Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

‘It is a viewpoint,’ Lymond said. ‘I think that if she fails to produce a legal heir, she will make an alliance with Spain and try to take Scotland and England by force. But that is some distance away. At the moment both Spain and England are allied against France, and France is not going to risk having every Protestant in the country up in arms, as Jerott says, against the Queen Dowager; and in alliance with the Protestant faction, and eventually the Protestant monarch in England.

  ‘I think if you use this material, you will start a conflagration that will kill many thousands and may destroy Scotland more surely than a threat already hedged about with a fair number of contingencies. At least, before you talk to your fellows, will you give it grave thought? And I beg you, bind them to the most strict, the most rigorous secrecy. The pride and prestige of the de Guises all depend on this match being ratified.’

  ‘I understand,’ Richard said. He stood up. ‘I have to ask you again. How did you come by these papers?’

  Elsewhere in the household other people, less occupied, were sitting at supper. The faint, savoury smell of hot food entered the gallery and lingered there, mixed with the other scents of cloth and warm metal and sandalwood, the traces of incense; the fragrance of juniper from the fireplace. The afternoon sunlight falling through the long windows latticed the velvet hangings with their flowered coronets; argent, a chaplet proper, debruised by a fess azure, invected … the device of Sevigny.

  And the comte de Sevigny, without moving from where he stood in front of his brother, said, ‘They passed through four pairs of hands before they reached mine, and the person who started them on their way I can only guess at. There are many people who don’t like the de Guises. There are some who don’t want the Scottish wedding. I have had to take these papers on trust, because if I didn’t, the people who handled them would be cut off without compunction, and so would you. All I can say is that everything I know points to their being truthful copies of three genuine documents of State, and that the wording bears this out as well. I doubt if anyone outside the French secretariat would have framed them in quite such a way.’

  ‘I remember once,’ Richard said, ‘you made me march on Annan by telling me that I should go in the opposite direction. I have to think of my country, because I live in it. And I remember that the only other name I have heard shouted in the streets since I came, along with that of de Guise, has been your own.’

  He stood, a broad-built man of unshaken purpose and integrity, and said roughly, ‘You must excuse me if I malign you. But you preach inaction, and still show me those papers. I think you mean the Commissioners to stop the wedding in order to cripple the power of the de Guise family, regardless of whether these papers are true ones or not; and regardless of what destruction it might mean to Scotland.’

  ‘Wait a bit.’ Adam on his feet was not content to stand by any longer. ‘Francis made those points himself. You can’t have it both ways.’

  ‘My brother is a devious man,’ Richard said. He had not moved his eyes from Lymond’s face. ‘All the points that he made are valid ones, and all the conclusions he reached would have been reached sooner or later by one or other of the Commissioners. Whatever we do, he will receive credit for trying to stop it.’

  Jerott Blyth’s mouth opened. He said, ‘You silly fool, you think Francis wants to bring Scotland to butchery?’

  Lymond said, ‘I don’t think we want any testimonials, Jerott, or even any untoward language. Fortunately, it isn’t entirely in Richard’s hands. The Commissioners will decide what to do. Only, I beg you, watch your step. You are carrying gunpowder.’

  For whatever reason, Adam saw Culter suddenly flinch; and a moment later Lymond’s hands, unfolded, dropped to his sides. Then he said in his usual voice, ‘Perhaps you can start guarding me after you have paid a call on the Hôtel de l’Ange and conferred with your colleagues. I promise I shan’t leave the house. And this evening a room will be ready for you.’

  With some firmness he had drawn to a close a discussion no longer profitable to himself or to his brother. A moment later Culter had taken his leave coolly and gone, the papers folded inside his doublet.

  Standing at the glass, his elbows spread high on the casement ledge, his chin upheld by his interlaced knuckles, Lymond watched his brother’s progress through the courtyard. Behind him Adam said softly, ‘It was Danny who brought you those papers?’

  ‘Danny!’ said Jerott explosively.

  Lymond did not even turn. ‘No. It was not Danny,’ he said. ‘And even if Danny tries to suggest it was, I shall deny it, just as I shall deny this conversation took place today.… There he goes. What do you think he will do?’

  ‘What you want him to do,’ Adam said dryly. ‘Doesn’t he always?’

  ‘No’, Lymond said. ‘Does anyone—Jerott?—know a nice clean strumpet who doesn’t have the pox and will sleep in my room tonight to discourage Richard? She needn’t stay beyond half an hour, and I don’t want to meet her.’

  ‘And that’s a bloody waste,’ said Jerott belligerently.

  ‘And it’s going to stay a bloody waste,’ said Lymond tartly. ‘I want a little privacy, not to work up a joint reputation as Hophni and Phinehas.’

  He abandoned the window, and Adam saw his face and let his lips open.

  ‘Oh, quite,’ Lymond said. ‘Twice in two days. Once it becomes continuous, I suppose we shall have to tell Richard. Or he will be spending twenty-four hours of every day in my bedroom.’

  Then Adam remembered the reason for Richard’s vigil: the dragging out into daylight of something of which Lymond had never spoken. And he remembered also, with sudden, raw understanding, a small event of the previous night; when he had heard Francis, his head in his hands, apostrophizing himself mutinously:

  ‘Plus étroit que la vigne à l’ormeau se marie

  Du lien de tes mains, maîtresse, je te prye.

  Enlace-moy le corps, maîtresse …

  Enlace-moy le corps.

  ‘… You never married, Adam?’

  He had been startled. ‘No.’

  ‘Then don’t,’ Lymond had said, the words trailing through his muffling hands. ‘It makes for very … long nights.’

  So now Adam touched the comte de Sevigny’s arm and said, ‘Come. We shall see if Archie can make a short night for you.’

  Chapter 7

  De terre faible et pauvre parentele

  Par bout et paix parviendra dans l’empire

  Longtemps regner une jeune femele,

  Qu’oncq en regne n’en survint un si pire.

  At dawn on Sunday, April 24th, since no one had told them to the contrary, the Prévôt and magistrates of Paris rose, broke their fast, put on their robes of crimson and yellow satin and left for the Hôtel de Ville, there to muster at seven in the morning to prepare for the wedding of Monseigneur the Dauphin of France with the young Queen of Scotland. There was a tiff about precedence, which petered out as the air became warmer. It was dry underfoot.

  Long before dawn, Philippa Somerville, after a sleepless night, rose from her temporary bed in the Bishop’s Palace on the quayside behind Notre-Dame Cathedral, dressed in cloth of silver and proceeded with the other demoiselles of honour to the long task of preparing their mistress for her wedding. She too, like the magistrates of Paris, was unaware of anything which might impede the ceremony.

  She remembered, certainly, Richard Crawford returning grim-faced from his brother’s house, and the conference of Commissioners which had taken place behind locked doors with, one could hear, a good deal of dissent and even some shouting. What she remembered more clearly, however, was the childish and debasing restrictions Culter and Austin had suddenly placed on her liberty: the withdrawal of Célie and her replacement by a silent woman named, ridiculously, Euphemia, who dogged her every movement and slept in her chamber.

  These measures were to protect her, she was told, against Lymond. They also made sure, although no one said so, that she was unable to make any indecorous movements towards L
ymond herself. Richard had not spared her an account of the woman who had shared Lymond’s bedroom the previous night. He had also taken time, with a slow and bitter reluctance, to place before her the truth of his brother’s habit of life, as an outlaw in Scotland, and as a mignon of France six years before, practising all the sensual arts.

  She knew it all, since Lymond himself had told her: the reckless degradation for whatever motives, whose stain, like the mud of Paris, was indelible. Sybilla had not been in the room while Richard had talked of his brother. Throughout, ever since Austin’s outburst, Sybilla had said achingly little. Only from her stillness and the searching blue gaze which followed and rested on her constantly did Philippa guess that only now was she coming to realize, as perhaps few others did, the full dimensions of the doomed relationship between Philippa and her son Francis.

  For that, she had to thank Austin, who against all probability was fighting, where Catherine d’Albon had simply withdrawn. And withdrawn sorely hurt, as Philippa knew, although with a pride which would let her smile when Philippa went to see her and say, ‘I showed you your face in the mirror. It was not only the face of one who loves, but the face of one whose love is returned. I should rather, Philippa, marry where there is no love than marry and find love turn to jealousy. Don’t be sorry. This is a better way than any other.’

  And for her, perhaps it was. An heiress finds no shortage of suitors. Since rumour had carried abroad her own rupture with Austin, the four days before the wedding and coming annulment had been made feverishly miserable by the suffocating attentions of all those she had drawn within her circle and especially those, such as the Schiatti cousins, to whom she owed an obligation.

  And worse than this, day by day, was the fact that no word reached her from Leonard Bailey; that perhaps no message would ever reach her. Perhaps he had chosen instead to favour John Elder and the Lennoxes, not herself, with the proof of Sybilla’s infidelity. Perhaps he had already sent Elder the papers and Elder was moving, smiling and chatting about the royal household, awaiting only his moment to reveal them.

  Daily, in those four days of chaos and ritual, she had seen Francis distantly, acting his rôle; and daily had noted the changes in him. The message from Leonard Bailey had become, by that Sunday morning, the most important thing in Philippa’s life; the most feared and the most hoped for.

  There are two things you desire, the astrologers had once told Francis Crawford. The first you will have. The second you shall never have, nor would it be just that you should.

  It might not be just. But this wish at least she might fulfil for him.

  *

  The Commissioners for Scotland, chosen by Scotland to decorate the marriage and fortify it with Scottish authority, dressed in the Hôtel de l’Ange and left early for the Episcopal Palace on horseback. The Earl of Culter, who for four days had stayed at the Hôtel d’Hercule with his brother, joined them on the way.

  At the Séjour du Roi, Jerott, Adam and Danny, expensively dressed, prepared to leave and take their places in the Cathedral. Danny, who had spent a number of exhausting days attending to his work, analysing a lady called Marthe and baulking every fitful step taken by the Dowager Lady Culter in the direction of the Petit Arsenal, looked, as usual, like a spindle of bobbles and fringe from the fripperer’s.

  Jerott, with the physique of a Knight of St John and a shrewder eye than most for a good length of tanné velvet, looked little short of magnificent. Under the constant, brutal demands of Lymond’s sovereignty, he was learning to forget Marthe and the bottle. Adam, soberly dressed, had not had the heart for Jerott’s bitter exuberance. He, like the others, had been present when the Commissioners had come to question Lymond; had heard Lymond obstruct every effort to discover the source of the copy, and had then heard the subsequent debate, chaired with incision by Orkney, in which the conclusion that Lymond urged was finally reached: to do nothing: to allow the marriage to proceed, and to act thereafter as the climate of the French court and their own diplomacy would dictate.

  It was, as Lymond’s exposition had been, a triumph of common sense over emotion, but it was not reached without the airing of harshly opposing views; a venting of small sudden flares which betrayed to the onlooker how uncertain was the ground on which they walked, and how hot the fires beneath. By the Treaty of Haddington ten years before, the Three Estates which comprised the Scottish Parliament had promised that their Sovereign lady should be married with the Dauphin at her perfect age, so that the King of France kept, maintained and defended that realm, the lieges of the same and the liberties and law thereof as he did his own realm of France.

  This for ten years France had done. The marriage was due, and Scotland was bound to it. In black and white they had also the agreement of the King of France to the Estates’ stipulation: should the Queen of Scotland die without heirs, the righteous blood of the crown of Scotland should succeed without impediment; aided, fortified and supported by the King’s majesty and his successors.

  This agreement Mary had signed, and rebutted secretly. In addition, the Crown Matrimonial had been demanded: the crown which in common usage meant that for his lifetime, the consort would share the powers of the Queen. The crown which, in unscrupulous hands, might be taken to mean that on the Queen’s death, the rights to the throne should pass to the blood of her husband.

  Orkney had questioned Lymond about the crown. ‘I believe,’ he had said with his deaf ear cupped, because they were speaking softly, ‘that you warned Lord Culter about this. Did you then have prior knowledge of what the French were likely to do? How is it, in fact, that this information came to be passed to you, M. de Sevigny, and not to one of the Commission?’

  ‘In an army, one hears a great deal of gossip,’ Lymond had said. ‘And as to the papers, perhaps it was thought that I was a likely spearhead of any revolution against the de Guises. I have not been told.’

  ‘And have you decided to enter the lists against the de Guise family?’ Bishop Reid asked. ‘You have not, I noticed, allowed your gifts in these past weeks to flourish unrecognized. Someone may decide to cure la piquure du scorpion par le scorpion mesme.’

  ‘He would be a fool,’ Lymond said, ‘who would cross the de Guise brothers at this moment. You will take the oath of fidelity to the Dauphin?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lord James Stewart thoughtfully. ‘We have the consent of the Three Estates to do so. We accept the sweets of this marriage: and the specific. Let time ahead show whether or not we may digest them.’

  It was then that Jerott, starting up said, ‘How can a country prosper under a Queen who has betrayed it?’

  And the Queen’s half brother had turned on him those heavy Stewart eyes and said, ‘For that, we have so far only the word of your friend the sieur of Lymond and Sevigny. He has explained to us how poor a moment we have chosen to cry patriotism with a shining sword. And I agree. Do not, I pray you, jar the barque of concord.’

  They would hold their peace, it seemed; not least because there was no concrete evidence. But, Adam thought, should that proof come, there were those among the nine who would cry patriotism, whatever wisdom counselled. And Richard Crawford would be one of them.

  He had watched the brothers through those days, helping with Archie to defend the little left of Lymond’s privacy. A reluctant watchdog, Culter held a post of small dignity, vulnerable to a thousand shafts of wit … which did not arrive. Francis at his most quiet, his most responsible showed his elder brother the face, Adam thought, his friends sometimes saw. And from that realized that Francis, in those final days, was drawing from obscurity an old friendship, to be remembered later maybe, and recognized.

  He did not know that he himself reflected all of this until Lord Allendale, on edge; unmoved by alien weddings which boded ill for England, said, ‘Why so despondent? Now you are French and need never go back to cold winds and sour marsh and sodden mutton and kail for your faring. I hear you write to Philippa’s mother. Do you tell her all the news?’

>   Brooding and restless with a sharp edge, in those days, to his tongue, Austin Grey also had changed from the courteous, diffident youth Adam remembered. Adam said, ‘I have told Kate all that has happened: yes. As you know, it is hard to get letters back just now, with shipping at war in the Narrow Straits.’

  ‘And you have told her, I hope,’ Austin said, ‘of the drugs of which your friend avails himself so freely? Perhaps you provide them.’

  ‘No,’ Adam said. ‘But I should, if it were necessary. He has cared for me, when I needed it.’

  ‘He nursed you, perhaps, when you received the lash you bear on your face?’ Austin said.

  For a moment Blacklock was silent. Then he said, ‘Yes. He sat with me all night.’

  ‘A faithful friend and physician. And who, as a matter of interest, had given you so brutal a lash?’ asked Austin Grey.

  And Adam, on a long sigh, had looked at him and then turned and left without answering; for it was obvious that he knew the answer, and was tormenting himself as well as his captors. But at least, Adam thought, he did not have to go to the wedding.

  *

  At nine o’clock, Messieurs of the Town of Paris, variously attired in crimson and yellow and black, mounted mules and left the gates of the Hôtel de Ville, accompanied by all the town bands of archers, arbalesters and hackbutters in their livery, and led by the ten sergeants of the town in parti-coloured robes pinned by the silver ship emblem of Paris. From there they crossed the Pont Notre-Dame and reached, with difficulty, the parvis, or open space in front of the Cathedral which was jammed by people disputing like starlings.

  Above their heads it could be seen that a platform had been erected in front of the west entrance to the Cathedral, with a canopy of Persian blue velvet studded with gold fleurs de lis and bearing the arms of France and Scotland. On either side of the great doorway were two hangings of the same material. And leading from the platform and round the right hand corner of the Cathedral was a high wooden gallery twined with vine leaves which continued, the town fathers knew, to the doors of the Episcopal Palace. Thus the royal celebrants, when the time came, could reach the church doors by bridging the people.