Checkmate (50 page)

So she took her place beside him, and looked under her long lashes at all her unknown subjects, while the Bishop said grace, and the chaplet proper of Sevigny made a nimbus of the bright canopy over her.

*

‘What are they talking about?’ said the Provost of Edinburgh irritably, to his step-sister Mary Seton.

‘You, probably,’ said the maid of honour and smiled, for the fourth time, at Fleming’s older brother.

*

‘They are, as you see, somewhat subdued,’ said the comte de Sevigny to his guest of honour. ‘Brought on by respect for the crown, and a certain natural diffidence. It poses a problem. If we contrive to bring each man to his nature, then he will be happy; but he will no longer be quiet. Do I have your grace’s permission?’

‘For what?’ she said. The flecked hazel eyes regarded him, as in after years perhaps she would regard her chancellor, her treasurer, the president of her council of Scotland. ‘Is there any king living with the right to deny his subjects happiness?’

‘There are tribes today,’ Lymond said, ‘who find happiness in lust and cannibalism and the worship of idols. Doesn’t that open up a whole familiar pattern of argument over the purpose of kingship? I shall spare you all of it. These are baked crabs, and these are primrose cakes, made of honey and almonds and saffron. The primroses are real: I shouldn’t advise you to eat them. And the liquid is Russian, and called
Gorelka.
’

‘It looks like water,’ said the Queen of Scotland. ‘Surely, if his subjects’ souls are in danger, it is the duty of a monarch to correct them?’

It did not taste like water. Mr Crawford said, ‘But then he will make them unhappy.’

‘In this world, yes,’ said his Queen, ejecting a primrose.

‘It is this world,’ said Mr Crawford tranquilly, ‘that we are discussing. In any case, who decides whether their souls are in danger?’

‘The Church,’ said Queen Mary indistinctly. ‘Who will advise the monarch.’

‘And if,’ Lymond said, ‘there are two churches? If one tribal witchdoctor says you may make a meal of your grandmother, and the other says burning is holier?’

‘You are talking,’ said Mary, ‘of savages. To civilized nations, there is only one church, and a Pontiff to whom we turn for guidance. And if you question that, Mr Crawford, it is blasphemy.’

‘I know I’m talking of savages,’ Lymond said. ‘Have savages no right to be happy? Presumably, also, savages have souls. So what is a savage monarch to do for them?’

She did not balk at it. More than the food or the vodka, the lure of the argument pulled her attention. She laid down her cup and her knife. ‘If he is a king, and is offered conflicting advice from his ministers, then he must seek the truth himself. He must find others outside the tribe who will enlighten him. This is the work of our missionary priests, Mr Crawford.’

‘He should take the word, then, of the first man he meets? All religions, Madam, have their missionaries.’

‘Then he must speak to many men, and weigh what they say. If he is King, he must have judgement.’

‘Not necessarily. But if he is King long enough, he will usually attain judgement. For example, you have reached a sound conclusion and one day, I trust, will have sufficient judgement to apply it. These are anchovies. May I give you some? There will be an entertainment for you shortly.’

She gazed at him over the anchovies. ‘You lecture me, Mr Crawford?’

‘I,’ said the comte de Sevigny, ‘am attempting to offer you foodstuffs. It is you, your grace, who insists on conversing of cannibalism: chacun a sa marotte. You are going to live on an olive a day, like the Stoics?’

‘Did they?’ said Mary.

‘I have it on the best authority. You know what they say. Feed a horse or a poet too well and neither will ever do anything. Lord James, your royal kinswoman requires nourishment. Forbid her to talk, and while she eats discourse to her on the duties of kingship.’

‘No!’ said Mary.

‘A masque on the glorious union soon to take place between France and Scotland?’ Lymond said hopefully.

She glanced at him sideways, her expression commendably close to the gracious. ‘You have prepared one, Mr Crawford?’

‘No,’ said Lymond with regret. ‘What we have for you are love songs. They need not keep you from eating. Simply recognize the singers, now and then, with a wave of the hand, and allow Mr Hislop, there, to join in the choruses.’

She laughed; and through all the company, the volume of talk rose a little, and then rose again as, nerves assuaged and stomachs full, each man began to come, as Lymond had undertaken, to his natural self.

‘I am sad,’ said the Bishop of Orkney to Lord James Stewart as the tables were gently drawn and the floor cleared and the candied ginger passed from place to place. ‘I am sad because we live, you and I, on two sides of one river. And whoso list to hunt, I know where is an hart we both covet.’

‘There is a remedy,’ said the Queen’s half-brother.

‘Is there? I doubt it,’ said Reid of Orkney. ‘There might have been, in the past. But this hart is ten years too young, I fear, for his destiny.’

*

The entertainment, which came with the sweetmeats, consisted of feats of skill, performed by jugglers, dancers, acrobats and illusionists. All were dark or yellowskinned and none of them spoke any language that George Buchanan tried them with. Each act was executed in its proper order and without any visible flaw. None of them had been seen before. The guests stood, with the inclusion of the Queen of Scotland, to applaud their last exit.

The dancers did not perform a symbolic masque, and the consort of players was in tune. The singers entered unseen and Piero Strozzi jumped to his feet at the first surge of tight-pleated sound; at the low, throbbing band of the bass, and the counter-tenor planing, slow and bird-high through the harmony.

‘Hunno! Oswald! Andreas!’ Piero Strozzi yelled at his host, through the busy hum of a party astonished to be enjoying itself.
‘Fou enragé
, you have sent for Les Amis de Rabelais?’

And ‘—Why not?’ murmured the Earl of Culter to Adam Blacklock, sitting beside de Nicolay behind him. ‘I don’t think I’ve ever heard better.’

‘It’s a long story,’ said Adam; and glanced across the handsome room to where he had last seen Jerott Blyth. He added, ‘And not one to mention in Austin Grey’s hearing. Francis once used Les Amis in order to try and leave France.’

‘And now, final irony, he is patronizing them. Where is Allendale?’ Richard said.

‘In the house somewhere, I believe. It isn’t the kind of celebration a sensitive prisoner would intrude upon. If Philippa were here, it might have been different.’

‘But she is here,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay behind him.

Adam stared and Richard, swinging round, examined the cartographer coldly.

‘You have failed, my lord, to allow for local deviation,’ said the little man blandly. ‘She came in five minutes ago, with Signor Strozzi. You will see, if you look, that the company has expanded itself in other directions also.’

Adam peered across the gentle, candlelit width of the salon. ‘The Prince of Condé,’ he suddenly said. ‘And el Vandomillo … the King of Navarre his brother. Christ.’

‘I also see,’ said the cartographer, ‘the Sieur d’Andelot and his wife and Monseigneur de La Roche-sur-Yon. And, I believe, M. de La Rochefoucauld. The Bourbons are here in strength. Who can have invited them?’

‘I did,’ said Piero Strozzi, coming and dropping with a thud on the cushion beside them. ‘This of your brother’s is too good a party, my lord, to keep to oneself. I sent out one or two discreet messengers. Mon petit François, I am sure, will bear me no ill will for it.’

‘You invited them without Lymond knowing?’ said Danny Hislop. He wriggled into the circle. ‘Can I be there when he hears about it?’

‘He cannot fail to know. We are not all blind,’ said Nicolas de Nicolay cheerfully. ‘But with the Queen of Scotland at his right hand and the King’s sister—you observed, of course, Madame Marguerite?—seated at his left, there is little he can do but appear delighted by it. At least,
mon cher
, you were obliging enough to refrain from increasing our numbers until the food was finished.’

‘It was not perhaps so discerning,’ said Richard coolly, ‘to compel his wife to celebrate the occasion. How did you induce her to come?’

‘Why, by telling her that mon petit François had sent for her,’ the Marshal said cheerfully. ‘There was a moment of, shall we say, incredulity when they met, but both parties rose to the occasion. She is being looked after by a number of attentive gentlemen from her own court and, of course, by the next incumbent, the charming Mademoiselle d’Albon.’

‘Christ!’ said Richard under his breath, and rising unobtrusively to his feet, began to make his way, with native persistence, to where Philippa Somerville, he now saw, was seated.

Danny got up as well.

Piero Strozzi, a single earring swinging against his dark face, looked up and grinned at him.

‘Why are you going? France is a civilized country. The two wives of the comte de Sevigny—does my poor Earl doubt it?—are fond of one another.’

‘I know,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘I want to see them being fond of one another. I want to see everybody brazening it out. And then I want to see what your petit François does to you when the party’s over.’

*

For her part, Philippa Somerville watched without pleasure her husband’s older brother picking his way purposefully towards her while displaying, to Catherine d’Albon, several eminent noblemen and one or two mesmerized students surrounding her, all the overtures expected of a selfless and hard-working guest, together with evidence that she had never spent a happier evening in her life.

The moment when Piero Strozzi’s messenger had found her, released from duty, drinking wine and reading poetry and discussing theology in the little house belonging to the mistress of a young medical graduate named Jacques Grevin, had been in itself sufficiently macabre, denoting, it seemed, some royal death or disaster.

The message he actually brought—that Francis Crawford wished her presence at his reception—was in its way even more worrying.

Since there was, she was assured, no time to change, she hurried to the Hôtel d’Hercule as she was, in a high-necked gown of unadorned russet velvet, with her unbound hair lying brushed over her cloak. Her mind, occupied furiously with possibilities, first reached the conclusion that some kind of unthinkable climax had occurred between Sybilla and Francis, and that, unable to ask another’s help, he had had to send for her services. Or had Jerott, too fuddled to remember the niceties, said something of Marthe to Lord Culter?

Or worse than anything else … Had Leonard Bailey left the house in the rue de la Cerisaye and chosen tonight, of all nights, to make public the scandal surrounding the Crawfords?

Even when her escort pushed his way through the crowds to the brightly-lit house, and she heard the music and laughter drifting from the tall windows, she still thought it possible. It was the dénouement a vengeful man would choose … before an audience of Sybilla’s own countrymen. And with even the Queen, it seemed, there to hear it. Bailey could have made his threat. Lymond might be waiting helplessly, even now, for his arrival.

So she came quickly into the room, her furred cloak fallen back; and saw him see her at once, and with an apology to the Queen at his side, rise to walk swiftly towards her.

And from his manner, she knew instantly that there had been no disaster. St Michael killed his dragon, gold and green, on the spotless velvet of a man who was totally at home, and in command both of himself and of every circumstance of his surroundings. And in his eyes was no personal apprehension, but only a faint, well-masked concern whose reason was perfectly obvious.

He had not expected to see her.

Philippa did not even speak. Her eyes sought Piero Strozzi and found him grinning, his splendid shoulders raised in expansive expectation of forgiveness.

Following, speechlessly, all the play upon her face and, turning, on the Florentine’s, Lymond divined, still without words, what had happened.

Then he smiled, betraying no anger, and said, pleasantly, ‘I see that Piero has been at pains to make fools of us both. There is no need for embarrassment. Come and make your salutations to the Queen and Sybilla and then I shall bestow you on Catherine for companionship.… Take your cloak off. Your gown and your hair require no adornment.’

It was direct flattery to restore her shaken confidence; but none the less, she was grateful for it. And when Catherine, smiling, came to lead her to a low cushioned hassock beside her, she was grateful, too, that Francis had chosen a bride of sensibility as well as intelligence, and that she had made a friend of her.

Someone was singing.

Richard, coming to question her, was diverted after all: she thought by his mother. Lymond, bending courteously, was talking to d’Andelot’s wife, reclining near her husband on a coffer-seat.

Danny Hislop, twining among quilted backs like winter jasmine, arrived and seated himself nonchalantly in her circle. The Queen, and everyone else in the dim, scented room were listening to the singers. And as thought returned, and the flush died at last in her cheeks, Philippa listened to them too.

The theme of the music was earthly passion. The songs sprang from every country and age, their story told sometimes by the music and sometimes by the singers and sometimes in mime by the dancers, grave of face and tranquil in manner, and faultlessly clothed, as were all the performers, in pale, clear colours which spoke of spring, and of young lovers and sunlight.