by Checkmate
‘I should make faggots of your bones, shouldn’t I, me little ugglesome allies? You lay your sticky trotters on us, who come to fight your wars for you? I think you need to be taught a little right feeling, eh brothers? So on your knees, Flemings. And prime your chops, Flemings. You’re going to lick the road clean for me and my fellows to walk on. And you’re going to pray like two English gents, while you’re at it. I’ll tell you what to pray. You say, God save the Queen and f—— Flanders.’
‘You bloody donkey!’ yelled Lymond. ‘D’you think I’ve been swearing in Walloon? When were you last in London? Never bloody saw it, I wager. Well, I tell you something. I was born by the Pissing Conduit at St Christopher’s Parish, and I can tell an English soldier from a parcel of hop-picking yokels from Surrey. What’s more, I know milord Wentworth.’
‘Do you, now?’ said an educated voice. The Knight-Porter and the fifty men at arms had arrived. The grip on the two apple-sellers slackened. Lymond looked up, his two-day stubble stippling his baleful, unwashed countenance.
‘That is,’ said Lymond sulkily, ‘I had an aunty that cleaned out his jakes for him. We’re honest traders, my lord. The gentlemen had no call to set on us. We sell sweet apples to those that’ll pay for them, but we’re poor men. If you take our goods from us by force, why, you take our livelihood, and that’s not an Englishman’s way. Leastways, not when I was in London.’
‘It is still not an Englishman’s way,’ said the Knight-Porter repressively. ‘Release these men. Replace the apples. Set the wagon to rights. You say your wares are for sale?’
‘Yes, milord,’ said Lymond. He dived nervously for his hat and clutched it, turning it round and round against his coarse jerkin. ‘All save a barrel bespoke for the Ruisbank.’
‘What price are you asking?’ said the Knight-Porter.
‘Two sols, milord,’ said Lymond. ‘Tuppence a pound, you would say. And fit for her highness at Greenwich, bless her dear, saintly heart.’ Piero Strozzi, rubbing his arms, let his mouth fall dumbly open.
‘We shall take them,’ said the Knight-Porter curtly. ‘And at three sols, to compensate for your pains. Can you turn the animal round, and bring the wagon into the courtyard?’
Lymond hesitated. ‘There’s a barrel of them for the Ruisbank. We made a bond on it,’ he said.
The Knight-Porter had grown impatient. ‘We shall see that you are helped to deliver it. Do you want to take my offer or not?’
‘Oh. Aye. Your lordship,’ said Lymond, ‘is a real gentleman. Milord, you’ve struck a blow for the honour of England, and when you see those dear green fields again, mind and salute them for me and my uncle.’
Later, sitting below Ruisbank Fort waiting for the ferryman to take them back across the harbour to Calais, Piero Strozzi said, ‘I have a strong objection to being described as your uncle.’
‘I beg your pardon,’ said Lymond. ‘I thought perhaps you would prefer uncle to father. It wasn’t, incidentally, the regular Knight-Porter. That was Sir Henry Palmer.’
‘Ah,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘The man who has helped to hold Guînes while my lord Grey has been away with King Philip?’
‘Yes. I knew Tommy, the older brother. He held Guînes and Calais appointments as well. Meddled in politics, however, and paid for it.’
‘I had heard. I had also heard that my lord Grey of Wilton was in trouble at the same time, but was reckoned too good a soldier to execute, even though he might lean to the Reformers. The English Pale is a useful exile, it seems to me, for the nation’s more recalcitrant citizens.’
Piero Strozzi turned and looked at his placid companion. ‘You took some trouble to get me this morning to Mass. Can it have escaped your memory that I refused a Cardinal’s hat in my youth? That Pope Leo was my mother’s brother? That I have a sister an Abbess and a brother a Cardinal at this moment?’
‘How could I forget? It was you,’ said Lymond, ‘who mentioned expediency.’ Behind them, the crenellated tower of the fort cut the sky. The garrison had been surprised to receive a barrel of apples, but delighted with it. Rumour had been correct: food stocks were low. And behind the fort lay the long line of the beach and the sea, whose murmur came to them even here, in the busy port. As he spoke to Strozzi he was filing facts as he knew the other was doing: facts about the number and size of the boats in the harbour; the position of the fishing fleet, the notorious drop in the tide, the gun emplacements along the walls and at the Watergate entrance to the city; the flood gates which controlled the intake for the moat of the citadel.
To the right, reeds in plumed, pale banks moved like drowned horses’ manes in the marshes. There was water everywhere. Save for the sand dunes the land was an endless, sludge-coloured slade, and above it, the wide pale sky, as wide and as light as in Russia.
‘I stand on neither side. I fight with Lutherans and against them. I lead the Pope’s army, and kiss his hands, if he will give me soldiers to throw against Florence. I am a man with no God,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘And you? You paid lip service at the altar. But I hear that those who would have you in Scotland have so far lit on no inducement.
‘Is it conscience which holds you? Yet I believe that the Queen-Regent allows those of the Reformed Faith to live within her daughter’s kingdom. Or is it a family quarrel? But your brother the Baron I recall as a charming, a moderate man, and nine years ago your mother the Dowager made me welcome and spoke of you as no man or woman, I can tell you, has ever spoken of me. And yet … my father was a true man. Tortured, he took his own life so that he would not dishonour himself. He wrote on the walls of his cell, “If I did not know how to live, I shall know how to die.” ’
The rowing boat was approaching over the sage-grey reflections of the walls of Calais, with behind the sturdy stalk of the Watch Tower and the square tower of the belfry among all the steep tiled roofs and spires. On the east walls the windmills buzzed, active as thread in the stiff breeze, which made fingerprints in the pale water and had silted up every crevice and gradient around them with a thick grouting of peach-coloured sand. Lymond said, ‘I too stand on neither side but … not, I think, without a God. If I went back, I should have to choose.’
‘And is that a bad thing?’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘It is difficult. It would be more gratifying, I can see, to rule all Muscovy than a nation smaller than Paris, with Mother France looking over your shoulder. Politics and religion are no longer fingers on the same hand, and your Queen-Regent’s tolerance may not last for ever. Your country may be governed well in the name of a religion you cannot agree with; or badly by those who worship as your conscience also instructs you. You may have to choose between your God and your country. Or you may have to choose differently from your family, who wish you to come back. Is this what you fear?’
‘Part of it,’ Lymond said. ‘It is all rather more complex than you imagine.’ He got to his feet.
Piero Strozzi rose likewise. ‘And your family? If the new religion brings trouble, and your brother were to die, who will they turn to?’
‘There is no doubt, of course, of the answer,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘But considering where we are at the moment, the question perhaps is academic. May I assist you, as my aged uncle, into the boat? I have a note from Senarpont which says that at the sign of the Trois Tetes is a very good inn. I suggest we now go and turn our apples into sour beer and naughty doings among citizens and mechanics and other lubberly loiterers.’
As it turned out, the beer at the Trois Têtes was excellent. Piero Strozzi, forced against nature to remain dumb, watched his companion rapidly and expertly become drunk, thereafter striking up a bosom friendship with a number of the aforesaid citizens and mechanics, including a brewer called Pigault who described, with a nice turn of phrase, the entire sluice system from Newnham Bridge to Gravelines which, if the silly bastards at the Citadel ever opened it, would drown all next summer’s crops and let in salt water round the town that would spoil all the brewing and cause such an uprising that Tommy Wentworth
and the bloody Council wouldn’t know which to face first—the French or the Calaisiens. The only soldier among them was Willie Grey, and he was away with the foreigners leaving Braying Teddy to hold Guînes, and Guînes, said Mr Pigault morosely, was a damn sight worse off than Calais.
He called King Philip a number of names, and embarked on a series of dirty songs all of which Lymond appeared to know in several versions. The session ended when Mr Pigault, full of his own beer, slid comfortably under the table. From there, after brotherly leavetakings, the applesellers made their way to the market-place where, under the Gothic towers of the Staple, they filled their cart with cloth, cheeses and tallow and began to make their leisurely way again by Rigging Street and the Shafts and Cock Lane to the Millgate, the east door out of Calais.
Above the portals, a two-line verse had been cut, with some optimism:
Il sera vraisemblable que Calais on assiege
Quand le fer ou le plomb nagera comme liège.
When they were free to speak openly: ‘Have you,’ inquired Marshal Piero Strozzi of M. le comte de Sevigny, Chevalier of the Order, ‘ever witnessed iron to swim like a cork?’
‘No,’ said the comte de Sevigny soberly. ‘But Nature’s laws are beyond a simple man’s reckoning. If I were asked to wager, I would say that before the new year, iron will swim; and Englishmen with it.’
They left the cob and wagon at Ardres and slept at Cléry in the same ruined barn, where the food and drink had been replenished and a sum of money added, divided into two purses. Healthily tired, with beer, with laughter, with riding, Marshal Strozzi slept instantly.
Lymond was later in quenching the candle. Waking at first light, Piero Strozzi found by his pallet a neat stack of paper, closely written, with beside it some cards bearing intricate plans: of the Citadel; of Fort Ruisbank; of the four gates and the bulwarks of Calais. He was examining them when Lymond came back into the barn fully dressed, and picked up his sword.
Strozzi said, ‘I may be old enough to be your unfortunate uncle, but I have my powers of memory yet. Why waste a night’s sleep? I shall, if you wish, applaud your skill as a cartographer. My little friend Nicolas de Nicolay produced a plan of Guînes just as pretty. You were his pupil?’
‘I was taught by an Englishman. The notes are an aide-memoire, that’s all. You will have a great deal to add. I wished you to take them because,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘you are going straight back to Compiègne, and it will be two days before I can join you. I have some business in the country to attend to.’
‘So!’ said Piero Strozzi. He sat very still, his broad naked shoulders, stuck with straw, glistening in the dim light. ‘A woman?’
‘I said business,’ said Lymond. ‘Remember? The intellectual passion that drives out sensuality.’
‘Then a little more spying?’ said Piero Strozzi slowly. ‘You are in bad country for it. You had better tell me where you are going. Dressed like that, you will be killed: you will not be taken prisoner.’
‘Private business,’ said Lymond. ‘I know the risks. If I don’t return, you may give Monseigneur de Guise my deepest apologies. I enjoyed our excursion. I have translated into Italian, by the way, the song you didn’t understand. If you ever come face to face with King Philip, you can sing it to him.’
Piero Strozzi roared, ‘Body of God, I shall!’ and stood up, and slapped the other man on the shoulder and watched as he swung into the saddle and set off through the low scrub on a track which seemed to lead south-east, between Péronne and Saint-Quentin.
It was not a direction Piero Strozzi fancied. A stretch of flat, ravaged farmland punctuated by strong forts: some held by French and some by the varied troops of King Philip. It had been their plan to return to Compiègne via Péronne, where a troop of pioneers and hackbutters under the man Hislop had been given work to attend to. Escorted by this band, it should have been simple to escape or outface the enemy.
The crazy Scotsman had taken no food or wine with him, which meant he was not going far. His motives could not be treachery. They were almost certainly, in spite of his denials, to do with a woman. Which meant untidy watch-keeping. Which meant possible capture and confession, and the end of all their hopes of Calais, unless M. de Sevigny had the will power of Philippe Strozzi, which was unlikely.
Cursing, Piero Strozzi dressed, packed and left very soon after his companion, but unlike his companion, did not give a wide berth to Péronne. Instead, he recruited six men, including Danny Hislop, and set out to track down his imprudent late fellow-traveller.
Chapter 6
Dedans les puys seront trouvez les os,
Sera Vinceste commis par le maratre
L’estat changé, on guerra bruit et los,
Et aura Mars attendant pour son astre.
The journey upon which Francis Crawford was embarked had indeed to do with a woman, but was one which he made with no prospect of pleasure or profit, but solely for the sake of a promise. Because an extraordinary degree of self-control in public and in private through the years had become second nature to him, he made it without deviating and without weighing the consequences; or indeed anything but the obstacles which lay before him.
These were not few. Before he had been riding ten minutes, he had to dismount and hold his horse silently in a tangle of dew soaked undergrowth while a troop of mercenaries clattered by, the red cross plain in the lavender haze of the morning. For some reason, King Philip’s troops were moving early. After that, he crossed open fields only when it was necessary, taking shelter at the first sound of men’s voices, or the chime of bridle and spurs, or the vibration which meant hooves beating a way over mud-clods.
There were very few ploughed fields. Wagon trains had spent the autumn rolling through Picardy, and wheeled cannon, and ensigns of armed men on thick Flemish horses. At first, no doubt, they had paid for the apples they took from the orchards, and the hay from the barns, and the cabbages from the kailyard and the nets of onions hanging from the thatched eaves. They had even paid, perhaps, for the daughters and sisters they tumbled.
And then, of course, however skilled the command and however well-intentioned the discipline, they would cease to pay. The farms were deserted; even the bigger ones, built like a fortress, with walls and towers enclosing the pond and the barns and the farmhouse. Many were blackened with fire. Others, the stage for some bitter encounter, had been reduced by both Spaniards and French to a haphazard pattern of stone, picturesque as grey Mauresque fretwork against the red fire of rosehips and the ashen drift of seeding blossom from the shelves of marauding black creeper.
He moved from place to place down the swampy track of the River Somme, wary of the flights of small birds; crouched behind some garden wall close to the pale yellow of charlock, or a bed of forgotten pansies, gold and red and dark, bloomy grapecolour; or again, in the rushes beside one of the marshy ponds which glittered through all the flat country, with moorhen tracking its jade lichened surface. By then, he had freed and sent off his horse. With the country alive with movement such as this, he was better on foot.
It took him until midday, using all the more primitive skills he was master of, to get himself just north of Ham, the new-taken fortress occupied by King Philip, and the seat of his army in Picardy under the Duke of Savoy, his chief general. Except that the flag flying now from its square tower was not the personal standard of Philip, by the grace of God king of Spain, England, Sicily, Naples and Jerusalem. The distant trumpets, the frantic marching and counter-marching were all now quite explicable. Philip, last to make his stately entrance upon the battlefield, had that morning become the first to make his stately exit. In case, one week later, he would be forced to leave at a gallop.
It was news, Francis Crawford recognized, to lift Strozzi’s heart. It meant his own intuition was correct in thinking the time had come to plan this push against Calais. It meant that de Guise and Strozzi together could force it to a conclusion. Senarpont, the Governor of Boulogne, was a good man, and would
see to the detail. In the long stretches of waiting that morning, when thought like a madman in a quarry had to be manacled, he had seen quite clearly the whole possible sequence of action, down to the last company of Schwartzreiters; the last flamboyant eruption of ambitious noblemen.
And now, so close to his destination, he must think of the business at hand. He must try to find the farm of the woman Renée Jourda, who had once been a village girl of Coulanges and who, ten years before he was born, had left her home to follow to Scotland the lady adored for her wit and her beauty called Sybilla Semple, who had broken short her stay at the nunnery. Who had married Gavin Crawford, the second Baron of Culter. Who had given birth to Richard her heir, who now held the title in Scotland. And who had brought himself up with joy, with laughter, with care, as her second son; although it appeared … it was certain, that he was not. A circumstance with which, not being a child, he would come to terms, no doubt, presently.
There were only three farms round the ruins of Flavy-le-Martel, and two of them were empty, except for a starved dog tied to a ring which cried at him as he freed it, its bones arching through its stretched skin. It ran to a pool of green mud and devoured it, before sliding off into the undergrowth. Francis Crawford watched it, and then moved out and on to the last.
The faded sign said Proyart; but that meant nothing. If Renée Jourda the village girl had a farm, it was because she had married.
Whoever had married the master of this domain had not led an easy life. Once, a fence might have surrounded it. Now it was fenced only by a ring of dark trees, and the steep, tiled roofs which crowded round the unkempt yard and marbled pond were gapped and ribbed like unravelled jersey-cloth. Lymond walked quietly forward.
The trees in the orchard were not ripe yet for robbing. They stood, brooding and ancient above their rotting wickets of poles, upholding their fruit like green lanterns; and behind them, a row of dry spires strung on withies showed where the vines had been. The house itself was closed and shuttered and cold and the well bucket had dust and dead leaves in it.
