Checkmate (86 page)

‘Every astrologer in France seems to have been her intimate,’ Lymond said. ‘And … Kuzúm?’

Sybilla returned his look steadily. ‘May be Oonagh’s child,’ she said. ‘Or may be Joleta’s. Marthe knew.’

‘And is dead. Poor sister. A pawn more helpless even than …’ He broke off.

‘It is as well, you see, that we do not know,’ said Sybilla. ‘And Kuzúm will always have Kate, and of course, Archie.’

He had forgotten Archie. His brow cleared. ‘And, of course, Archie, everyman’s keeper. Christ,’ he said despairingly.
Taire d’une mouche un elephant.’

Philippa turned her head and saw Sybilla look too, and the lines on her firelit face ease a fraction. What this meant to Francis struck her, suddenly, for the first time. She looked at the paper, still held in his hand.

As if she had spoken, he looked down as well. Then walking forward, smiling a little, he held it to Philippa. ‘Read,’ he said, ‘so that you will know what your children might have been. Then give it to Sybilla.’

‘Might have been?’ Sybilla said.

He dropped by her side and laid his hand over hers, where it gripped the chair arm. ‘What did you think I would do?’ he said. ‘Rush to Midculter and bastardize all my nieces and nephews? These are yours. Keep them. Burn them, if you wish. It is over.’

‘John Dee made a prophecy,’ Philippa said. ‘Do you remember it? He said that now you knew what you wanted. The first thing you would have, but the second you would never have; nor would it be just that you should.’

‘I was thinking of it,’ said Lymond. ‘The first thing was you, my Lady bricht … The second, it seems, was my heritage.’

‘Do you regret it?’ said Sybilla. ‘I would have kept it for you if I could. I did not know, you see, what you were to be.’

He lifted her fingers, and looking at her, kissed them. ‘With the Dame de Doubtance to blame,’ her son said, ‘you are absolved of all responsibility.… My dear, there is no blame, where there lives a passion like that: do we not know it? Rest at peace. We are your children; and we love you.’

*

Much later, when they had left her, she sat in her room and saw beneath her door the lights blazing from the wide oaken porch to the music room.

She did not know when they found their way there; and at first the music she heard was only tentative. A harp sang, and then someone picked out a low, gentle tune on the harpsichord. And through it all their voices murmured, talking and talking.

Then, at some point, what they learned must have been put behind them. She heard her son’s voice lilting in some mimicry, and Philippa’s laughing, and then more laughter, and their voices declaiming together. Then the harpsichord found its major habit and suddenly spoke, firmly and well, and a lute joined in, and was discarded for the guitar, cleanly executed. Then the music mounted, and altered.

Sitting still in the dark, Sybilla listened to the condition of love, transmuted into brilliant sound, rolling, surging, ringing through all the quiet house. And then her son’s voice, formally speaking:

‘So cler and so light hit wes, that joye ther was ynough. Treon ther were, ful of frut, wel thikke on everich bough. Hit was evere more dai, hi ne fonde nevere nyght; Hi ne wende fynde in no stede so moch cler light …’

In the bright room, had she seen him, he was sitting, his arms leaning on the harpsichord, looking at Philippa. He got up.

‘I love you. I love you …’

There was a broad praying stool at his side. He saw it, and smiling knelt, and held his palms up to Philippa. And she, kneeling opposite, closed them, palm to palm, with her own.

‘Camille de Doubtance, and whoever may be your master …

‘We are here. We will work together for what purpose seems to us right. We will work with calm, and with tolerance and, please God, with saving laughter.

‘We know something of men. We know of evil, and of sloth, and of self-seeking ambition. We accept it, and will use what we have of wit and good faith to overcome it.

‘And if we do not overcome it, still we are the road; we are the bridge; we are the conduit. For something have we been born. For something have we been brought here. And if we hold firm, the men who peopled our earth need not be ashamed, when the reckoning comes, to say,
we worked with all we had been given; and for one another.
’

He closed her hands with his own and spoke to her, holding them.

‘We have reached the open sea, with some charts; and the firmament.’

28 February 1974
EDINBURGH

“The finest living writer of historical fiction.”
—Washington Post Book World

THE GAME OF KINGS

Dorothy Dunnett introduces her irresistible hero Francis Crawford of Lymond, a nobleman of elastic morals and dangerous talents whose tongue is as sharp as his rapier. In 1547 Lymond returns to defend his native Scotland from the English, despite accusations of treason against him. Hunted by friend and enemy alike, he leads a company of outlaws in a desperate race to redeem his reputation.

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QUEENS’ PLAY

Once an accused traitor, now a valued agent of Scottish diplomacy, Lymond is sent to France, where a very young Queen Mary Stuart is sorely in need of his protection. Disguised as a disreputable Irish scholar, Lymond insinuates himself into the glittering labyrinth of the French court, where every courtier is a conspirator and the art of assassination is paramount.

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THE DISORDERLY KNIGHTS

Through machinations in England and abroad, Lymond is dispatched to Malta, to assist the Knights Hospitallers in the island’s defense against Turkish corsairs. But he shortly discovers that the greatest threat to the knights lies within their own ranks. In a narrative that sweeps from the besieged fortress of Tripoli to the steps of Edinburgh’s St. Giles Cathedral, Lymond matches wits and swords against an elusive villain.

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PAWN IN FRANKINCENSE

Lymond cuts a desperate path across the Ottoman empire of Suleiman the Magnificent in search of a kidnapped child, an effort that may place this adventurer in the power of his enemies. What ensues is a subtle and savage chess game whose gambits include treachery, enslavement, and torture and whose final move compels Lymond to face the darkest ambiguities of his own nature.

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THE RINGED CASTLE

Between Mary Tudor’s England and the Russia of Ivan the Terrible lies a vast distance indeed, but forces within the Tudor court impel Lymond to Muscovy, where he becomes advisor and general to the half-mad tsar. In this barbaric land, Lymond finds his gifts for intrigue and survival tested to the breaking point, yet these dangers are nothing beside those of England, where Lymond’s oldest enemies are conspiring against him.

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CHECKMATE

Francis Crawford returns to France to lead an army against England. But even as the soldier scholar succeeds brilliantly on the battlefield, his haunted past becomes a subject of intense interest to forces in both the French and English courts. For whoever knows the secret of Lymond’s parentage possesses the power to control him—or destroy him.

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