Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Three of the singers were not from the King’s chapel. ‘The young men who so delighted us at your reception. I could wish,’ said John Erskine to Lymond, (Mars, donne nous ce jour où se fait l’aliance/Qui joindra pour jamais l’Ecosse à notre France) ‘that their songs today were of the same order.’

  (O mariage heureux, que Dieu veule lier/Pour faire sous un Roy deux royaumes plier/Et non deux seulement, mais sans meurdre et sans guerre/A la France et l’Ecosse alliant l’Angleterre.)

  It is not difficult, if paid sufficiently well, to find rhymes in French and Latin to extoll the virtues of a match made in heaven, and to proclaim the joy to all men of a union between two brave and ancient countries. None of the main protagonists, including the Scottish Commissioners (Surgit ab Orcadibus speciosus Palladis autor), escaped eulogy. But through it all the principal theme, chanted in chorus and proclaimed, thrillingly, by single voices was repeated, hardly varying; glancing from wall to window to pillar to vaulted ceiling, striking back with a thousand tongues from bone and medal and jewel, and ending with the noble Latin of Cassillis’ former tutor:

  Haec una centum de stirpe nepotes

  Sceptriferos numerare potest, haec regina sola est,

  Quae bis dena suis includat secula fastis …

  O royal youth! destined o’er Gaul to reign

  Accept a dowry worthy of a King …

  When history her pride of birth enquires

  The race and honours of her ancient sires

  She can recount, on Fame’s wide spreading wings

  One hundred sceptre-bearing martial kings

  Sprung from the same august and royal line …

  When conquered kingdoms were compelled to change

  Their laws, and statutes of their sires derange

  Scotland alone her liberty retained

  And on her ancient base inviolate remained …

  Hunger to endure beneath a northern sky

  The summer’s heat and winter’s cold defy

  Never beneath the tyrant’s foot to bend

  Without high walls their country to defend …

  Whate’er of other kingdoms Fame may tell

  Scotland still nobler deeds and tales can trace

  And from the proudest claim a prouder place …

  (Icelle Dame a ceddé et delaissé, par ces présentes au Roy et ses successeurs, Roys de France, la possession, vuyde et vacue duy royaulme d’Escosse, pour en joyr por eulx sans ce que aulcun empeschement leur puisse en ce estre faict par personne quelconque.)

  It was Francis Crawford, of all the silent circle of Scotsmen, who walked off abruptly and waited, his head bent, his arm on the wainscoting, until the epithalamia had ended.

  Then the dancing started again. For half an hour, it was necessary to stand and applaud as the Queen of Scots, her eyes brilliant, her cheekbones pink in her white face, again led the slow chain, her blue-green train, carried for her, interweaving its velvet with the cloth of gold, the silk and the tissue of the princesses.

  Two Parliamentary councillors, discovering the Russian commander beside them, began an eager, deferential conversation about trading concessions. When he could, Lymond moved away.

  Adam, watchful, saw him twice after that: once with d’Estrée and de Thermes and another gentleman of the Order, the four shoulder-chains of silver cockle shells sparkling fluted together, and once with Perrot, the Prévôt des Marchands, who was reliving, one would say from his hands, the defence of Paris.

  He was not difficult to follow. The crimson velvet clasped with rubies and vented with gold was the only brutally vulgar dress Adam had ever seen Lymond wear, but he had known better than to comment on it. Now he watched it progress, constantly impeded, from point to point of the vast salon; now with the Duke de Nevers and some of his captains; now with Madame Marguerite; now with the Marshal de St André, never more attentive than now, when his foolish daughter had broken the formal bond between them. And then, returning laughing to her chair, the bride had called him and was complaining, with mock severity, that he was not wearing her glove.

  Mary Fleming, who had a closer view than Adam Blacklock, saw the Queen’s hand on Lymond’s arm, and the eyes of the Cardinal of Lorraine, watching them. Then someone was brought forward to be presented and unexpectedly the daughter of Jenny Fleming found that the man James admired above all others was standing beside her and asking her, with charming irony, how she was bearing the strain of so many suffocating pleasures.

  She answered, and he entertained her, briefly for a moment or two longer before he said, ‘Mary: where is Philippa?’

  ‘Did you notice? I don’t know,’ said Mary Fleming. ‘The heat turned her head a little and she slipped away to her room while the tables were being drawn, but she isn’t there now. In fact, according to Euphemia, Philippa didn’t go to her chamber.’

  ‘If she was dizzy, perhaps she didn’t reach it. Have you looked?’ said Lymond curtly. And then, seeing her flush, he added quickly, ‘I beg your pardon. Of course it has been impossible for you. May I ask a favour of you? Will you take me to her room and allow me to speak to Euphemia? And could you send another page perhaps to look for her, without creating any alarm?’

  But Euphemia, yellow of face, had already sent several maids and had been out herself in the network of passages searching for Mistress Philippa, whom she had been enjoined, on pain of a beating, never to let out of her sight. ‘And I never did!’ wailed Euphemia. ‘Day and night, I never did! How could they expect me to get into the King’s Grand’ Salle to watch her?’

  For, it seemed, a cloak was missing. A heavy, enveloping cloak which had been carried, in case of rain, on the short procession from Notre-Dame to the Palais, and must therefore have been removed during the fuss when the Queen was being combed and prinked prior to the banquet. ‘She’s outside,’ said Euphemia, her eyes filled with unbecoming and horrified tears. ‘She knew before the banquet she was going out. It is a trick. It is an assignation!’

  The gentleman in crimson velvet, whom she did not know, did not rebuke her. He only stood perfectly still and said, ‘Do we know where she might be going? Have any messages reached her?’

  ‘None! None!’ said Euphemia, horrified. ‘She was not permitted to receive messages! Her family … the Lord Culter is extremely strict!’

  ‘Then,’ said Lymond, ‘did she send any?’

  The woman thought. Mary Fleming shut the door, her heart beating, on the distant noise outside and envied Mr Crawford his composure, waiting. Then Euphemia said, ‘There was the letter she sent the Hôtel de Guise, about her boxes.’

  He said, ‘What was that?’

  ‘Just after we arrived. A letter to one of her grooms, telling him that someone would be calling with mules to take away the four boxes in her chamber, and to help him, as they were heavy.’

  ‘Boxes?’ Lymond said. ‘What kind of boxes?’ And turned as Mary, in spite of herself, drew a quick breath. ‘You know?’

  ‘I know the boxes she means,’ Mary said. ‘They were metal bound, with Nuremberg locks in iron. Philippa has had them with her now for two months. She said they contained books.’

  ‘But you didn’t believe her?’ Lymond said.

  Her mouth for some reason dry, Mary Fleming faced the swift, un-aggressive inquisition. ‘They were full of money,’ she said. ‘You could hear the coins move when they were lifted.’

  For a moment, Lymond’s eyes continued to dwell on her, then he turned back to the woman Euphemia. ‘And the gentleman who was to call for the boxes,’ he said. ‘Did she name him, or describe him in any way?’

  That she remembered. ‘His name,’ Euphemia said, ‘was M. Janus, and she said he was an old gentleman, very heavy, with an English accent. She didn’t know,’ added Euphemia, suddenly frightened afresh by the atmosphere, ‘that I read the letter. They said I was to read everything.’

  Janus. The two-faced God. The God of Gates, with a key in his hand.

  ‘I see,’ Lymond said. ‘Tha
nk you. It was not your fault. I know where Mistress Philippa is, and I shall not even trouble Lord Culter, I believe, with the story. You will have her safely back before long. Mary, will you excuse me?’

  But swiftly as he made out of the room, Mary Fleming pursued him. ‘Where is she? What do I say? What if someone asks for her?’ And then, as he turned, ‘You don’t know yet, do you?’

  ‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘But I shall find her. And if you are able, I would ask you not to let it be known, for as long as you can, that she is missing. Am I asking too much?’

  ‘No,’ said Mary Fleming. He was asking a great deal, but then, she would have given him a great deal, as once her mother wanted to do.

  The last galliard had begun in the hall, and messieurs of the Town, pleased, well-drunken and wonderfully tolerant now on all matters to do with both collars and precedence were lost in wet-eyed pleasure at the splendour of it all, and in a mood to form loving friendships with every man in the room. Daniel Hislop, having exhausted his larynx, if not his stock of witticisms, had gone to earth among a huddle of somnolent advocates. Jerott, kept remarkably sober by his fellow captains, had found a lady who liked black hair and Lyon velvet, and was skirmishing with her. Adam, uneasy about many things, agreed, for the third time, to become the lifelong blood-brother of a hatmaker and then stepped sharply aside, causing a landslide of creased yellow satin as Lymond’s voice spoke abruptly behind him.

  ‘Adam? Is Osias on duty? Or anyone else?’

  Adam’s heart went cold. ‘Not tonight,’ he said. ‘It was impossible, because of the …’

  He was not allowed to finish. ‘On other days, has Philippa always been followed? I asked that this should be tightened.’

  ‘Always,’ Adam said. ‘Except for the one time you know about. Francis, what’s happened?’

  ‘And on that one occasion,’ said Lymond, as if he had not spoken, ‘how long was she away from the Hôtel de Guise? Is it known?’

  ‘An hour, Osias thought,’ Adam said. ‘She crossed the rue St Antoine from the de Guise house, going south. That’s all he could find out … Francis?’

  ‘She left the palace this evening,’ Lymond said. ‘So she wasn’t going, the other time, to one of the bridges. She didn’t leave by the Porte St Antoine, and she had hardly time to get a ferry over the river and back again. And that leaves the Petit Arsenal district.’

  ‘The Petit Arsenal?’ Adam said. ‘That’s where …’

  ‘What?’ said Lymond.

  ‘Danny was asked by Philippa not to tell you,’ said Adam slowly. ‘She thought, it seems, that your mother might try to visit a house in the Petit Arsenal district, and if she did, Danny was to prevent her.’

  For the first time, Lymond did not speak at once. Then he said, ‘And the address?’

  ‘Danny was never told,’ said Adam quietly. ‘The only person who would know is your mother. If you like, I shall go and ask her. She went some time ago to her room.’

  ‘No. Thank you. I had better do that,’ Lymond said.

  Long ago, returning from some turbulent sequence of misdeeds, the younger, beloved son of the house of Culter would rap at the door of his mother’s chamber, and be admitted, and closing the door, would bend upon her the grave, sweet gaze, made of mischief and love, that melted the bones in her body. Then, sinking to one knee, he would kiss her hand, in obedience and humility.

  Now he rapped, and she heard his voice speak her name and, rising, she faced him as the door opened and shut and he stood, his bearing and looks unlike anything she had ever seen in him before, in any extremity. He said, ‘I have to find Philippa.’ And then, walking into the room, he dropped on one knee and said, ‘I will promise anything you wish, to the end of my life, if you will tell me the name of the house that you know of.’

  And as she did not answer, staring appalled at his face, he said, ‘Philippa asked that you should be prevented from going there. We know it is near the Petit Arsenal. I think Leonard Bailey has found it.’

  Blanched by age and by agony, her skin had no colour at all, and her drawn brows this time were no longer those of a beautiful woman. Then she said, her timbreless voice barely audible, ‘It is called the Hôtel des Sphères; and it is in the rue de la Cerisaye.…

  ‘It is where you were born, Francis.’

  He left while she was speaking. He reached the Grand’ Salle without thinking, as the quickest way to reach the staircase, and found his way blocked, unbelievably, by the muscular countryman’s body of his brother.

  ‘You are very busy,’ Richard Crawford said, ‘for a man assisting at the nuptial feast of his monarch. Wherever you are going now, I am sure you won’t mind if I come along with you.’

  Over and over, the same song, the same burden; the obstruction; the battle; the challenge: if you won’t lead, try following, Richard!

  But where he was going now, he could not take Richard. Nor, looking at his brother’s face, could he think of any ruse that would serve him. Richard said, ‘They tell me Philippa isn’t to be found. I don’t suppose you would know where she is?’

  ‘No. Ask Euphemia,’ the comte de Sevigny said. There were men all about them.

  ‘Don’t look round,’ Richard said. ‘There is no way out there. It would be rather crude, but if I have to, I shall stop you with violence. You are in a hurry, aren’t you?’

  He was in too much of a hurry not to take all the care in the world with the next move. It was bluff and double bluff: a step, a feint, another step, and a sliding movement which took him out of Richard’s grasp just as his own blow, low and accurate, made his brother gasp and desist. Then he was moving as fast as he could through the crowds, with Richard he knew a few bare yards behind him.

  He had not gained enough distance to outpace him on the stairs or in the outer rooms and passageways, so he did not attempt it. Instead Lymond turned inwards across the corner of the Grand’ Salle and up to where stood the wreathed double doors of the Chamber of Requests, flanked by two Archers of the Royal Bodyguard.

  ‘Monseigneur?’ one of them said. He knew them both well.

  ‘I have to assist their graces,’ said Lymond. ‘The noble earl my brother is not meantime to be admitted.’ And did not look back as he stepped through and the doors shut behind him.

  The King, with a black silk mask binding his brow, was surprised but instantly welcoming. ‘The man we wish to see. Come, you create marvels in the field. Show us how to adjust this galleon so that Monseigneur my son may properly guide it.’

  The golden room was full of people, and ships. The ships were ingeniously mechanical, and made of red velvet and cloth of gold, with silver sails as high as a man. The King, Lorraine, Navarre and Nemours, masked and impatient, were already seated each in his barque. Condé, abandoning his, was kneeling beside the ship of the Dauphin, ferreting within its entrails with a hunted expression to do with a rip in his exquisite stockings. Mars, fil de Mars said, ‘It is unsafe. I will not ride in it.’

  ‘Nonsense, mon fils,’ said the King. ‘Is it unsafe?’

  ‘One requires to steer it with caution,’ said Condé. He rolled up his eyes, bored, at Lymond, who knelt beside him quickly, and surveyed the mechanism.

  ‘Well?’ said the King. ‘Our audience, messieurs, awaits us. Is it safe for the Dauphin?’

  Lymond rose. ‘On any other day, yes,’ he observed. ‘But on his wedding night—no: I should not trust the Dauphin to any but a perfect vehicle. It would be better to launch five boats instead of six.’

  ‘We can’t do that,’ Condé said. ‘We have to steer round the hall and pick up our consorts.’

  It was spoken with the irritation of a man whose consort for the purpose was the Duchess de Guise, ten days over the birth of her untimely offspring. His Majesty said, ‘The Dauphin was to have uplifted Queen Catherine. You say the steering will not answer?’

  Lymond touched the levers. ‘I could make it answer,’ he said. ‘But that would hardly …’

  ‘Then you sha
ll steer it,’ said the King heartily. ‘François, give him your mask. And the cloak. The height is different but seated, it will not be noticed. The plan, de Sevigny, is to steer twice round the hall. Then I shall pause and take up the Queen of Scotland beside me, while Navarre takes his wife, Lorraine takes my daughter Claude, Nemours takes Madame Marguerite and you, of course, take her grace the Queen.… Does it astonish you, to find yourself so acting with the princes of the blood?’

  ‘I am overwhelmed,’ said Francis Crawford rapidly, and climbed into the ship. Someone signed to the King’s gentleman nearest the door and he opened it, and caught the eye of the trumpets.

  The blare of sound warned Richard Crawford that there was no prospect, when the doors opened, of slipping inside and on some excuse, of dragging out his younger brother. Instead he had to stand there, sickened still by the pain of his blow, and see the Archers fling open the leaves and the mechanical fleet of the king come swaying and tacking across the black and white squares of the floor.

  The doors closed. Since there was no other exit Lord Culter stationed himself by the entrance, and watched with little attention as, to music and clapping, the royal crew skimmed round the pillars and threw silver light on the statues of past monarchs, long since dead, with their playthings.

  It was not until the last graceful ship had passed him twice that he saw that the unsmiling mouth under the mask of the helmsman was longer and firmer than the Dauphin’s ever would be; that the chin and throat were mature, and the airy hands on the silk reins were those which had just inflicted on him such careless agony.

  Then the barque came to a halt and the captain, rising, smiled and held out his hand while the Queen of France, glancing at him, stepped in and sat down beside him. Her thick lips moved, asking a question, and at the answer she laughed and then sat, as the ship slid into motion and followed the rest down the length of the Grand’ Salle and into the depths of the palace. The last Richard saw of them before the crowds closed cheering between them was the Queen’s snubbed and inelegant profile turned on her chevalier, a considering look in the shallow, protuberant eyes.