Checkmate (36 page)

Philippa stared at him. ‘Money,’ she said, ‘is the usual thing. What have you done with Lord Grey?’

‘Oh,’ said Lymond. ‘Lord Grey is half-way up the ladder from grower to buyer, and is remaining in wraps till the market settles. The Crown presented him to Piero Strozzi.’

‘And?’ said Philippa Somerville. She sat down. She felt very, very happy.

Lymond sat himself also. ‘It took two lawyers, a cashier and the Lieutenant-Criminel de Robe-Courte before even Lord Grey could grasp the pattern,’ he remarked cheerfully. ‘Actually, Marshal Strozzi fixed his lordship’s ransom at seven thousand crowns and Lord Grey reduced it by haggling to four thousand and had nearly reached an agreement when the Queen of England was moved to send him a noble message of personal love and encouragement, upon which Strozzi added ten thousand crowns to the asking-price. Willie Grey was still producing
bouillons
over that when he found himself being led out of the door. Strozzi had sold him as a going concern to the comte de la Rochefoucauld’s brother, who wanted him to exchange for the comte de la Rochefoucauld, who had been a prisoner of the English since Saint-Quentin. Are you with me, or are you merely nervous in case we are going to be late for our appointment?’

‘I am, unfortunately, with you,’ said Philippa.

‘I told you it was complicated. Well, the comte de la Rochefoucauld was an unsatisfactory prisoner. He tried to escape. He said he was dying. So to make sure of his money, the Count’s captors didn’t wait for Lord Grey, but sold him back to his own side at once for a ransom of thirty thousand écus. He is here in Paris. Lord Grey is still here as his prisoner. And the family want at least twenty-four thousand écus to go towards the high costs of salvage. Are you ready? It’s raining.’

‘Look outside,’ Philippa said, ‘and you will see that the Cardinal of Lorraine has sent his second-string coach for the survivor of Calais to ride in. You don’t look very festive, except for that vulgar affair on your shoulders. Tartar barter, I take it? And under it?’

Lying on the rich, sober cloth of his doublet was the exquisite thing she
had referred to: a golden chain of linked plaques, each one thick with eastern jewels and enamel. And under it was the black cross-sash, she realized, of his Order: the St Michael, the most coveted of all French distinctions.

‘The wages,’ said Lymond, ‘of insufferable irregularities. The other is my obsidional crown of grass. The clothes are my own. Tant de payis, tant’ de Guises. I chose a tactful feuille-morte because the Duke will almost certainly be attired in white and gold velvet and diamonds. Like North Rona: scant of ony religone, but abundant of corne. Who in God’s name do these rubies belong to?’

‘You. But you wouldn’t suit them,’ said Philippa. ‘Ffarewell Carboncle chosen chief. It’s my husband-hunting equipment. What about you?’

‘I don’t hunt husbands,’ said Lymond, getting up. ‘It’s the other way about.’ He stood for a moment, looking at her. ‘Has it been very bad?’ he said unexpectedly. ‘Calais ought to be French. Someone was bound to take it, sooner or later. But you shouldn’t have had to watch the rejoicing. I’m sorry.’

He was the only person who had thought of it. Philippa, her eyes very bright, said, ‘I didn’t enjoy it. But at least there wasn’t much slaughter.’

‘No,’ said Austin Grey bitterly. ‘We all surrendered.’

Lymond turned. ‘There may be some issues worth being martyred for, but I doubt if the Staple at Calais is one of them. However. Suppose, Philippa my child, you bring Lord Allendale a little English comfort while I see somebody? Then we must leave, or we shall have no food but of thorns, which will neither fatten nor avail against hunger.’

The door closed behind him. Austin said, ‘After that, what can I say that doesn’t sound illiterate?… Philippa, the French are our enemies and yet … Why take service with the Scots Queen? You wrote that you were coming home.’

‘I am. In April,’ Philippa said. ‘I haven’t forgotten what country I belong to. But I found some business which needs to be finished and, you know, I
am
married to a Scotsman, even if we are both doing our best to get rid of each other.’

‘I see,’ said Austin. From deeply flushed, he had turned rather pale. He added, ‘So it seems stupid to ask if you need help, especially from me. The Greys have been made to appear very foolish.’

‘I don’t know whether you know the signs,’ Philippa said, ‘but Mr Crawford isn’t totally sober. From what I can gather, the Greys held out with a thousand men against the entire French, Swiss and German forces for eight days and only gave in when the Burgundians made them. You have no small reputation, I can tell you, at the French Court. Your mother will be flying flags from all the battlements.… You look tired. Don’t let him browbeat you.’

Smiling, he shook his head slightly and then dropped his eyes to his hands. They were hard, as Lymond’s had been, with callouses at the base of the fingers. Philippa, taking the bull by the horns, said, ‘And don’t let
him embarrass you, either. You know why he left the room, and so do I. You can take it that I don’t intend to have my friendships either spoiled or engineered by Francis Crawford. Does that make you feel better?’

He was laughing when he looked up, the lines of difficult reserve easing already out of his over-bred face. ‘You haven’t changed. But what am I to do? The laws of chivalry are silent.’

Philippa rose and walking over to him, placed her two hands lightly on the padded stuff of his sleeves. ‘Follow your own mind and heart,’ she said. ‘I shall be honest with you. And if my suspicions are right, we shall be given plenty of time.’

*

It was not so easy to remain matriarchal sitting in the Cardinal’s tall, red velvet coach with Francis Crawford keeping himself to himself less than a foot away from the fall of her furs. From the tilt of his head on the padding, she guessed that his eyes were closed. He said unexpectedly, as she was looking at him, ‘Evil the drink and ill the resting place. I am not, unfortunately, asleep.’ It was not difficult to guess how he had spent the ten minutes’ absence.

A little flame of purifying anger ran through Philippa’s veins. She said sharply, ‘I suppose you have heard? Your brother is on his way here with Sybilla.’

That lifted his head, his eyes open, from the velvet. Then he said, ‘I beg your pardon, Philippa.
Plures crapula quam ensis.
’

‘And you have heard?’ said Philippa. So often, disconcertingly, he answered not her tongue but her intention.

‘Yes. D’Aumale, d’Estrée and I are to take a party to Dieppe to welcome them. We are all moderately good playactors, Richard, Sybilla and I. There will be no unpleasantness.’

‘But that is why you are drinking?’ The last time he had met his mother, Lymond had turned on his heel and walked past her. And Richard, driven to anguished fury by everything about his younger brother: his high-handed neglect; his utter refusal to concern himself with the affairs of his country had at last attacked and might well have killed his cadet.

Lymond said,

‘Why am I drinking? I am celebrating the wresting from you of Calais. Or shall I tell you the truth?
The truth is that …’

He had given the words, incongruously, the cadence almost of poetry.
Then he broke off vaguely and picked up in a more painstaking tone. ‘The truth is that I must be in a rather worse state than I thought I was. I apologize.’

‘What exactly did you find out in Flavy?’ said Philippa.

‘My letter told you,’ said Lymond. The rain, renewing its force, thundered upon the roof and one side of the carriage. The crowds outside saluted the Cardinal’s coach from their windows, or pressed to the sides of the streets under the galleries. Lymond said, ‘The old lady is dead. I had hoped to find out where Bailey is living, but Lord Grey’s men failed to discover.’

Philippa said, ‘Why should Bailey come to France? You left him content with his pension in England. Is he hoping to wring more money from Sybilla than you are paying him? Or could he possibly mean to hint something of all this to Richard?’

‘Not if he wants to live,’ Lymond said. ‘I don’t imagine he knew for a moment that Richard and Sybilla were coming here. In any case, neither one of them could afford what I pay to him. No … I think he is here by chance, and thought he saw some way to harm me. If Grey hadn’t shown me the letter, he would have been quite secure. I expect he has left France by now. But I think you should continue to take precautions. Why are you still here?’

He had not, unfortunately, lost sufficient hold of his faculties. Philippa said, ‘The Queen wants me to stay until April. I’m going to have to meet Sybilla. I wish you would tell me the truth. For example, you have said nothing to me about headaches.’

She withstood, for what seemed a long time, an unforeseen scrutiny. At length, ‘Who told you?’ said Lymond.

‘Adam. When he came to the Séjour du Roi.’ Marthe was not going to be at the Hôtel de Ville this afternoon. She had not seen or spoken to Marthe since the day the news of Calais arrived, and she had betrayed herself. But then, neither had Lymond.

‘I see,’ said Lymond. ‘I regret I didn’t edify you with an account of them, but they seemed to have vanished. Apart, that is, from the normal rewards of intemperance.’

‘And at Flavy?’ Philippa said.
Don’t let him browbeat you
, she had said to Austin.

He drew an impolite long suffering breath, she saw, to do exactly that. Then he said crisply, ‘I learned only one other thing at Flavy, and that is of no possible consequence. Isabelle Roset was Renée Jourda’s widowed sister, and she kept house for Sybilla and her master somewhere in Paris. The child Francis Crawford was born there. And so far as I am concerned and you are concerned, Philippa, that ends the matter.’

They had nearly arrived at the end of their unproductive journey. Philippa thought,
Poor Austin
. And said, drawing a long breath herself, ‘And who was the master? The father of Sybilla’s baby?’

‘She died before she could say. A beneficent occurrence for everybody.
Here we are,’ Lymond said. And looking at him, and not at the Place de la Grève, Philippa knew that she could expect him to say nothing further.

What he had told her up to a point, she had no doubt was the literal truth. What he had not told her, but everything else about him made very obvious was that where once he had been uncertain, now he knew the name of Sybilla’s lover.

She was afterwards to remember it as the most disoriented day, from moment to moment, that she had ever passed in her life.

In it, she spent nine continuous hours in her husband’s company. Hours which, had they been offered her on her arrival from Lyon, she would have found the sense and the fortitude to forgo. Hours which he perhaps would have spared her had he not believed, because he wanted to believe, that her passing attachment to him after five months must surely have faded.

He was not to know, his strung-up nerves doctored with alcohol, that disaster upon glorious disaster was about to befall the City of Paris’s Antique Triumph for the Heroes of Calais; or to guess what was to follow it. He had no premonition even when the curving line of royal carriages drew up on the gentle riverside slope of the Grève and rested there closed in the downpour while the City Fathers waited civilly ranked, their plumes and satins and erminetails buffeted like furzy wrack in the cataract.

In time, the rainstorm abated. The City Fathers stood, water running down their humble features. The King’s carriage door opened. The King’s steps were placed before it. The King emerged and placed his foot, smiling, upon them. The Town Battery embarked on an offering of deafening salvoes. The King’s carriage horses reared, and the King fell out on to the paving.

Lymond buried his face in his hands.

*

The guns were still firing as the Royal family, the Princes of the Blood, the victors of Calais and their ladies moved within the pictured arcade erected about the Hôtel de Ville portals. The Town’s fifty standing hackbuts also began their salute, followed almost immediately with a carillon of bells from the church of St Jean en Grève, another from the belltower of St Esprit and a third, a little behindhand, from St Jacques de la Boucherie, whose tenor rope had broken.

A small concert of fifes, trumpets, clarions and tambours struck up inside the arcade (Hoc Hercule Dignae and cardboard marble) where the
Prévôt des Marchands, his mouth opening and shutting, delivered his message of welcome. The King, his mouth also opening and shutting, could be seen to be persevering with an affable reply. Philippa’s husband, crimson with suppressed laughter beside her, was discovered to be talking also.

‘What?’ Philippa screamed.

‘I said,’ shrieked the noble and puissant seigneur François, comte de Sevigny, ‘thank God the guns are pointing …’

Silence fell.

‘… away from us.’

He had dropped his voice in time, but Marshal Strozzi, also unfortunately commenting just behind, had not. There was an explosion of laughter, abruptly cut off. With her husband, very slightly out of hand, walking beside her Philippa followed the others up the staircase between the breathing ranks of Archers, Arbalestriers and Hackbutters of the Town and past Vicissitude, France In Triumph, the royal arms, the town arms and the motto,
GRADATIM
, or
gradually
repeated above every third step of an almost imperceptible progress into the Grand’ Salle of the Hôtel de Ville de Paris.

They had done their best, with tapestries, with paintings, with fleurs-de-lis and ships on the rafters, to create an Antique Triumph fit for the monarch. Pinned with ivy, painted on friezes were the escutcheons and the devices of everyone: the crescent of the King, the iris of the Queen, the Eclipse of Monsieur, the Gorgon of the King’s sister, the thistle of the Queen of Scotland, its purple still faintly running; the emblem, chastely sportive, of Madame de Valentinois, the King’s permanent mistress.

Happy fancies abounded. Along each tapestried wall hung ten twinned ivy crescents tied with taffeta: a reminder, had the Cardinals needed one, of the long and useful alliance between the Turkish and Christian kingdoms. At the service end of the room a Latin inscription, big enough to be read by the king and commencing
SCOTIA TUTA SUIS, ACCEPTA BOLONIA
 … extolled the present reign’s finest successes. At the royal end hung the choicest offering: a rose-decked goddess with Bacchus and Satyrs and a verse beginning
TU DEA, BACCHUS, AMOR
 … and ending,
PRAELIA MNEMOSYNE, NON POCULA REGIA CURET, OR
,
Count only the battles and not the cups the king drinks
.

The names of the Duke de Guise, of Calais, of Guînes were everywhere, interwoven with heroic parallels: Jason; Ganymede; the banner of Caesar with four V’s instead of one, signifying that M. de Guise, having come, seen and conquered at last, should this time trap his good fortune by chains in case, as ever, it dodged him. The town had worked very hard.

On the other hand, although twenty years had passed since the Prévôt and Echevins, armed with silver trowels, had laid the foundation stone of the new Hôtel de Ville, it stood still only two storeys high, and its Grand’ Salle did not allow any elbow room when its tables were set for a
hundred. Those invited by the Prévôt to watch, already admitted, lined the walls of the room on a scaffolding. Those invited by the Prévôt to sup, in their best clothes and early, naturally made sure of their places also.

The King entered, the trumpets blew, the bells rang out afresh from the churches, and the twenty-six merchants’ wives already ensconced at the High Board rose, curtseyed and settled again, smiling at their less privileged friends. It was clear where the King was to go, since the royal chairs had been placed on a dais. Where the princes of the blood, the victors of Calais and the great lords of the court were to be seated was for fifteen minutes a matter of frenzy.

Steering purposefully, Philippa found two vacated places just below the Sieur d’Andelot, the Duke de Nevers and Seigneur d’Estrée for the former Voevoda of Russia and King’s Lieutenant-General in Paris, who was showing a maddening preference for simply standing stock-still, looking virtuous.

Unfortunately, Piero Strozzi elected to come and sit on her other side. He caught Lymond’s eye, which was not hard to do. Philippa Somerville turned to the Marshal and addressed him in succinct Italian.
‘If you laugh, I shall kick you.’

‘Signora,’ said Piero Strozzi, ‘if you care to continue in this field of discussion after dinner, we should have much to say to one another. That is——’

He broke off, his eye arrested by something on her other side, and then resumed, injured, ‘… that is, if you had not brought your Russian retinue with you.
In bocca serrata mai non entrò mosca
. I give you a friendly warning. You think M. de Sevigny is drunk. He is not.’

‘You might not think so,’ said Lymond amiably. ‘But in ten minutes or so, I am going to slip under the table and lie there.’ On his other side, the comtesse de Laval put her hands over her ears and pulled a face at him. The noise, ringing back from the beams, was quite dizzying, and so were the fumes of sweat and scent and wet clothes and incoming food. The doors, which had been with difficulty shut, burst open again to admit a group of noisy, wet people. They closed, and then opened again. There were not enough places at the table. The benches jostled with incomers. The narrow space between the long trestles was filled with parties looking for seats, parties standing or kneeling on seats or parties simply meeting other parties and exchanging various witty ripostes.

They were all, Philippa saw, minor members of the Court, who had had no invitations in the first place. Perrot, speaking to the King, looked extremely flustered. The Maître d’Hôtel was sweating. More people began to pour in. The superfluity of blue blood, it was clear, was more than thirty Archers without benefit of password knew how to control. The reeking air, pushed by the heat from the two raging fires, moved and swung and swirled up to the rafters where the municipal chandeliers, specially made in black and white, the King’s colours, tossed and swayed from their herbaceous pinnings.

The comte de Sevigny looked up, his hair, and the priceless collar he wore neat and spiteful and glittering in the candlelight. ‘Christ,’ he said. ‘Piero. What are
you
going to do when the candelabra fall down?’

Piero Strozzi leaped to his feet.
‘Messeigneurs!’
The roar of it cut across even that febrile cacophony. ‘Messeigneurs nearest the door! The candelabra are about to fall on you!’

That got rid of twenty-five people. By a miracle of sinuous movement, Lymond was by the outer doors as the last of them backed out, exclaiming. The outer doors shut, then the inner doors. Marshal Strozzi, leaping to his feet, roared, ‘Messeigneurs! All has been made safe! The Prévôt begs you all to sit and be welcome!’

Everyone subsided. Opposite her, Philippa noticed, she had the god Janus with a key in his hand, and a verse beginning
QUI BIFRONS FUERAM, GALLIS SUM GALLICUS UNA FRONTE DEUS
, indicating, she took it, that he was prepared to be two-faced for everyone except Frenchmen. It reminded her of something. Lymond, sliding back, said, ‘I’ve told Jacob if his Archers let another soul in, I’ll shout Fire. They’ll all jump through the windows.’ A braying noise, creeping into the room while he was speaking, broadened, intensified, and began to permeate the clangorous gases.

Strozzi screamed. Lymond, not in the least disturbed, frowned at him. ‘I asked the hautboys and clarions to play for us.
Paris, fontaine de toutes sciences
. If you can’t lay your hands on three hundred Tartar horsemen with scimitars, I recommend clarions for quelling a riot. What, then?’

Piero Stròzzi had screamed again. The Queen’s cousin rose to his feet. Below the black hair, tightly curled with the damp, his lips were drawn back in a rictus of passion, displaying his broken teeth. Then, raising one pink and ribboned arm, he swept it across the table and tore from a startled échevin’s grasp the silver cup from which he was drinking. Gouts of claret soaked the municipal rust and crimson velvet. The merchant jumped to his feet.

Nose to nose: ‘You have many ill-deserved rights as échevin of this undesirable city,’ said Piero Strozzi, ‘but stealing my table silver is not one of them!’

Someone hauled, with steady violence, at his coat. He rocked, but remained standing.

‘Monseigneur!’ Where visible through beard and winestains, the merchant’s face was blotched with fury. ‘I demand reparation! You insult me and the city which honours you!’

‘Honours me!’
roared Marshal Strozzi, staggering and recovering with aplomb. He interrupted himself, staring along the crowded table. ‘Mon petit François, there is your silver, also.’

‘So it is,’ said Lymond with interest. The merchant’s wife who was admiring a great salt in cut glass and silver snatched her hands back, turning white. The man at her side began to rise slowly, piping like a
Chinese ocarina. Lymond, concentrating, surveyed him closely. ‘Now I think of it, the shirt is very familiar.’

‘My lord count!’ said the Councillor.

‘… But I couldn’t swear to it, in a court of law. I don’t object. The intention is to make us feel at home.’ He lifted a heavy silver-gilt object from the table far to his left and showed it helpfully to Marshal Strozzi. ‘There’s one of your livery pots.’ Marshal Strozzi lunged.

This time Philippa waited until he was off-balance. Then she took a strong grasp of his fur-trimmed coat with both hands and jerked.

With a crash and a hooting of oaths which out-trumpeted even the clarion, Marshal Strozzi fell on his back. It was a gradual fall, broken by the short row of pages behind him. He dropped into a dish of roast swan, and from there into a platter of bustards, and ended with a liquid sigh on the floor in a bowl of small pullets with vinegar. Gilded plumes from the swan quilled, with chic, a bubbling tippet of gravy. From the ruffled merchants, there came a squeal of shocked glee. He lay, speechless.

Across his fallen chair, Lymond gazed reflectively at his wife. ‘You borrowed the silver,’ he said.

‘Someone had to help them,’ said Philippa. ‘The King invited himself, and left them eight days to get ready. Baptiste had four days to finish the paintings. The tinsmith could only supply so much on short notice. They had to have linen brought in and laundered and buy rose water to scent it, and torch batons and wine, and get a Folder of Linen for the napkins. The master roasters and bakers haven’t had any sleep for three days, and Jodelle for four, and they’ve all been here since this morning, slaving to make everything ready.’

Piero Strozzi sat up, his gravy-stained hands negligently clasped about his steaming and redolent knees. ‘But why the comtesse de Sevigny?’ he inquired. He was no longer annoyed.

Philippa glanced at Lymond. ‘The comte de Sevigny had protected the walls of their city. They were willing to entrust me with their pride.’

‘Ah.’ Piero Strozzi rose to his feet, righted his chair and removing his ruined coat, seated himself in his doublet. ‘I think, mon petit François, that your wife delivers a reprimand and a warning. We watch our conduct?’

‘It’s going to be awful,’ Philippa said, flinching as the King’s trumpets, shrieking, announced the general serving of the banquet. ‘But if your bone-headed scions make fools of them, the Prévôt and Councillors will never forgive them.’

Piero Strozzi and Francis Crawford looked at one another. ‘A hint,’ said Lymond, ‘sufficeth for the wise, but a thousand speeches profit not the heedless. Did you hear what she said?’

‘Unfortunately,’ said Piero Strozzi, ‘I heard what she said. She spoke good sense.’

‘No bloodshed, harrows and ffrayes?’

‘I have said this before,’ said Piero Strozzi austerely. ‘You have no
sense of responsibility. Look at those titled louts at the end of the table who will not sit because they have not been brought wine. Do they not realize that pages cannot pass between the tables if they move about and meet their friends and slap one another, laughing?’

‘We have wine?’ said Lymond.

‘Yes. And some of us have had too much of it. Let us pass it,’ said Piero Strozzi, picking up two of the willow-covered flasks standing before him, ‘to those more deserving.’