by Checkmate
He was not smiling. He looked up slowly and met her gaze, his own level. He said, ‘I beg your pardon. I didn’t know I was giving quite such an insufferable impression. I think I forget sometimes …’ He hesitated, choosing his language.
Philippa finished it for him. ‘… that I am aged twenty, and Kate Somerville’s daughter; and sensible? For Sybilla, I am willing to involve you in any kind of genealogical embarrassment. But you really needn’t have fears of the other kind.’
‘I don’t. I know that perfectly well,’ Lymond said. ‘I am trying, I believe, to avoid offering you the kind of attentions which would be expected by Madame la Maréchale.’
He did not cite Güzel, she noticed. Who had the same training she had. Touched with remorse, Philippa said soberly. ‘Since we’re being frank … Wasn’t that foolish? The Queen is going to offer you the Maréchale’s daughter in marriage. It might well be what you need.’
‘What I need?’ said Lymond. Then he said, ‘Oh, I see. But you haven’t seen Madame la Maréchale in her chemise.’
With commendable patience, Philippa made no rejoinder. By mutual consent, they had begun walking rather swiftly towards the gate to the bridge-head. After a moment he went on. ‘I knew Catherine d’Albon was being sent south to meet me. I don’t want her. That is why I did what I did with her mother.’ He hesitated again, and then said, ‘What I told Marthe tonight was not strictly true. I am already pledged, and not only to the nation of Russia.’
Behind the cobbler’s apron unpleasant changes took place in Philippa’s abdomen. She ignored them. ‘To Güzel?’ she said steadily.
He shook his head. She saw that, looking ahead in the fog, his profile contained a curious and suspended calm, the smiling mask of some state far from peaceful. ‘Not to Güzel,’ he said. ‘But for my lifetime.’ And walking still he offered her, smiling again, four lines of verse, lightly spoken.
‘Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera
Pour nulle vivante, tant soit elle bonne ou sage
Forte et puissante, riche de hault lignaige
Mon chois est fait, aultre ne se fera.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Philippa said. It was a half-truth. Subconsciously, she supposed she had always known, since she was a schoolgirl. She said, ‘It’s my turn to beg your pardon. I only wanted to assure you that I have nothing to tender but friendship. But if you want it, there is a great deal of that, going cheaply.’
He slowed, with the intention perhaps of confronting her. But on second thoughts he said only, ‘Then the cost should not be beyond me. The pledge, without Latreia or Douleia, is simple friendship?’ He had begun once again to walk briskly.
Rousing herself: ‘The pledge,’ said Philippa, tartly, ‘is friendship. Simplicity is not, you will agree, one of your prominent attributes.’ They had passed through the gateway and turning left, mounted the rise of the long eight-arched bridge crossing the Saône. The fog was still thick on the bridge, concealing all but the first pair of flambeaux, but a current of air, winding through it, revealed the Fourvière heights for a moment, black against a starlit sky with the chapel lights bright on its summit, and the roofs of lamplit houses with their feet in the fog at its foot.
Dancing red in the haze, one of the bridge torches swayed in its socket. Gazing at it, Philippa was aware that she had been ungracious. She said, ‘But if you’ve no objection to fish scales, I’ll shake on it.’ And Lymond, to her gratification, accepted the hand that she offered him.
He did not shake it. He took it in a grinding and sinewy grip and dragged her sideways until she was running. Then he released her, spinning, to sprawl on the cobbles. His sword hissed from its scabbard. And gasping, she sat up and stared at him.
What she had seen was not the bridge flambeau swaying. It was a torch in the grip of a burly man with a fierce, swollen face and a patch of raw flesh two inches wide running down brow, cheek and jawbone. A man who strode out of the fog on the crown of the bridge, axe in hand and stood, holding the torch high and grinning. ‘Well met, M. de Sevigny: I might have been in the boat if your little bitch hadn’t blocked the traboule with Renaud’s knife-grinding wheel, and left it running. You may put up your sword. There is a line of men awaiting you at the other end of the bridge, and another line closing the bridgehead behind you. You would have met them if you had come out of the rue Mercière. As it is, you came by the quay gate, and this makes me very happy, and also my friend Octavien beside you. Only, where is the little bitch?’
He never did hear the answer, for Philippa stabbed him from behind with her husband’s poniard. She dragged it out as he fell and stabbed him again, gritting her teeth, in the area delineated in white paint by the black eunuch who instructed the princes’ class in the seraglio. A staccato hack of steel, interspersed with an outbreak of retching, told that the man Octavien had flung himself on Lymond. She caught up the fallen man’s torch and lifted it.
In a flare of yellow, the blade of an axe parted from the haft and whistled out of their sight in the darkness. The owner, the stock still in his hand, was in Lymond’s grip and Lymond’s hand was over his mouth, stifling his cries and forcing his head back with an expertise which Philippa saw was swift, impersonal and utterly final. As Lymond lowered the dead man to the ground she uttered neither comment nor commendation. It could hardly have been otherwise, man to man; or Octavien would have been fit to lead armies, and Lymond to be a third-rate paid assassin.
But from this point onwards it was not man to man, but Francis Crawford and herself against an unknown number of men at each end of this bridge. And although she had joked about swimming, there was no escape that way. Below the bridge was swift current and a tumble of rocks that would kill them. Lymond’s voice very quietly said, ‘Christ, Philippa: I won’t ask where you learned that. Now prop up the torch and come and give me a hand. Si leonina pellis non satis est, assuenda vulpina.’
‘Or, Si Dieu ne me veut ayder, le diable ne me peut manquer,’ said Philippa valiantly. ‘I am listening, mon compère. As a drunkard believes a drunkard, and a madman a madman.’
Very soon after that, the chain of five men at the Fourvière end of the bridge heard break out again, and closer, the clash of sword blades in the vapour. This time they could also hear voices, including the screams of a woman.
Their orders were to remain where they were. But it was galling to stand by and listen, when it was clear that the King’s emissary and his lady had been quite overthrown by the ambush. Presently, the girl’s screeching voice rose to a shriek: there was a shout, and a thud and a splash from the river bed. A moment later, the foreigner’s cries were cut off also. Then, speaking their own patois, an indignant voice, presumably Octavien’s, said, ‘Don’t be a fool! Get the rings at least before he goes over!’
After that, it would have been foolish to stay. One of the five men began to stroll forward, and was overtaken by another. In a moment, all five were running headlong for the parapet, where the smoky light of a torch flared on the jewelled points and rich doublet of M. le comte de Sevigny, encasing a very dead body already dangling half over the handrail. Boots and laces and buttons were already torn off in ten grasping handfuls before the first of the five men realized that the body was not that of M. de Sevigny. And when, whirling round, they thought to dash back the way they had come, the two people they sought were already running, softly and fast for the bridgend.
Because Lymond was steering his wife by the arm, they both saw the obstacle in their path just before they cannoned into it. It was large and lukewarm and soft. Fending herself off, Philippa’s hand pressed against buckles and leather and then, stumbling, she recognized something else—the unyielding steel of plate armour.
A horse and rider, both dead. With others, she suspected, lying beyond them. Lymond’s voice said, ‘Run to the end of the bridge, turn right, and hide yourself in the porch of the Customars’ house.’
As a madman obeys a madman, and a drunkard a drunkard. Asking no questions, she did a
s he told her.
So their escort had been waylaid after all. No quartet of men at arms had arrived back at the Hôtel Schiatti or at Lymond’s lodging: no one even knew that she and Lymond had left Jerott and Marthe. Instead, their attackers were more numerous and better organized than anyone had expected. They could cordon off the bridge on the chance that the Captain-General had escaped from the quayside. It was equally possible that the roads to Lymond’s destination and her own on this side of the river were watched.
Hence her instructions. Instead of running on she turned right, along the rue de la Pescherie as far as the church of St Eloi. Then facing uphill and away from the river, she turned round the back of the church and into the tall, jutting porch of the Custom-house. Inside, the studded door with its wrought iron hinges was firmly locked, and the windows were dark.
Lymond had not told her to knock. And indeed, the noise would bring their assailants sooner, in all likelihood, than the customars. She waited therefore, breathing hard, with sweat drops, erratic as mice, straying over her neck and her temples, and listened for the footsteps which meant Lymond was coming.
She never did hear them. Instead there struck on her eardrums a sonorous sound, hardly deadened by fog, of another calibre altogether. The alarm bell on the bridge had been set swinging.
For perhaps eight strokes it rang deeply and loudly. Then, shaking lightly, it came to a halt, revealing a ground-bass of excited men shouting.
Lymond, in his shirt-sleeves, shot into her hiding-place breathlessly. ‘They’ve cut him down. Hell.’ He listened. ‘I was afraid they’d seen us. The fog is going. This way. Traboules, my knife-grinding Philippa. With your invention and mine, it will really go hard if we can’t lose them.… Wake up, you bastards!’
She could hear running feet now, as he had done. But even so, he stopped in his stride and scooping up first one stone and then another, hurled them with a vicious crash straight through the Customars’ windows. Then, catching up, he caught Philippa under the arm and plunged through and under the first of the rows of tall houses which climbed the steep hillside in front of them.
Fear had gone. He had touched her. He had admitted her to the sexless friendship she had asked of him. She had been treated at last as a partner and adult. She was free, as he had said, to join her invention to his; to expect and give co-operation without fear or favour, as might be done by Adam or Jerott or Danny.
A heady experience, for an only child accustomed to single-thread happiness, and not to the moment of creation that occurs when the warp is interlocked with the weft. When the singer is matched with the sounding-board; the dream with the poet. When the sun and the fountain first meet one another.
Side by side they were evading, she and Francis Crawford, a pack of men who intended to kill them. To escape them would be a miracle. To try to escape them with wit and grace and all that civilization could add to an occasion essentially barbarous was her care, her delight, and her intention. And the outcome he had foreseen touched her in its terrible proximity not at all.
So they fled into the night-black traboules: up the steps, between the pillars, over the courtyards and again into the twisting broken-backed tunnels, with the thudding of feet always tracking the darkness behind them.
Since the flight from Greece when he had been sick with opium, she had never seen unleashed, for such a span of time, his strength, his gaiety and his physical charm.
Every circumstance conspired, like a merchant, to display them to her. Swooping like birds from space to space of the tall houses scaling the hillside, they used what fortune suggested to defend themselves with. Baulked by a locked door, they took to a high, sprawling staircase whose galleries overlooked a nest of different courtyards: as their pursuers swarmed after them he bombarded them blithely with geranium pots, chanting: ‘Ding ye the tane and I the uther’ as she helped him, so that children screamed and dogs barked and a man in his night shirt, opening shutters, discharged an arquebus into the night air and dislodged an entire family group of Jupiter, Ganymede and the eagle from a cornice. ‘A sangre! A fuego! A sacco!’ sang out Francis Crawford; and seizing her hand, set off running again.
He talked, indeed, all the time, breathlessly, with snatches of verse and of laughter and a flow of frequently ribald comment which only ceased, now and then, in the cause of evasion. To begin with, also, he guided her, until she showed him there was no need for it. Philippa Somerville had spent a childhood competing with schoolboys among the woods and streams of north Tyneside, and in her cap and apron and sensible shoes was as agile as he was and, she wished to prove, not without invention.
They clambered over the cold nested clay of the pantiled roofs and crossed a narrow street on a ladder, because Philippa insisted on it. They sprang from niche to balcony and swung between pillars. They arrived at ground level and freed a mastiff and unshackled the door of a pig sty: at first floor, and found looms and a great roll of silk which streamed and bounded, calendaring all their assailants; at second and third and fourth floors and found sacks of flour to upset, or a bucket of slops or a wallsconce to send flying downwards, first from her hands and then from his, watched by the winged lions and griphons on the ceiling bosses, the angels guarding the windows; the fanged faces grinning from corbels or spewing open-throated from gutters above them. Decoration Gothic and classical heaped its profusion around them: shell and pilaster, acanthus and ballflower, bas relief and statuary in niche and fountain and rooftop as they crossed the road on a plank and began again, in the next house above them.
It gave them, also, a profusion of openings. Hanging gardens contained jets of water which could be diverted and pools into which the unwary could be enticed in the darkness. Fruit hurtled down (Pesches de Corbeil! les pesches!) and Tyndale’s snake, in a glorious mélange of colour (Tussssssh! Ye shall not dye …) burst from the vats of a dyeshop.
Walls handsome with stone frieze and tracery were not hard to climb, any more than garden ramparts with vine and trellis and niche, whose cage or pot or plaque or classical amphora might suggest a ponderous helmeting. And there was alway something to use, a row of melting grey plates from a kiln shelf: a slither of fish; a bag of pepper, left by a spicer, which touched off a sneezing and barking that spiralled up all the wide turnpike and flew trouncing back from the roof vaults.
Philippa had carried the pepper. Francis Crawford had a flask of neat spirits, filched from an apothecary’s windowledge. He broke the neck at the top of the staircase and splashed it into the channelled stone handrail below him. Then he snatched down a sconce and set fire to it.
They fled hand in hand to the rooftops, and flung shut the hatch on the fire and the shouting. ‘It won’t spread,’ said Lymond swiftly. ‘It will hold them a little.’ And stood for a moment on the dizziest edge of the roof-peak, bright and breathless and smiling.
His eyes were on the south; his hands held two flaming brands which streamed in a soft flowing air that had melted the fog to scraves and streamers wreathing the chimney tops. Fed by flame and by moonlight his hands and hair and shirt contained their own glow, like the globe of a sorcerer.
But he was not a figment of daydream or of fantasy. He was the quick-witted man who had raced with her; the man whose strong wrists had pulled her from trouble; whose laughter recognized, more than his own, her buffoonery; whose voice had whispered, sung, exclaimed or cursed, with equal felicity, carefree as birdsong on top of their striving.
Whose essence, stripped by necessity was, it now seemed, warm and joyous and of great generosity.
He stood, his eyes on the plunging rue de la Orfeverie below him, and intoned, gravely and musically.
‘By the grace and ineffable Providence of God, the only Unoriginated, and Infinite, Invisible, Inexpressible, Terrible and Inaccessible, Abiding above the Heavens, Dwelling in Unapproachable Light, and with a Vigilant Eye inspecting the Earth at suitable intervals …
‘Adam Blacklock has got off his backside and done something about the bloo
dy uproar eventually.’
Philippa dragged off her cap and pushing back her drenched hair, looked below them. He was right. At last the alarm had been raised; the troops mobilized. It seemed that all the streets from the river were flowing with pebbled silver, rising higher and higher and flooding now to the roots of their building as Lymond, shouting, caught their gaze with his voice and his fire-brands. Then he dropped them and spoke to the night air. ‘Well, it’s impressive, you know, but there’s a thing in’t, as the fellow said drinking the dish-clout. The bastards might dodge out the back way.’
‘The side way,’ said Philippa, peering. ‘They’re forcing open a door to the ruelle.’
‘Are they, dammit?’ he said. ‘Then let’s stop them!’
To stop them they had to arrive first at the head of the ruelle. There should be, said Lymond, a tavern there.
To reach it, Philippa fled with him round and round spiral stairs, across landings, along balconies, into arches and doorways and courtyards. There was a tavern there. They went through it like gimlets through butter and gained the top of the ruelle, up which all that was left of their enemies was painfully staggering.
The ruelle Punaise was less a street than a near-vertical drain between houses, roughly stepped and little more than the width of one person. Because they were tired, their former pursuers found speed beyond them. Because, below in the street, the first of the troops were arriving, the climbing men slipped and staggered and fell in their fear but kept running, for at the top of the ruelle lay the steep road to the wall, and the hill of Fourvière, and freedom.
Until the last moment, indeed, they hoped to reach it. They saw the mouth of the ruelle above them, open, empty of people. If they discerned, through the sweat, a certain unevenness on the horizon, it seemed no more, very likely, than a profile of the stone and pebble and mud of the vennel. They were not to know that the outline was that of eight four-gallon blackjacks, arrived there by a neat piece of leverage.
