Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  A fact which Marthe just now should have remembered. She had set out to attack and had been cut down without mercy, and without care for who else besides Marthe might suffer.

  He had always known, Jerott supposed, that Marthe had been close, long ago, to Lymond’s mistress. He knew no other man who, in cold blood, would have made that threat, or who would have carried it out as Lymond would, ignoring every instinct of decency.

  He shivered. The cold was beginning to penetrate. Against the cressets under the archways the rain spangled the darkness like the wild silver threads of horse-harness: as from the passing of heavy cavalry the wind buffeted his cheeks and his flanks and his sleeve-knots. His senses filled with the hiss of the rain, Jerott walked through the ghostly steam of its impact, and through a passage, and, mechanically, into the chain of large courtyards beyond it.

  Because of the rain each was empty even of servants. He had found the locked stables and turned, conscientiously, to explore the arcades which enclosed them when he noticed, not in shelter at all, the pale, shallow cup of the fountain.

  It was less symmetrical, in the sheen of the rain, than he remembered it. Then he saw that a man rested there on its steps, his head turned on the rim. One coatless arm, lying loose, pillowed it. The arcade lanterns, dimly exploring, found the darkened blond of soaked hair; the fixed flame of strung jewels and the line of wide brow and closed lid and turned cheekbone whose twin he saw, night after night, on his pillow.

  The rain fell. For a moment Jerott stood petrified. Then he ran for his life over the courtyard.

  Francis Crawford opened his eyes. ‘It’s all right,’ he said without moving. ‘The crucifix marque-vin. I’ve been as sick as a dog. I deserve to be, don’t you think? Poor, bloody Jerott, caught between bastards.’

  He gave a sudden, violent shiver and, lifting his head from the stone, pulled himself up to sit forward. His hands covered his face. He was so close that Jerott could see the vibration in him: a steady trembling, subdued as the purr of a tomcat.

  The effects, unpleasant but normal enough, of anger, and cold, and intemperance. For which Francis Crawford had himself only to blame. Himself and Marthe.

  The rain beat Lymond’s darkened hair into his hands and the barmi produced Russian arpeggios of emerald fire, keyed to all the irregular gusts of his breathing. Beneath his hands, his lips were parted.

  Jerott’s anger vanished. He placed his palm on the other man’s shoulder. The sleeve and the flesh under it were both badly chilled. ‘Come in,’ he said. ‘You can use Adam’s rooms.’ His hand, moving upwards, drew the fair, tangled hair clear of Lymond’s eyes and checked, at the shudder that ran jarring through from his fingertips.

  Lymond dropped his hands. He made no protest. He did not look up. But unimpeded at last, Jerott could see the look on his face and give it, sickeningly, its correct interpretation.

  ‘Oh God in heaven,’ said Jerott Blyth. ‘You bloody, arrogant fool …’ He sat back suddenly. His own arm, supporting him, was unsteady. ‘Why didn’t you accept Piero’s offer?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Lymond said. It was not easy to hear him.

  ‘You ought to know!’ said Jerott wildly. ‘You’re not a priest. You fight. You live on your nerves as we all do. Then you can’t touch a girl, in case you leave your senses and take her. Is that what happened?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Lymond said. ‘It might have bound me to her for life. It was what Marthe wanted. No light fame shalt thou carry to thy father’s ghosts …’

  ‘What?’ said Jerott.

  ‘… to have fallen under the weapon of Camilla.’

  He didn’t explain. His lids were fringed like a girl’s. His tapering fingers, without defences, lay within touching distance. Jerott Blyth, rising to his knees and then to his feet, said, ‘Come quickly. I can get you a woman.’

  ‘If you know of a woman,’ Lymond said, ‘then go to her. What I want I can find for myself. You might perhaps, when you go, send for Archie.’

  ‘Sir?’ said a voice, uncannily apt, in the darkness. Jerott turned.

  ‘My lord count? Mr Crawford? M. de Sevigny?’

  ‘All of these,’ said Lymond dryly. He was shivering still. But he was also trying, Jerott saw, to collect himself. Jerott Blyth hesitated. Then he offered, leaning, an arm, and Lymond took it and stood, as the moving figure neared in the darkness.

  It was Archie Abernethy, cloaked and half-dressed as when he had been roused at the Hôtel St André. He said, ‘What’s amiss?’ sharply.

  ‘Drink,’ said Lymond impartially. ‘The cutthroat of so many men’s lives, and the robber of purses. I have been compelled to render my gorge. I have recovered. What is your difficulty?’

  Archie said, ‘Is that true?’ and Jerott answered his thought.

  ‘Yes. Nothing else happened. How did you know we were here?’

  ‘Mr Blacklock. He was worried,’ said Archie uncompromisingly. And to Lymond: ‘I’ve ill news. Are ye fit for it?’

  ‘A death,’ said Francis Crawford. He had thrown off Jerott’s arm.

  You could see, in the darkness, the pity in the little man’s eyes.

  ‘Aye. It’s death,’ he said.

  ‘Then tell me,’ said Lymond. ‘Now, and quickly.’ The trembling had wholly stopped.

  The black eyes of Archie fixed themselves on him in return. ‘Your mother and brother,’ he said. ‘Their ship has foundered.’

  There was a little silence, during which Lymond made no movement. Then he said again, ‘Tell me.’ The amber hair, like the hair of the new born, streaked and coiled round his temples.

  Archie said, ‘They came from the Forth in a fleet of small ships with the other Commissioners. The wind drove the vessels apart: they put into whatever safe harbour they came to. Two of them made for Boulogne, but never got there.’

  He stopped. Lymond said, ‘If you go on, you will be finished the sooner.’

  Jerott turned his head away. Archie did go on, and his voice, if a little hoarse, was quite level. ‘They went to the bottom, crew, passengers, horses, clothes, gifts for the bride on her wedding. They say two men only were rescued by fishermen, and these two were an Earl and a Bishop. The survivors have gone to Dieppe. The King wants the welcoming party to ride to Dieppe in the morning.’

  His voice ceased. Jerott said nothing. For a little while Francis Crawford stood unseeing and dumb in the darkness, the icy rain whipping his doublet. Then he said, ‘I shall set out now. The others can follow.’

  Jerott exclaimed, shrewish in his anxiety. ‘Damn that. Four hours’ sleep won’t hurt you—or them, for that matter.’

  But Lymond shook his head and moving suddenly, left the steps and then, walking steadily, the shining circle of lamplight.

  Jerott leaped to follow. He had taken the first stride after when Archie’s arm, hard as a mattock, barred his stomach, and Archie’s lightless black eyes snapped at him.

  ‘What d’ye fear? If ever man valued his life now, it’s that one. He has to get to Dieppe. He has to find if there is none left of his name but those fatherless bairns home in Scotland. And he has to decide … man, he has to decide what to do about it.’

  Chapter 3

  Des deux duelles, l’un percera le fiel:

  Hay de lui, bien ayme de sa mere.

  In a trance of fatigue, he would have ridden the hundred miles to Dieppe by post-stage as he was, had nothing prevented him. But, moving into the house from the rain, he found the bright lights of Marthe’s empty parlour unbearably dazzling, a familiar phenomenon; and the smell of the spilt scent revolted him.

  Neither fact augured well for a journey. He wished to be certain at least of completing it. So he let common sense and Archie prevail, and assumed dry clothes and occupied Adam’s bed for thirty meticulous minutes while Archie packed saddlebags and an escort was arranged, and money, and a warrant for post-horses.

  At the end of that time, Archie came back and questioned him curtly. ‘Mr Blyth said ye were sick. How sic
k?’

  ‘Very,’ said Lymond. There was a bowl of soup in Archie’s hands.

  Archie said, ‘We can leave as soon as you like.’

  ‘We?’ said Francis Crawford.

  ‘You and I,’ Archie said.

  With a delicacy he had not expected, Jerott and Danny and Adam were not going to ride north, supporting him. Archie waited, and then said, ‘You’ll feel better, a bit, when you’ve a bite taken.’

  *

  He made the journey to Dieppe without resting, except to change horses. Half-way there, his escort began to fall back, and then as fresh mounts became hard to come by, to slow him down quite considerably. One man came to grief on the highway. There seemed no point in compelling six other people to face the mud, the wet snow, the uneven road and the darkness to no purpose. At the next post-station he sent them all home and continued unaccompanied, with Archie.

  And that, since it removed a distraction, was an error. One could not talk, but one could think, during the long thudding canters over invisible plains with a sleety wind scoring the face and freezing the hands in their glove-leather. And when the pace slackened, at once he would be aware of the galling fatigue of the saddle, and the growing strain on his shoulders and fore-arms. The post-houses knew who he was. Every fresh horse was strong, and restive and eager.

  On stretches such as these, Archie’s hands on his reins would sometimes check him; and then, in the lee of a chalk quarry or a tangle of weather-torn bushes the little trainer would pull out aquavite, and a handful of raisins. But the aquavite made him sick, and Archie, when he found out, stopped giving it to him.

  Then they began to pass lighted cottages, and laden wains emerging from farmyards, and cattle, plodding in to their milking. The sky paled. Over Calais; over Boulogne the new day came spreading: by the time they were in the waterlogged fault of the Bray valley, it was quite light. They had been riding at gallop or at canter, for six continuous hours.

  To Francis Crawford the rest of the journey was never quite clear in his memory. The wet snow had stopped, leaving a landscape dense and spidery with thin rails of leafless trees, their spars floating and weaving in the cascading grey air. A flock of short, stocky birds rose once, wheeling, blackening, wheeling, and caused his horse, racing flat out, to curvet. He crossed what seemed to be endless undulating chalk fields with the same grey web of trees smudged with mist on the skyline.

  Then his horse stumbled again, and very soon after that, they saw the hooded thatch of the next posting station, and there was a brief interval of noise and warmth and the reek of horse-sweat and steaming clothes and hot tallow and of fish, from the wicker carts with their two powerful horses on their way to take herring to Paris.

  He left the crowded room abruptly when he had only been there for five minutes, and waited for the fresh horses in the squelching cold of the bustling yard. Archie said, when he came out, ‘These will take us to Dieppe. But there’s no sense in killing them.’

  It was the only mention of restraint that he had made, from beginning to end. Jerott had tried to stop him, but not the others. The others remembered another shipwreck, only fifteen months ago in Scotland, when Richard his brother had ridden like this to come to him, but not so far, and in the knowledge, of course, that he was living.

  He and Richard had met on the strand at Philorth and like the sand under their feet, all the muddled solicitude which had prompted that journey had in five minutes dispersed through their fingers. Richard, believing him to have come home at last to his responsibilities, had been outraged and wounded to discover that his plans were to leave Scotland for ever. And he had been as careful as he knew how to be, but it had not been enough because he too had been hurt, by a loss he could afford less than Richard. In the wreck had died Diccon Chancellor the English navigator, who had been more than half-way towards becoming the friend he had never quite managed to find and keep, in terms of equality, except sometimes, in passing, with women.

  He had thought sometimes to recognize the same affinity with Richard, but circumstances and, he supposed, his own nature were always against it. And of the women, two had died and he had cut himself off from the other.

  ‘This is the Chalk Hill,’ said Archie. ‘And there’s the gate of Dieppe. What do you want to do?’

  Below them, running through its cold swamps, was the River Arques with the walled and moated town of Dieppe on its left bank. On the chalky cliffs to the west of the town the blue-capped towers of the castle and citadel stood clear against the grey sky and grey sea beyond: the sea which washed the shores of both England and France, and had become a moat and a graveyard for both.

  Lymond said, ‘The captain of the gate will know where the Commissioners are. I shall go there first, and then join you up at the Castle.’

  He had not realized until he turned then and looked at him, how tired Archie was. The lines in his dark cheeks were deep as knifed clay, and his black eyes were reddened and sunk under the close leather helmet he wore like a turban.

  Lymond said, ‘A brother, whether I have one or not, could not have done more.’

  Then, before Archie could try to answer, he touched spurs to his worn, steaming horse and plunged downhill to the Porte de la Barre drawbridge.

  *

  The captain of the ward knew him, and was flustered by his lack of retinue and the forewarning which was expected on the arrival of a great lord, a King’s officer and a Chevalier of the Order to the King’s loyal town of Dieppe. It took a few moments of sickening patience to put that right; then Lymond asked his question.

  The captain turned up his eyes. The town was full of Scotsmen. He couldn’t tell how many each Commissioner had brought with them. And all arriving at different times, some by boat, some by road according to where the weather had landed them.

  Yes, he had heard two ships had been wrecked off Boulogne. A fishing boat had brought along the survivors that morning. A man called Rotisse and a man called Rit, he had been told, both Commissioners. The servants had not known how to swim.

  He did not know if there had been anyone else in the fishing boat. He had been on duty since dawn, and was only going by hearsay. The principal guests at any rate were in the big house. La Pensée, the house of the late Jean Ango. Monseigneur knew it. Monseigneur had stayed in it before.

  He had, in December with d’Andelot. And long, long ago with Tom Erskine, who had married the Fleming girl’s sister, and died also, in Scotland.

  ‘I shall go there,’ said Lymond. ‘Without escort. They know me.’

  He had to push his way through the market place at the Puits Sale and steer his horse through the crowds in the Grand’ Rue. The town was full of Scotsmen. But then, it always was, what with resident merchants and refugees, and fishermen and the ships of both countries carrying wine and hides and letters and practising a little piracy on the side. Speak Scots in Dieppe and anyone could understand you. Knox had been there most of last autumn, and no one had troubled him. At times it was more foreign than French.

  Someone in Kennedy livery went by and he almost called to him, and then turned and went on picking his way. After ten hours, one should have patience. And he did not want to accept this, his final loss, in the open market-place.

  Then … here, enclosing the great terraces and the riverside gardens, was the wall he had once swung over, masked on a summer night. And there, gleaming through the bare trees, the fountains and statues.

  Masterless and directionless after the harsh years of outlawry, he had celebrated his freedom six years ago in ways he preferred not to remember. But it would be reflected in the faces of eight Scottish lords he was about to meet: two earls, two barons; two officers of the Church and two civic leaders, all chosen with care by Mary of Lorraine, Queen Dowager of Scotland, to complete the contracts and attend the wedding of her one living child Mary to the Dauphin of France.

  He knew who they were. He also knew their political and spiritual aspirations. Five of them were of the orthodox religion
. The rest were not. The Queen Dowager of Scotland had sent to her brothers de Guise three of the foremost sympathizers of the Reformed Religion in Scotland. As wedding guests they might seem incongruous, but there was much that was practical in the idea. It freed the Dowager of their presence for several months, and offered her brothers an opportunity to bribe or convert them. It remained to wonder why Richard, of baronial rank and no fiery beliefs, had been included, and Sybilla his mother along with him.

  You might think it a mother’s natural wish to send to her daughter’s marriage a noble and elderly lady who had cared for the child in her infancy. You might also think that the Duke de Guise wished Francis Crawford to leave for Scotland, and had suggested this as a means of encouraging him.

  In which case, it was a pity for the Duke de Guise that the crossing had been so stormy. Or, on the other hand, perhaps the plan of monseigneur mon oncle was going to succeed better even than the Duke had cause to hope.

  He touched up his horse and rode up to the gates, which stood already ajar, held by two liveried keepers. The outer yard was swarming with people, and through the archway he could see one of the Scottish heralds running forward, struggling into his tabard, and behind him a hurrying gentleman in a good furred coat who looked like the maître d’hôtel.

  The captain of the Porte de la Barre had known better than to let a Chevalier of the Order and a victor of Calais arrive unannounced at the house of Jean Ango. Someone, running by a faster route than his, had roused the household.

  The herald was Alec Ross. He had his tabard on by the time Lymond dismounted, had walked through the line of servants into the archway and there paused, to hear his formal welcome. He saw, without looking, that shutters were open everywhere and windows crowded. The maître d’hotel added a few formal phrases and a succession of apologies. The sieur de Fors had not expected their lordships to come from Paris until Sunday. At that very moment, the Lieutenant-Governor was entertaining the Commissioners and their train to a banquet at the Écu de France … a modified banquet, of course, in view of the sad bereavements which the Commission had recently suffered.…