Checkmate (70 page)

‘Why draw our attention?’ he said. ‘Alec?’

‘There’s a village beyond,’ Guthrie said. ‘It looked deserted. But while our friends stay in the trees, you couldn’t get near enough to tell either way.’

‘We don’t need to cross near the trees,’ Captain de Forcés said. ‘We can water the horses downstream just as well.’

‘If there’s a force in that village,’ Jerott said, ‘it can’t be a very big one.’

Lymond said, ‘Big enough to slow us down if it follows us. Big enough to hold us here for a little time if we attack it. I think that is why it is here. To send a scout to Philip’s army and hold us until a regiment gets here. A good idea. They’ve only made one mistake.’

‘What?’ said Jerott. A pistolier, irritated by the lack of action, walked over the flowering grass and raising his weapon released an explosion in the direction of the chestnut trees. With a brief thud, two returning bolts arrived, one in the grass and the other full on his cuirass, making a white dent the size of a balled fist. He fell, and two comrades scuttled out and hauled him back, gasping.

‘Good God,’ Lymond said. ‘How would you propose to get them out of those trees? Wait till they drop out from famine? We have the field gun, had you forgotten?’

They had the field gun and shot and matches and powder, and they did not need to come within crossbow range to align the cannon on the summer grove, heavy with the langours of August.

Two of the enemy shouted, parting the leaves just before the gun fired and were allowed to climb down and surrender, to be bundled off, their wrists bound up with hackbut cord. Then the gunners touched off the cannon, and reloaded and fired it again, until the grove was a mountainous graveyard of split boughs and dead birds and greenery. Two men were thrown clear, in fragments. For a while they could hear the voice of a third, under the wreckage. Then it faded to silence.

Smoke, rising white into the air, thinned and wandered, flushed rose in the sunset. ‘And now,
mes amis
,’ said the Marshal to the men, bright-eyed and alert crowded round him, ‘let us see what we have in those houses.’

In the houses were two companies of landsknechts and one of Spaniards, under a young captain from Brabant. The field gun, turned on the wall, breached it with a single ball, and with another brought down all the hovels next to it. Lymond dispatched a trumpet first to call for surrender, and when answered with defiance turned the mouth of the gun on the houses. When he sent his pikemen in, the drums marched with
them, the roar of their beating reverberating from all the stone shells and arcades and cellars.

Jerott had once had that done to him, and knew how in a small space it deadened thought and sowed panic.

The Spaniards were brave. They stayed where they were and forced men to come in and fight hand to hand in the passages. The Germans escaped into the street and over the roofs, where the hackbutters picked them off, merry as fowlers. Like hot water thrown on an anthill, the fighting seethed, short and sharp for forty minutes. Then it was over; and the only enemy still alive were bound in the wagons.

This time, Lymond had promised his men all the booty they could discover.

The villagers in their flight had overlooked only some hens, some wine, and some onions; and below the rubble in the patched earth were a few vegetables.

Only the Spaniards were better provided. In the blacksmith’s house they found flour and biscuit and lard; on the dead bodies fine arms and shirts, money and jewellery; and in a weaver’s loft a dozen camp followers, huddled together, who lost no time making themselves pleasant to the conquerors.

The jubilation rose, hurled from building to building, as the evening sky dimmed to turquoise and the cressets flared, bright as animals’ eyes in the dusk, leaping from building to black splintered building. De Forcés, before a brilliant fire, collected the booty piled before him ready to apportion in Amiens. Food was distributed. Alec Guthrie, before a locked door, supervised the amount of wine claimed for each ensign.

They had posted sentries and outposts. But the mere fact that they were to be detained there meant a reasonable margin of safety. They fought well, Lymond had said. Give them an hour. Then let’s get them over the river.

Some of them were in the river already. Jerott, his thirst slaked, his bodily vigour still driving him at battle pitch, left the village and strode with the rest shouting and singing to the Luce, unbuckling his straps as he went. His sergeant, his points untied, was fondling a girl with her back to the wall in the darkness: as Jerott passed he was having her, neatly and urgently.

A party of Germans, yelling to one another, lit them up with a dangling lantern and began chanting obscenities. Behind them was Jerott’s page. Jerott, grinning, began to fling him items of armour as he unfastened them until, in shirtsleeves and hose, he stood calf-deep in the red surging water, drenched and laughing among the nude hairy flesh which leaped and vaulted and screamed in the spray all about him.

A lighted brand, tossed high in the sky, lit the cream mane and tail of an Andalusian mare, and the doublet and bared head of the rider, still as a monument, looking at him.

Someone shrilled. ‘Join us, Marshal!’

The Marshal, if he enjoyed the joke, did not answer. But the Isabel flung up her head, as if a goad quite unaccustomed had been used on her. The next moment she had kicked out her heels, and snorting had plunged abruptly into the gathering darkness.

Jerott said to his page, ‘Get my horse, quickly.’

*

A single rider, at dusk, is not so hard to track in open country; the more so if he is quite reckless of pursuit, and of the noise he makes.

Late as he was in the chase, Jerott was saved by the fact that his quarry had no destination. When, discerning the hoofbeats, he first glimpsed mare and horseman streaming like smoke through the meadow-lands, he saw the Isabel virtually riderless, and knew his instinct this time was the right one.

There were hedges coming, and the slate-coloured glimmer of ditches and ponds and behind, black on the indigo sky, the crenellated line of a deep band of forest. Jerott, nursing his mount, turned its head to the trees and, converging, asked it to overtake the other uncontrolled horse, far in front of him.

Forty miles on the march had tired the Isabel but, lashed as she had been, she was far too excited to falter. She took a ditch in her stride, and another, and then, her nostrils wide, soared over the thorn hedge which guarded the woodland.

Behind, instead of firm ground, lay a quagmire. Her legs sank into it buckling, and bone jarred on bone and flesh squeezed into flesh as her smooth chestnut flanks struck the earth, twisting. She threshed once, her ribs crushed, and died, almost before Lymond stirred from the spongy ground where she had flung him.

He had broken no bones. What had gone was his bastion: the mindless violence through which thought could not seize him. Without it he stayed where he was, his hair brushing his knees, his folded arms tight as a man with a spear in him.

And so Jerott found him, and obtaining no answers, had to locate for himself what the damage was. There was none that he could find. Only a constant and uncontrollable shuddering; a visible comber of movement running through and through the arrogant body.

Jerott said. ‘Oh Christ,’ and taking the other man’s shoulders held him as if in a vice; in the obliterating grip that itself can sometimes stop thought, and re-form what is shattered below it.

After a long time, the shivering lessened, and Jerott scrupulously slackened his grip and said, ‘Francis? There’s a tree just behind you.’

And he understood that, for in a little while he pulled himself back and laid his shoulders against it. His lids, in the near-darkness, appeared to be closed, and at no time at all had he spoken.

Stillness descended. Behind them in the wood a bird called and then
flew, in a ruffle of wing beats. Something brushed through the grass near the Isabel and then raced away as Jerott shifted. His own horse, its reins knotted, stood heavily, its bridle jangling as its hips altered. Jerott said, ‘It’s Philippa, isn’t it? Philippa herself: not the want of a woman?’

There was the flat silence of extreme exhaustion, both of the mind and of the body. Then Lymond said, ‘Yes.’

‘I didn’t know,’ Jerott said; and the manner in which he said it was the apology he did not think of making. Then he said, ‘There is no need for you to be here. I can take this convoy to Amiens.’

There was another silence. Then, ‘No,’ Lymond said. ‘No. I shall stay with it.’

‘You can’t stay with it like this,’ Jerott said. And when Lymond made no answer, he said, ‘What does it matter? There will be a truce. In a few weeks you can return to her anyway.’

‘I can’t,’ Lymond said. ‘I can’t. That’s the trouble. I don’t think I can go back at all.’

He had his palms over his face. ‘The marriage is incomplete, Jerott. And there is no way that I can go on with it any longer.’

*

On arrival at Amiens, the Marshal de Sevigny proceeded directly to his business, which was the preparation of a camp in which to receive and lodge, feed and water an army of sixty thousand with its arms, munitions and horses; and to arrange, according to the plan of battle, a suitable disposition for the artillery, the sentries and the various companies and their leaders.

It was decided to bring extra cannon from Paris. Jerott Blyth, extremely grim-faced of late, left to arrange it, and bore with him a note from the Marshal de Sevigny to his brother.

This he took to the Hôtel de l’Ange, avoiding Austin Grey but insisting on being seen by Lord Culter who received him, the letter opened and read, with summary courtesy. ‘You know what this letter contains?’

‘Yes,’ Jerott said. ‘Francis believes the Cardinal may have guessed that you all know the truth about the dowry papers which signed away Scotland. Have you seen any evidence of it?’

‘None,’ said Richard Crawford. ‘Nor does my brother give reasons for thinking so. Perhaps he is right. Perhaps it would merely suit him to speed our departure, now that he has shown his coat to be so unequivocally Gallic.’

Jerott, his face red, clung to his temper. ‘Soldiering is his trade. He merely follows it. In any case, surely common sense alone tells you to leave France. Such things don’t remain secret for ever.’

‘Particularly,’ Richard said, ‘if you have a brother as nimble as I have. I’m told that the impossible has occurred, and the Duke de Guise’s pedestal trembles. Let Francis only bring down the Cardinal, and the
power he wanted is here, with Scotland, no doubt, as his colony. Is anything beyond him now, even a princess?… Or no, I forgot. He is, shortsightedly, still legally tied to his present wife.’

Lacking the finesse to reply, and unwilling to knock the man out of the window, Jerott left him. To Marthe, whose interest he could count on, he eventually was able to relieve all his feelings.

She had no comfort to give him but sent him back, at least calmed, to the source of his anxiety at Amiens. Then, having made sure of her privacy, Lymond’s sister prepared her travelling coffers, her mules and her servants and set out for Blois and her house in the street of the Popinjays. From there, she lost no time in calling on Philippa.

*

The comtesse de Sevigny was in the gardens when Marthe sought her, and Applegarth had to lead his surprising guest by marble steps and wide paths through arbors and elm bowers, past knotbeds and box groves and walled orchards and water gardens until at last she was discovered, in a grotto canopied by a vine trellis. Before her was a marble sarcophagus, on which lay a number of papers trapped by pebbles, and she was sitting on a low stone bench beside it, dressed in the loose Andalusian robe which had become all the vogue recently, and writing busily.

Nicholas Applegarth, who had not met Marthe before, was sufficiently instructed by rumour to know that it might be wise to remove her from the house, and relied on Philippa’s good sense to receive her without warning.

Even so, when he called gently, ‘Madame!’ and Philippa looked up, he wondered if he had acted correctly. Then Philippa rose and said, ‘Marthe. I’m glad you have found your way here. Nicholas, would you look after Mistress Blyth’s people, and perhaps send us something cool to take while we talk? Come and sit.’

‘I have no one with me. I am staying at the Maison de Doubtance,’ Marthe said. And as Applegarth left she said, erect and quite uncompromising, ‘Since I am sister to Francis, I should like to know why you are killing him?’

The pen she was holding dropped from Philippa’s hand. She knelt after a moment and lifted it. Then, kneeling still, her hair arcading her hands, she said, ‘He is ill?’

‘Don’t you know?’ Marthe said. ‘According to Jerott, he is working, persecuted by headaches, like a being possessed by the devil; and under a self-imposed regimen which is breaking him. Surely that doesn’t surprise you?’

Philippa sat down. She said, ‘I thought the headaches had gone.’

Marthe looked down at her. ‘But here, he was at the beginning of his trial by endurance. Now he is tired, and in a place where all the demands on him are physical and he is surrounded by nothing but violence and
vigour and virility. And he is staying, because there is nowhere else for him to go.’

‘Did he tell Jerott that?’ Philippa said.

‘He told Jerott,’ said Marthe deliberately, ‘that yours is a platonic marriage, and because of that, he could never return to you. That is all Jerott knows. On the other hand, I know the truth.’

The flowerbeds by the fountains were full of clove pinks. The thick, hot scent of them was stifling, and the sun, reflected from the white marble, dazzled Philippa’s sight, so that she closed her eyes and drew a long breath before opening them. Then she said, ‘How can you know it? It belongs to me, and to Francis.’

‘And to Austin Grey,’ Marthe said. ‘And to John Elder, and to Sybilla. It will stop there, I imagine, although the Lennoxes are likely to be edified by it. I shall not bore you with the details, but Madame Roset’s body was found, apparently murdered by a great-uncle of your husband’s. Elder deduced most of the rest from what he already knew, and made sure Austin heard of it. The Marquis, of course, is waiting anxiously in Paris for you to see the light of reason and fly from the arms of your pimping seducer. Are you with child by the old man?’ said Marthe.