. Only his hands, taking hers lightly to greet her, were hard across the palm with the grip of the rein and the sword-hilt, and the filbert nails cut closer than she had ever seen them in the salon. It would be some weeks before he could match Catherine d’Albon with the lute, in counterpoint or out of it.

He looked well. And as if somewhere, lately, he had tasted happiness.

‘Devoted
obedience at the kissing of your holy feet,’ Lymond said, lifting a silver cup of Hippocras and handing it to her severely, ‘but what do I have to do to induce you to leave France? Stand and pray like St
Kevin, until my two outstretched palms both have nests in them? You remember Lord Allendale.’

Philippa turned her gaze to Lord Allendale, on whose fine-skinned dark face was a clearly read turmoil of feeling. She said, ‘Poor Austin: you should never have let Mr Crawford buy you. The Vidame de Chartres will challenge you out of jealousy.… I am sorry, truly. But you’re well; you’re not wounded. And Lord Grey?’

‘He is in Paris also,’ Austin said. ‘A little hurt, but quickly recovering. Arthur is with him. Philippa … why … Kate has been expecting you.’

‘Yes. Well, the Queen won’t release me until after the wedding,’ said Philippa with absolute candour. ‘How long are you going to be here?’

Austin, who had also been handed a cup of wine but was not drinking it, looked at Francis Crawford, who was. Lymond said, ‘We haven’t decided yet. I can’t make up my mind what to ransom him for.’