by Checkmate
It was hard to believe that Archie had not actually been present at the interview, but had merely cleaned the room up afterwards, to save Mr Blyth from shaming his valet. In the event Jerott appeared at the supper table, rather shaky and yellow as a Portuguese Indian, and listened while Adam described the dying throes of the German threat to Lyon.
Rumour, which at first, naturally, had assumed Jerott’s wife to be faithless, had now produced a tale which, if you knew Jerott, had all the melancholy aura of accuracy. He had returned to Paris to find the Hôtel de Séjour filled, not with lovers but with poets, painters, sculptors and musicians and in their midst, impatient with the Philistine intrusion, his beautiful and intellectual wife Marthe.
She had not been interested in Jerott, and Jerott, one could tell, had been far from tolerant of the poets and the musicians and indeed, had probably tried to boot them over the threshold.
The person to leave, of course, had finally been none other than Jerott, who after fulfilling with joyless violence an expensive number of commercial transactions throughout the night had ridden straight back to Compiègne, with understandable consequences.
Among his colleagues Adam Blacklock, himself an artist, an aesthete and a bachelor, had not been over sympathetic. Danny, who had one or two small arrangements satisfactorily current himself, was reasonably tolerant. Lymond, whose own erratic history was all too well known, was not tolerant at all; partly perhaps because the lady concerned was his step-sister, and partly because, with fourteen thousand Swiss and German troops distributed between Compiègne and Verbene, he had little time to waste playing governess to Jerott.
He had none, certainly, in which to make excursions to Flavy-le-Martel, even if he had been willing to advertise his intention, which he was not. Then, little more than a week after his return to Compiègne, there arrived at Court the Queen of Scotland’s most senior uncle, the Duke de Guise, summoned from Italy to save France from disaster like Chrysostom restored by an earthquake, and discovering, as he moved from a defensible Lyon to a tranquil court and a confident and liberated Paris, that by some perverse fortune, France had been rescued without him.
Accompanied by Piero Strozzi, under whose aegis the remarkable M. Crawford had been persuaded to return from Douai, the Duke de Guise rode to Compiègne with his trumpets, his banners, his gentlemen, and congratulated M. Crawford, as his niece had foreseen he would, on his hard work, his loyalty and his competence. He then addressed the troops, distributed a limited amount of back wages, and to the sound of cheering, rode back into the castle, leaving M. de Sevigny to take Marshal Strozzi round the foreign detachments.
Taking refreshment, amiably, with the rest of M. de Sevigny’s colleagues in his chamber, the Duke invited the Seigneur de Thermes, the Duke de Nevers and M. d’Estrée to describe for him the military situation as they presently each understood it.
They did so, readily. After ten minutes, a member of his own suite, with care, managed an interpolation. ‘It seems to me, monseigneur, that most of this repeats the report you already have before you from M. de Sevigny.’
The Duke de Guise glanced at his papers, and lifted out, with manicured fingers, the packet of ribbon-bound documents which had lain underneath them. ‘You are right. I have read this with interest. A clerkly hand, and a most meticulous attention to detail. It has been compiled, I suppose, with the expert help of all you gentlemen. Do I take it that you agree with it all?’
The Duke de Nevers looked round the comfortable room and then at the handsome bearded face opposite with its large, considerate eyes and honourable scar.
Still on the right side of forty, descendant of St Louis and Charlemagne, a bold and brave leader of men, wealthy, powerful, head of the most brilliant family in France and next to the monarch and his brother, the man who at this moment controlled France’s destiny, François, second Duke de Guise, was a man with whom to walk softly, whatever your rank. De Nevers said, ‘The facts are correct. The projects for the future are all the results of mutual discussion. The only one we had cause to dispute with M. de Sevigny was, of course, the first; but he has inclined us to follow his view. We think the time is ripe for expelling the English from France. We think the Christian King should attack the Pale and drive the English out of Calais.’
*
‘You know, of course,’ said Piero Strozzi, riding down the lines of huts and pavilions, ‘that you have been sent out of the way? That the Duke de Guise has been made lieutenant-general of all French armies inside and outside the kingdom, and that his orders are to be obeyed as would the King’s? That having, according to God’s Vicar on Earth, accomplished in Italy little for his master’s honour and still less for his own, he must urgently re-establish his reputation, and that therefore any campaign, any successes to come in this war will be immediately seized and appropriated? Did the monarch tell you that, when he made you a Chevalier of the Order? Did you know how short would be your tenure and is this, by any chance, why you are wearing so bravely the hundred-thousand-ducat point diamond with which his Most Christian Majesty rewarded the saving of Paris? I have to warn you that it is not the Duke’s habit to dispense with rivals by allowing them to leave freely for Russia. He breaks them; and they do not survive the experience.’
‘I am relieved to hear it,’ said Lymond. ‘I thought they were planning to send me with the eight ensigns and one hundred and fifty light cavalry to Scotland.’ A horse coughed in the lines and he turned his head; but the man Archie Abernethy, without requiring an order, had already turned and ridden off to investigate. Lymond added, ‘You are sorry for me, then?’
‘I feel responsible for you. I didn’t think you’d last a month,’ Marshal Strozzi said cheerfully. ‘They may insist on sending you to Scotland, or they may feel they would elicit more reliable service from M. de Thermes. M. de Thermes greatly enjoyed his last spell of duty in Scotland.’
‘And you did not. You had a pike in your thigh, as I remember. In any case, I deserve more confidence, I do protest, than you are showing in me. In performance and in humility I am quite exemplary. The Duke cannot break me.
‘O Lord I am not puft in mynde
I have no scornfull eye;
I do not exercise my selfe
In things that be to hye.
But as a chylde that wayned is
Even from his mother’s brest
So have I Lord behaved my seife
In silence and in rest.’
Marshal Piero Strozzi, a man with a notable sense of humour, grinned, and then gradually ceased to grin. He said, ‘I have another good piece of advice to give you. Have regard to the sources of your quotations. And allow to drop your new friendship with M. d’Andelot. As the Duke de Guise requires credit with the King, so his brother the Cardinal requires credit with Rome. We are all watched. You will be no exception.’
‘Quid,’ Lymond said, ‘melius Roma? Scythio quid frigore peius? Do you have any other advice?’
‘Yes,’ said Piero Strozzi calmly. ‘Bella gerant alii; tu, felix Scotia, nube. Get a child on the d’Albon girl and make them force your marriage through before the gap between King and Pope becomes any wider. Her father counts for something in the kingdom yet. As St André’s son-in-law you would be safe. Or safer.’
‘Splendid!’ said Lymond gratefully. ‘Unless he finds out first that I’ve cuckolded him.’
The bellow of Strozzi’s laughter, rolling back, sang round Archie’s ears as he cantered briskly to catch up with his employer. When he could speak: ‘Tell me,’ said the Marshal, ‘why should the little Stewart want your wife for her lady in waiting?’
‘At a guess.’ said Lymond, ‘to stop me marrying Catherine d’Albon. It would be convenient if, like St Baldred of the Bass, one could be reproduced in triplicate to satisfy every party. What do you think of the project for Calais?’
They had reached the outermost bounds of the camp. ‘Do you need to ask?’ Strozzi said. ‘I wish, not that I had thought of it, but that I were as
powerful as de Guise, and could claim to have thought of it. He will agree. He cannot fail. I would break my bâton if I thought otherwise. I see you recommend an immediate reconnoitre.’
‘You are an engineer.’ Lymond said.
Piero Strozzi’s dark, Italian face, eroded with age and weather, pressed itself into a pattern of creases. ‘Ah! Pride is not dead in you yet! Yes, I am an engineer. Duke François will not go: I shall be chosen. And for my companion, I will not have my choice questioned. You shall come in person and see if your unchivalrous scheme will indeed work. You do not hold Douai against me?’ He looked up, smiling.
‘Yes, I hold it against you,’ said Lymond, and he was not smiling at all. ‘But the days are evil: iniquity aboundeth, and charity waxeth cold. I shall not retaliate.’
*
Danny Hislop was absent on a mission to demolish the outlying areas of Péronne, and Jerott with Adam as his lieutenant had two companies skirmishing round Chauny when Piero Strozzi and Francis Crawford left unescorted a few days later to ride the hundred miles north to the enemy seaport of Calais.
The Duke de Guise, having given the venture his sanction, had disappeared to report to King Henry. He had little doubt of his reception although the idea, of course, was revolutionary. One did not, because of cold, disease, boredom, scarce food, bad roads and impossible transport, wage war in winter. Secure in this belief, the unpaid Spanish armies were already beginning to retrench and disperse at a time when, gathered for defence of her heartland, the French army had never been stronger. The shame of Saint-Quentin, the Duke was to tell his monarch ringingly, would be obliterated. From ruin would come the brightest jewel in France’s diadem. This winter, France would be freed of her last English settlement. After two hundred years in and around Calais, the Goddams were to be driven at last into the sea.
No interest in the wholesale exploitation of his idea had, so far, been displayed by the comte de Sevigny. Riding north alone with him on his first reconnoitre the Marshal Strozzi, an ebullient man, set himself to plumb the depths of his partner’s precocity.
Lymond bore it without apparent resentment. Having dissected his position on Calais, Piero Strozzi went on to pick his brains methodically on the subject of flat terrain warfare, winter campaigning and the infiltration tactics of Tartars; and listened with concentration to all the younger man could tell him of the Tsar’s armies of hired Cossacks and the Janissaries, brought as children from other lands, who formed the core of the Sultan’s army.
‘You see: formidable!’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘The Turkish captain fights for himself; for his own advancement. He knows his wealth cannot be inherited. Here we buy our fighting-men over the counter, as the Tsar buys his Cossacks, you say. They come, they steal, they quarrel, they eat the countryside bare, they fight whomsoever you may point them at, even their own fellow-countrymen. Then they go home, leaving their masters satisfied or dissatisfied; and the land wasted behind them. You will never do good with a man who fights for money alone. You know that. He must covet rank and power. Or he must fight for his freedom, as your Scotsmen have done against the English. Or for the good of his soul, or the soul of his enemies, as your Russians have done against the Tartar, and the Knights of St John of Malta against the Mussulmen, and the Sultan’s army and fleet against the Christians——’
‘… Excepting the Most Christian King of France,’ Lymond reminded him affably.
‘Excepting, of course, the Most Christian King of France,’ Piero Strozzi accepted with equanimity. ‘Contre les loups, the Constable says, il se faut aider des chiens. And his merchants agree. Where would religion be, M. mon compagnon, without expediency? But he is the best fighting man that I know, he who goes to war for his eternal salvation,’
‘There is another,’ Lymond said. ‘He who goes to war from revenge.’
The dark face did not trouble to turn to him. ‘It is true,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘Rangoni taught me well. I have fought in Luxemburg and Mirandole and, given the troops, I could have saved Siena … my God, what I could tell you about that! You were at Tripoli. But at Siena they were selling rats at an écu apiece before they surrendered. I have been General of the Galleys of France as my brother Leone was, and for the same reason: to throw out the usurpers who caused my father to die in Florence. And to free Florence, as your nation has striven to free itself from England. You disapprove, Scotsman?’
‘Leone is dead,’ Lymond said. ‘He might have been Grand Master of the Knights of St John and swept the Middle Sea free of Osmanlis, but he chose to put Florence first. The Knights had reason to complain, but if motives count, that must surely weigh on the credit side. There are men, as you say, who fight for rank or power or money. Or even for exercise and amusement, once the hunting season has ended.’
Then the swarthy face with its dark curls did turn. ‘So the fish dislikes water. You have about you a stink of Malta yet, mon petit ami. Do you spit on your grandfather, who fought all his life in France and in Italy for love of war and of Albany? And lost all his beauty for it. I saw him in Italy, with his fine yellow hair parted for him by a battle-axe. When he told you tales of his prowess, did you say, But what were your motives? Or have you forgotten him?’
‘I remember the scar,’ Lymond said. ‘And I remember his funeral. I was three years old at the time.’
‘Devil take you,’ said Piero Strozzi warmly. ‘You are the only man in this country who can make me forget I am twice his age, and then remind me of it like a mule’s hoof in the belly. But I forgive you. If you talk too much, you also refrained from bringing the town guard about me at Douai. Tell me one thing. For what reason do you wish to return to Russia, to become again commander of all her armies?’
There was a short silence. Then Lymond said, ‘To enforce peace.’
‘Ah. And then?’ said Piero Strozzi.
‘And then to rule,’ Lymond said.
*
They had much in common, aside from the professional gossip: the tales of other men’s mistakes and eccentricities and all the low comedy which accompanies warfare. Exchanges of such a kind carried them to Cléry where, in a neglected barn beside a burned-down farmhouse, they found fresh straw and, stored behind some rotting vegetables, a chest holding a change of clothes, a napkin of food, and a wineflask. How they came there, Strozzi did not inquire and Lymond volunteered no explanation: his intelligence service, or, if you preferred it, the number of spies he was paying were his own affair.
They left Cléry rested and refreshed, since it is a stupid man who carries a slow brain and tired muscles into danger. The rest of their journey indeed was enlivened by lurid incidents in which one or other of the King’s trusted commanders took a fancy, it seemed, to put the whole enterprise to risk for the sake of an hour’s entertainment. On one occasion, to do with a fisherman, a smithy, and three German archers from Arras (‘Eine Deutscher bukt wie ein bawar’) Lymond rendered even the greatest practical joker in Italy speechless with combined hysteria and anxiety. Only later, when it was all over, did Piero Strozzi perceive that, after all, Francis Crawford was exacting retribution for Douai.
Then they were at Ardres, and ahead lay the Pale, the frontier of the English-held hinterland of Calais.
They crossed it at Leulinghen, whose thatched church once straddled the frontier, its French door in the nave, its English door in the choir. They left after early Mass by the choir door in their coarse jerkins and dusty boots, showing at Sandingfield a pass thoughtfully provided at Ardres by their host for the night. His name had been Haines, and his cousin, Lymond said, leased all the fishing in the marshes between Hâmes and Ardres. He had supplied them also with a mule and a small wicker cart containing six barrels of apples, which they collected outside the church and trundled nine miles through low hills and over the causeway to the moated walls of the city of Calais.
They showed their pass again to cross the drawbridge with the rest of the crowd at the Bullengate and made their way at a dilatory pace to the market place
, displaying on the way a happy if illegal propensity to sell apples to any passer-by who requested them. At intervals the mule, a stubborn creature, chose a stance and defied all their efforts to shift it, ending in an act of total resistance at the drawbridge wardhouse of the citadel.
The tang of the apples and the sight of the red waxen mounds were too much for the pikemen on guard there. Yelling and whacking with vigour, Lymond jumped round his mule to find his fruit disappearing in handfuls behind jacks and into stuffed breeches.
He made no effort to consult his trading partner. Howling, he snatched the shapeless hat from his rough hair and jumped on it. Then, stick whirling, he charged at the soldiery.
It was afterwards revealed to Marshal Strozzi that he must have seen the approach of the Knight-Porter and his fifty armed soldiers, returning from closing the Millgate. At the time, the most distinguished muleteer in Christendom stood with the reins in his clutch, breathing stertorously, while his crazy companion ricocheted like an unwashed puppet from cuirass to mailed fist to the flailing wood of reversed and jocular halberds. A couple of hackbutters got to work with their boots and the wicker cart shuddered and tilted. With a bellow, Piero Strozzi dropped the reins and rushed into battle.
‘Bleedin’ butter-boxes!’ said with injured astonishment one of the three men he knocked sideways. ‘Bloody Flemish thievin’ bastards! Gabbling cutpurses!’ He got up, revealing the fact that he had a certain minor authority. He proceeded to prowl up and down in front of the apple-sellers who, in the grip of seven men, had flailed themselves to a spreadeagled standstill.
