Checkmate (65 page)

He was a mischievous man, and not above malice. The Commissioners, having heard what they wanted to hear, moved away. Sybilla said, ‘You imply they are much in love. Did you see Mistress Philippa? Did she seem to be happy?’

‘I never saw them apart,’ Strozzi said. ‘They greeted me together, and dined with me together, and waved me farewell together the following morning. I would find that too much. I had a good joke to tell mon petit François and I could find no opportunity. I rode off to Onzain and told it to Lord Grey instead to cheer up his captivity. He is not so badly off as he makes out. He had a wench with him.’

It was Austin who persisted. ‘But did she seem happy?’ he said. ‘Is she well?’

‘The wench? Ah, the young maid from Hexham. They never spoke to one another,’ said Piero Strozzi thoughtfully.

Sybilla lost patience. ‘Signor Strozzi, we are attempting, with some difficulty, to distinguish the condition of a young girl of whom we are particularly fond. Did Philippa seem well? Who never spoke to one another?’

Piero Strozzi looked surprised. ‘I beg your pardon,’ he said. ‘Ce beau chevalier and his mignonne. They talked, each of them to me, but almost never to one another. It is true, of course, when I am there, there is no need for others to converse, but some of one’s friends are not commonly backward.’

‘And their health?’ Sybilla said. ‘We were told they were both very tired.’

Strozzi shrugged. ‘How can one tell? It has changed him, as I have said. He has no wish to hear of the great matters of court, and if I mention the war, I am taken aside and shown horses. You know, I dare say, the intuition one may sometimes acquire, that one is not wanted?’

For the first time, the tension in Lady Culter’s face relaxed a little. ‘I do,’ she said.

‘Well, this I did not have,’ said Piero Strozzi simply. ‘And yet I knew I was not wanted. There is something formidable in that household of Sevigny.’

Obeying the dictates, perhaps, of just such another presentiment he did not stay much beyond that. Only, just as he was taking his leave and after Austin had left, alone, to go to his room, Sybilla said, ‘I wish you would explain something you said. That there was something formidable in that household of Sevigny?’

‘Ah,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘It does not lend itself truly to words. But you know, perhaps, you, Lord Culter and you, Blacklock, the
alla sanguigna
, the blue-red shimmer of a sword when it is drawn from the flesh? That is what it was like: the
alla sanguigna
, burning behind all the politenesses. Since also we are here together in small numbers, I may say something else.’

‘Yes?’ said Richard quietly.

‘Assai sa, chi nulla sa, se tacer’ sa
. He knows enough, who knows nothing, and who can keep quiet. It is not a matter which concerns the world,’ Piero Strozzi said, ‘but I am a curious man, and I notice that much as these two are together, they never touch. There is no embrace. There is no twining of the fingers even. So I ask questions, and I watch, which is difficult, for in that household they are very discreet. But this I must tell you.

‘M. le comte and madame la comtesse sleep apart. Their rooms are in different wings. And they do not move from one room to another. Whatever they may wish you to think, Madame, your son and Mistress Philippa are not living as man and wife.’

The day following Piero Strozzi’s visit to the Hôtel de l’Ange, Marthe returned to her husband.

Jerott received no kind of warning. Preparing, with the others, to leave with Strozzi and de Guise to join the army then mustering at Chalons, he was turning out of a back courtyard of the Hôtel du Séjour, his eyes on the lists in his hand, when a familiar voice spoke directly in front of him.

‘Whoredom, said Sir Thomas More, is better than wedlock—in a priest. Have you as yet reached any conclusion on the subject, Master Blyth?’

It was Marthe, sweet-sour and golden, in a gown of some Oriental fabric he did not recognize, and a line he had not seen before between her brows.

He killed, with an effort that could be seen, the impulse to grip her; to fling himself on her; to press out under his kisses the sight of that mocking mouth. Instead: ‘About monastic life and the priesthood?’ he said. ‘Being still in a state of wedlock, I’ve been trying to keep an open mind on it all.’

‘And an open bed?’ she said. ‘And an open bottle?’ She had not changed.

‘Suppose you come in,’ he said, ‘and ask Danny and Adam if they will give me a testimonial.’

‘You don’t ask,’ she said, ‘if I can supply one.’

Then he did sigh, looking at her from the open dark eyes in which there was much dignity but no guile, alas, to match hers. ‘You know,’ he said, ‘that with or without a testimonial, you have only to come to be received.’

‘Even if I make no promises?’ she said.

‘I have learned that those, too, are pointless,’ he said simply.

*

The Cardinal of Lorraine’s first peace conference failed, and he returned to Paris with a quantity of perfumed gloves, pressed upon him by the Spanish. The release from captivity of the Constable retreated a little further into the future. The Duke de Guise’s programme for the
uniting of the largest army ever mustered by any monarch was tackled by all concerned with exemplary vigour.

During the third week in May, the meadows beyond the Faubourg St Germain in Paris, normally the after-supper pleasance of students, were occupied by an orderly procession of four thousand Protestants singing Lutheran psalms interspersed with anti-Papal invective. In the course of their march, which led them after dark into the city and down the rue de St Jacques, they took with them for protection several companies of horsemen and many on foot with concealed weapons. The composition of the procession was extremely mixed, being drawn from noblemen, plebeians and artificers and men of every kind and condition, as well as from women and children. They were not stopped.

The following night they repeated the performance, this time to an immense crowd of spectators. On the third night, a proclamation was issued forbidding the gathering, and when it was ignored, the city gates were closed against them at dusk.

Even then, there was no disturbance. The concourse of ten thousand persons spent the night in the houses of the suburb, or strolling through the meadows in the pleasant mild air, re-entering the town in the morning. On subsequent nights they did the same but omitted, with belated tact, the ballads against the Vatican.

An account of the disturbances being sent to the Court, the Cardinal de Sens, the spiritual Primate of France, issued a severe proclamation in the King’s name to prevent further such demonstrations, and by offering rewards for information, succeeded in arresting some hundred persons of no great consequence who had taken part in the singing. Among them were a number of tutors and other officials from the University colleges.

Because of the nature of the times and the danger of civil war, great discretion was used in the case of a number of great persons who openly favoured Calvinism and were known to have attended. The King of Navarre, who had been present only, he pointed out winningly, as an interested bystander, was questioned none the less by the King and by the Cardinal.

François de Coligny, sieur d’Andelot, recently back in Paris after securing the Brittany ports against threat of English invasion, was less fortunate, as it happened, in his perfumed handshake.

He had been seen to attend the demonstrations. He had also, so the Cardinal was able to show, sent for Geneva books during his recent captivity. The King, who was fond of him, regretfully summoned him to face his questions, and went so far as to have him warned in advance of their content. A simple lie, there was no doubt, would have saved him. But confronting the King at his supper, the sieur d’Andelot merely replied, with strong rectitude and no sense of discretion that, while owing the French King his absolute devotion, his soul belonged only to God, and lit by the torch of the Evangile, he approved the doctrines of Calvin and thought Mass a horrible profanation and an abominable invention of mortals.

Enraged by the blasphemy, the King snatched a basin to hurl at d’Andelot but, his aim being no better than his son’s, instead cracked open the head of the Dauphin. M. d’Andelot, under instant arrest, was marched off with his wife to the bishop’s prisons at Meaux, thus freeing the six brothers de Guise of another rival.

The Commissioners for Scotland endeavoured to preserve a unified front behind which, from their various religious convictions, they viewed the passage of events with some little alarm. The presence of the English fleet in the Narrow Seas still compelled them, supposedly, to remain in Paris. The real reasons on both sides were a matter of opinion. If they stayed, they could bring home the terms of the peace or the outcome of the war. They could watch and judge further the honesty or dishonesty of France towards Scotland, as already betrayed by Queen Mary. And, there was no doubt that, by accepting the King’s pressing invitation to linger, they were denying the Queen Dowager of Scotland the company of some of her strongest Reformers.

Visiting Lords Seton and Allendale with some frequency, John Elder now knew very well which were the Calvinists and had heard, with admiration, of the fine reception given them by Lord Culter’s younger brother. In a comradely and even, one might say, a Christian sense, Lord Culter had been a disappointment, and so had his mother. The Secretary obtained, from Austin Grey, an introduction to Jerott’s wife Marthe.

The meeting was not a success. Marthe, faced with a gentle denigration of Lord Culter for not acknowledging the less fortunate sprigs of his line, remarked merely, with boredom, that she didn’t know there were any such. On being reminded, apologetically, of the family resemblance, she merely remarked, irritably, that perhaps then Lord Culter was the bastard. Which, since Lord Culter had been born fully attested many years before anyone else, and the correct number of months after an equally fully attested wedding, was clearly prevarication.

‘I beg your pardon,’ John Elder had added. ‘I felt sure I had heard that M. de Sevigny looked upon you as his step-sister. Could I be mistaken?’

‘I don’t know,’ Marthe had said. ‘I suppose it depends on heredity. What sort of mistakes did your parents make?’

He thought of a very good answer in bed that night as he pulled his cap on.

*

In the continuing absence of Madame Roset, the agent who concerned himself with the Hôtel des Sphères instructed the servants to place neatly within a campaign chest all the money, clothes and other effects of the late Master Bailey, and hand them to the authorities for transmission to England by the first person of that nationality to leave the country. Since the two nations were still officially at war and the traffic was not therefore dense, the chest remained in a bureau in Paris, with a label on it.

A recalcitrant cellar door, forced in the same house by a maidservant,
proved to have stacked up behind it four locked boxes clearly containing money. The agent, applied to, took charge of them for his principal.

Sybilla sent for Adam Blacklock and said, ‘I’ve had a letter from Philippa’s mother. I can’t answer it.’

‘I know. So have I,’ Adam said. Then as Sybilla added nothing, he said, ‘They don’t want anyone. I wrote to Applegarth and I wrote to Archie, and they don’t answer. I could wring Archie’s neck.… Nothing happened, did it, about that demonstration?’

‘No,’ Sybilla said wearily. ‘It was not very wise of them to go. But no one seems to have noticed. Why should Archie make you think of that?’

There was no point in lying. ‘It was Archie who told me that Lord Culter was a Calvinist,’ Adam said. ‘Francis found out at Dieppe. You may not have noticed, but all the time you have been here, we have been keeping the Protestant Commissioners so far as possible out of trouble. Only the other night they escaped us. Without Francis at Court, we don’t have the warning we usually get.’

‘It seems hardly fair,’ Sybilla said, ‘that you should have had to assume the burden of caring for the Culter family.’ Then she said, as if quite against her will, ‘I am so afraid. They don’t speak, he said.’

‘You want me to go,’ Adam said. ‘But, you know, Francis has always been his own master.’

‘He was not his own master when he left Russia,’ Sybilla said. ‘Nor was he his own master when you brought him to France. He is like a river forced into glass and driven from stem to stem of a conjurer’s maze without ever reaching the sea. Would you rather I sent Richard?’

It was an empty threat, but the fact that she was driven to make it was enough. Next day he left.

*

He had forgotten how beautiful Sevigny was. He rode to Orleans through wood-smoke and the song of birds and came to the river, strung like a rosary with its palaces, their bowered turrets stitched in the water like tapestry. He sent no warning before him but spent the night at Blois, and set out with the sun at his back in the morning, past the vineyards and through the spring flowers and between the slender tree trunks gloved in ivy, until ahead of him he saw the wall, and the beeches, and beyond them the château, distinct in the sun as a Cellini tiara.

He was told at first, courteously, that my lord was not at home; and then suddenly Archie was standing before him, his hands on his hips, saying, ‘Oh. It’s yourself.’

The tone was exasperated. But behind the lined and leathery face Adam caught a glimpse, before it vanished, of an expression which could have been pure relief. Then Archie said, ‘Give me your saddlebags. They’ve been riding. You can wait for them in the parlour.’

‘You bloody Indian clam,’ Adam said. ‘I wrote you.’

‘I didn’t get it,’ said Archie.

‘I wrote Applegarth as well,’ said Adam angrily.

‘He didn’t get it either. He’s away for a day or two. Jesus,’ said Archie, ‘are ye not keen to come in? You must be fair wore out with ali that writing.’

So whatever there was to tell, Archie did not intend to convey it.

Then, clean and combed, he was waiting rigidly in a tidy, well-appointed room which seemed to be full of books, and the door opened, and Lymond came in.

Quel changement
, Strozzi had said, and it was true. The change was there, and not only in the chamois and lawn, replacing the velvet, the rubies, the gold tissue. It was as if all about him had been stripped down and cleansed and reduced, without blurring, to its true structure. And his eyes, which were smiling, were clear.

‘Poor Hermes,’ said Lymond. ‘And without even a winged staff to pawn. Don’t look so apprehensive. Someone was bound to try again, once they got Piero to stop talking. O cruell Mars, thou dedly god of war; O dolorous tewisday, dedicate to thy name! We hoped it might be you.’ And taking Adam’s hand at the same moment to draw him to a chair he turned his head and said, ‘And here is Philippa.’

They had walked, for whatever reason along the passage together and, not to embarrass him, were entering separately.
We
, Lymond had said instead of the familiar, imperious
I
.
They’ve been riding
, Archie had said, without requiring to identify
them
. Such a sovereignty, Adam thought, resentment starting up for the first time in his thoughts. Such a sovereignty, to be pulled down so quickly.

Then Philippa came in, and looking only at himself said smiling, ‘I’m sorry. Signor Strozzi said it was like being received by the Dioscuri. Would you rather be entertained by one of us at a time?’

Which was altogether too near the mark to permit him to reply with a truthful assent. So he grinned and said, ‘I came to see both of you. Kate has been writing to ask how you are.’

Neither of them queried the excuse. ‘Sit down,’ Lymond said, ‘and have something. I suppose it is too early for anything but Hippocras. Where did you come from, Blois?’

And as Adam nodded and he busied himself pouring spiced wine, Lymond said, ‘We are as you see. It was not given to us to make this change with proper consideration for our friends, for which you must blame an obtuseness of mine. That it was a change of great … importance to us, I hope you will understand. Later, I hope you will find us more communicative. When there has been … what do they call an earthquake?—a
wondernous of earth
, it takes a little time to recover.’

He presented the wine. ‘Now may we leave the subject? You must have seen the vineyards as you came by. We have some changes in the gardens we want to show you presently. And these.’ And laying down the salver, he lifted two books of drawings. ‘Do you remember my trying to
buy these in London?’ He did not say how he had now come by them, but Adam saw Philippa lift her eyes, with a smile in them, to his.

It was the key to which all the rest of the long day was tuned: that of tranquil hospitality, filled with small pleasures, carefully designed to his taste, first by one of his hosts and then by the other. All their attention was concentrated on himself and he was enclosed by it, as in a satin box. To his efforts to let in the outside world their response was totally negative and differed only in quality. He mentioned as soon as he could the break-down of the Cardinal’s peace negotiations over the twin stumbling-blocks of the future of Savoy and Calais, but before he could speculate about their resumption, or about the honesty of their purpose, he had been led by Lymond’s skill into another channel and with equal adroitness denied any chance of returning. Philippa, he found, took no part in such diversions, but would allow an outside topic to die for lack of contribution.