Checkmate

  Lymond said, ‘And that is your only excuse?’

  And Sybilla met his gaze with eyes as uncompromising as his own. ‘I thought I was the excuse for your whole way of life?’ she said calmly.

  And nothing had prepared him for that.

  After a space he said, ‘And who do you blame for your mistakes? Isabelle’s master?’

  ‘That’s enough,’ Richard said. You could tell from his face that the allusion defeated him. His touchstone was the colour of Sybilla’s face.

  Sybilla said, ‘I told you that you had all the weapons. Were we two other people, you would proceed to use them, and I should restrain and placate you in every way possible.’

  ‘… But we are two other people,’ Lymond said. ‘Aren’t we?’

  There was a little pause. Then Sybilla said, ‘What you are, I am waiting for you to show me.’

  Richard’s angry grey eyes … honest grey eyes … were looking at him. Sybilla was not watching. He supposed she knew that however near he might tread to the crevasse, he did not mean to fall in, and drag Richard with him. Instinct had been right, when last year he had fled such a confrontation. As no living soul could hurt him, Sybilla could.

  ‘What I am?’ he said. He laughed. ‘Don’t wait. Ask anyone in London, or Malta, or Russia.’ He made his way to the casement and flung it open. The rumour of a crowd, muffled hitherto by the windowpanes, burst fresh upon them. The courtyard and the road beyond the gardens were jostling with people, and the name they were calling was audible: Sevigny. Sevigny. Sevigny.

  ‘Or ask them,’ Lymond said. ‘I have no concern with Midculter. It has its own master and mistress. And if it did not, I should still have no concern. If Richard dies of an apoplexy, you should find a good steward and marry him.’

  ‘Then why,’ said Sybilla, ‘did you come here today?’ Sevigny! came the noise from the courtyard.

  He closed the window. In the swirl of air the candle flames fluttered and guttered. He walked to the door in the silence and turned, his hand on the post.

  ‘I told you,’ he said, ‘I had a sense, I believe, of indebtedness. But someone trussed it in black felt and kicked it to death, as the Turks do.’

  He looked at Richard. ‘I am glad you are safe. If you wish any help before Sunday, I shall be at the Castle with M. de Fors. I don’t imagine there is anything personal we need to discuss after this, either during your visit or later. On behalf of his Most Christian Majesty, we shall attempt to make your stay in France a pleasant one.’

  Neither replied. He closed the door and found a servant a short way off who brought him to the maître d’hôtel and his horse.

  Ross Herald was there also, anxious to be of assistance. ‘I hear the banquet is nearly over. The Commissioners’ll be fashed tae have missed you. But you saw the Earl and his mother.’

  The noise was all round them by this time, but somehow, he caught it. Lymond turned. He said, ‘I saw Lord Culter. Has he … has his title by some chance been altered?’

  ‘God save us!’ said Alec Ross, and talked fluently for three unbroken minutes.

  Lymond listened, focusing his attention with infinite trouble. Just before leaving Scotland, his brother had been given the Crown lands adjoining Midculter and the barony had been raised to an earldom. Richard was now in rank the first Earl of Culter, although neither he nor Sybilla had mentioned it.

  So that Alec Ross had not intentionally misled him. Nor had Sybilla. She had merely discovered that he thought Richard dead, and had continued to let him believe it. I thought I was the excuse for your whole way of life, she had said to him. Her ripostes, on the whole, had been more successful than his.

  Or perhaps she, too, was feeling like this.

  Alec Ross said, ‘You see, the word has got round that you’re here. You could go by the back ways, my lord, but it’d be a pity to disappoint them. There’s an escort from the household waiting.’

  There was, in the livery of the corps de garde of the town, and already mounted. Ross was right. For the sake of the Commissioners, if not for himself, he would have to make the short ride across the town publicly. A fresh horse, a little restive with the uproar, stood awaiting him. They had even brushed his heavy coat, soaked with the long overnight journey. It was a day and a night since he and Piero Strozzi had tried to rescue the Hôtel de Ville’s hilarious victory feast and since, in Philippa’s presence, he had forced Marthe to do what he wanted by the only means at his disposal.

  He had better make the ride. One could not outrage everyone: spurn every overture; deny every generous emotion. He had discovered that, if nothing else, before he left Russia.

  Dunbar, on his heid-ake:

  My heid did yak yester nicht

  This day to mak that I na micht …

  Not everyone was in the narrow streets. Men were about their business, whether it was fishing or privateering, or laying the keel of a new vessel over the river, or drawing an old into harbour, trudging rope over shoulder as the tall masts slid upriver behind it. Work did not stop in the potteries, or the kilns, or the brew houses; or in the yards where, thickly gasping, the rape oil coiled in black reeking boilers.

  But there were many who did come to the doors, wiping their hands: the sailmaker; the carpenter with his astrolabe, the women with lace in their hands and flax caught on the nap of their aprons.

  So sair the magryme dois me menyie,

  Perseing my brow as ony ganyie …

  The skinners came out, and the Dutch cask-makers laid down their hatchets, and the merchants emerged, with the men who carved whalebone and ivory. And since the catch was already salted, or packed off cold in its seaweed, the fish dealers came and stood on the chill puddled stones with the women and children, to look at the lord who had saved Calais—Paris—all the fine ships and brave men of Normandy from their second occupation by the English. And from the windows of the tall wooden houses, they leaned out and shouted, with cheerful approval, his surname.

  That scant luik may on the licht.

  The mare they had lent him was playful. She passaged, her ears pricked out of the gateway, and before she had travelled ten yards had called into play, inevitably, all his already overtaxed sinews.

  Further on, it was more than a matter of extreme discomfort. The crowds along the Grand’ Rue were much thicker, with a good deal of pushing and jostling. His guard broke ranks, struggling to keep with him. A group of white-capped, red-cheeked girls threw down a spray of evergreen from a window, and as he glanced up, cap in hand, his horse jarred back on her haunches, hooves clattering. He controlled her; and again, when a group of boys ran forward from an arched tunnel stacked high with oyster-boxes. The odour of shellfish clung in the air, with the reek of warm oil and resin and the fumes, sunk into clay and timber and grey, salty stone, of the herring slung, russet-shot, over their beech smoke. It lay thick in his throat as the mare heaved, and sidled beneath him.

  His name reverberated. The overhanging storeys, closing off the free air, gave back the squeals and the shouting, the clack of sticks and the beating of hands, the carillons of a bell-truss and the hiccoughing roar, over and over, of iron rods raked up and down shutters.

  Full oft at morrow I upryse,

  Quhen that my curage sleipeing lyis …

  He acknowledged it all, as he was well accustomed to do. He was a professional, and it was part of his performance. If, in the future, he should require the services of these Dieppois burghers, he would depend on their image of him here this morning.

  It would not, however, embellish that image if his horse were to kill somebody, or escape his charge or in any other way betray what were, at this moment, his very real weaknesses.

  For mirth, for menstrallie and play,

  For din nor danceing nor deray …

  He had passed the Hôtel de Ville whose doors stood open: the banquet then must be over. Saluting, his eyes sweeping the crowd, he looked for a face he might know and thought he saw one: that of a woman. The next moment, push
ed aside by the crowd, it had vanished. The mare curvetted and he did what he could, with his whip and spurs, while the din fluctuated, swimmingly artificial, like the vertigo which ever since Sybilla’s onslaught had assailed him.

  It will nocht walkind me no wise.

  Since endurance and perserverance are also virtues of the military, he employed them until, sooner than he had expected, it became quite certain that whatever happened, the rest of the ride was beyond him. He said to the captain of his escort, ‘Your pardon, mon capitaine. I wish to pause here at the church of St Jacques.’

  A worthy, if unexpected change of plan. It took longer than he had hoped to clear a new route to his left, and a forward surge of the crowd meanwhile broke through the ranks of his escort and brought them, plucking, pulling and calling, to his stirrups.

  He felt the mare quiver and knew, if she reared, that he could not hold her. Then from the tower of St Jacques, the voice of the bell called la Catherine pitched through the screams with the first of her summons to worship. At the first clang, his mare ripped the reins from his fingers.

  He saw the whites of her eyes, and felt her muscles bunch. She didn’t rear. Nor did she strike with her hooves, or dislodge him. She stood, trembling but still, her reins dangling, with two liveried stablemen holding her.

  And at his own knee was their master: a clear-skinned bearded young man in a furred coat who said, pleasantly dictorial, ‘I am sure, Mr Crawford, that the Lieutenant-Governor would forgive two well-meaning Scots Commisioners if we delayed your return to the castle. We are with friends in a house over yonder. Will you join us?’

  Members of reigning houses have no need to introduce themselves. This was Lord James Stewart, the Scots Queen’s half-brother; and his uplifted hand, discreetly steadying, proved that Lord James was not in the right place by accident.

  If he was going to be ill, as he was, almost immediately, it might as well be under royal auspices. Lymond said, ‘I gather we share the acquaintance of a lady named Martine. Thank you.’

  Someone with apparent authority moved forward and spoke to his escort. A pair of double doors opened and closed behind him and his mare was brought to a halt in the peace of a small, silent courtyard. He left the saddle with what seemed to be a great deal of expert assistance.

  ‘I should be obliged,’ said Lymond, ‘if you would take that horse off and shoot it.’

  He had understood he was going to be sick. It was much to his surprise therefore, that before they could help him, he fainted.

  Chapter 4

  La verge en main mise au milieu de branches

  De l’onde il mouille et le limbe et le pied

  Un peur et voix fremissent par les manches

  Splendeur divine, Le Divin près s’assied.

  Philippa, who was rarely favoured with the more dramatic ailments of this world, had a head cold of historic virulence.

  It assailed her the morning after Francis … Mr Crawford had proposed in public to catalogue the bodily features of his Russian mistress; and by the time she reported for duty had thickened into a turgid, throat-rasping affair which recalled all Gideon used to say, cheerfully, about avoiding claret if your name began with a letter of the alphabet. Madame de Brêne quite rightly turned her away from the little Queen’s chamber, and she returned to blow her nose in her room, where Adam Blacklock presently found her.

  He, too, was pale, presumably from Marthe’s wine and not the Hôtel de Ville claret, and the hesitations both in his walk and his speech were more marked than she had seen them recently. He spoke politely to Célie, who let him in and then retired to the window with her sewing. Then, crossing the room, he said without any preamble, ‘Philippa. Have you heard any news yet this morning?’

  Francis … Mr Crawford, she thought. No. Madame de Brêne would have told her. Not Kate, either: that would have to come to her direct. Then someone else from the Séjour du Roi: Marthe? Jerott? Danny? Or Austin …?

  To her extreme irritation Adam, a diffident man, was still standing looking at her. She said, ‘I haven’t heard any news. I’ve got a cold. Out of his Nois the meldrop fast can rin. What news do you have? I’d prefer something soothing.’

  ‘Francis has gone to Dieppe,’ Adam said. ‘He left last night, after a false report that his mother and brother had drowned.’

  Because he was kind, he had put it clearly. But still she said, ‘False?’ And then, when he nodded, ‘And you have sent someone after Mr Crawford to tell him?’

  ‘It was too late,’ Adam said. ‘He will find them at Dieppe with the other Commissioners.’

  Last night, distressed and exhausted, she had been granted at least rest and privacy. While Francis, his condition no better than hers, had taken to the road, with that news for company. And at the end of it, Sybilla. And Richard.

  She remembered, looking at Adam, that he knew all about that. The elderly maid had her head bowed. Philippa said, ‘The shock might mend affairs between them. Surely, when they see him, they’ll be careful.’

  Adam said, ‘If he is tired, and they put a foot wrong, he will choose the one unmentionable response and make it. He did it last night. I don’t know if you or Austin can forgive him. Marthe never will.’

  Philippa sat down. ‘Marthe’s troubles can wait. Tell me what you are afraid of?’

  Adam sat down also, his face drawn in the cold light. He also, one would guess, had slept very little last night. He said, ‘So far, Richard knows nothing of Marthe. I know, from what Jerott has dropped, that you’ve been searching into … her birth and her background. I can think of nothing more tragic than that Francis should … that there should be a confrontation.’

  ‘There won’t be,’ Philippa said.

  Adam glanced over his shoulder and then returned his eyes to her face. ‘How can you be sure? Philippa, would you go to Dieppe?’

  She had guessed it was coming. ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Why not?’ The thin scar, as always when he was anxious, lay starkly over his face.

  She didn’t glance, as he had done, to her woman. She said, ‘You heard Marthe. To have me there would only add to his burdens. By now the damage will have been done, or they will be reconciled. And I trust his ultimate good sense more than you do. Richard will never hear of Marthe through him, or anything else that discredits the family. Is Jerott worried?’

  ‘Jerott doesn’t know I am here,’ Adam said. ‘The last thing he wants is to see you in Francis’s company. You know that.’

  ‘In case I become corrupted. Jerott and I wish the same thing, for different reasons,’ Philippa said. ‘But you don’t object to throwing Mr Crawford and myself together?’

  ‘I know your upbringing,’ Adam said. ‘And I know something else. Francis has his divorce and his freedom in prospect, but the headaches have come back. Archie was worried last night. Philippa, this family business has to be laid bare and thrashed out with Sybilla. Not before Richard in a storm of stripped nerves, but with Sybilla, in calm and in privacy.’

  ‘He won’t,’ Philippa said. ‘And I can’t help. I don’t know the truth and I can’t see any way of finding it. I think F … Francis has reached it by guesswork and it is quite unacceptable. All I can suggest is that with time, the unacceptable usually becomes accepted.’

  ‘We haven’t got time,’ Adam said.

  The blood left her heated face. She said, keeping her voice steady, ‘You spoke only of headaches at Christmas.’ And knew from his face that, like herself, he was recalling London.

  He said quickly, ‘That is all it is. He has nothing worse than headaches, Philippa; although God knows they are annihilating enough. No. I meant … He will leave for Russia.’

  His eyes were level and anxious. The woman in the windowseat looked up. Philippa said, ‘I can only think of one thing that would do any good, and that is to prove or disprove what he has found out about Sybilla.’

  ‘You said you couldn’t,’ said Adam.

  ‘So the impossible has to become the poss
ible as well,’ she said. ‘Adam, can you …?’

  ‘We watch him,’ Adam said. ‘We watch him all the time, and Archie is with him. The other thing he needs is someone … anyone at all … to lift some of the strain.’

  It was, of course, the conclusion that she and Marthe had already reached. ‘You mean, to sleep with? I don’t think,’ said Philippa, ‘that professional ladies are adequate. The trouble is, he doesn’t seem to have considered Catherine. In any case, she might well hold out for marriage.’

  A faint smile, for the first time, crossed Adam’s perplexed face. ‘Wise girl,’ he said. ‘But you know, I don’t think we can wait till April.’

  ‘No. Then I think,’ said Philippa, ‘I had better have a word with her mother. The Vidame is very engaging and I’m sure Condé is delightful but really, at this moment we want something quieter … What on earth are you laughing at?’

  ‘You,’ said Adam. ‘Are you as objective about Austin?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said simply. ‘Don’t you think we should suit one another?’

  ‘Philippa, I can’t think of anyone you wouldn’t suit,’ Adam said. ‘It depends what, in return, they can offer.’

  ‘I see that. But love, you know,’ Philippa said, ‘is a very considerable inducement.’

  *

  She had dinner in her room after Adam had gone and later sallied forth, laden with handkerchiefs, to seek the Maréchale de St André. From there she walked the short distance, in extreme cold, to the rue Marie-Egyptienne, passing the Séjour du Roi as she crossed into Montmartre from the old wall’s turreted gate towers.

  She did not stop, because Marthe was there, but her heart still sickened, remembering Austin.

  Adam, when she asked him, had been reassuring. ‘Unlike Francis, he never loses his good manners. He’s a gentleman, Philippa. Marthe should never have persuaded Jerott to bring him over. But he hasn’t once asked who Marthe is, or commented on her likeness to Francis.…