by Checkmate
She said, ‘Do I not come before vanity?’
‘I have that, too,’ he said. ‘But you know the difference between that and conscience. Every other woman since Eve has asked to be loved more than honour. But not you.’
‘If you have any,’ she said. ‘After what you have told me.’ She was standing.
He knew very well now what sort of attack he was under. He said, ‘Even if it is only a chimera, it makes marriage impossible.’
‘It seems a pity,’ Philippa said. ‘But if honour can’t make me the legal occupant of your bed, would it cavil at a private arrangement? Or do I have to be a fully paid bawd before you would think it proper?’
He said, ‘Don’t. That is not a weapon for you. And it destroys what we have.’
‘But I have nothing, yet,’ Philippa said. ‘And all the nicety is on your side. Which means I choose any weapon that suits me. You say I can’t hold you to your marriage. Neither I can. But I can find my way to your room; and to your bed. Do you think your scruples could survive that? Or I can come close to you now, like this. The door is locked.’
‘No!’ he said; and then controlled it immediately. ‘No, Philippa. Forgive me, but I’m going to call Archie.’ She was standing only four paces off.
‘For protection?’ she said.
He said, ‘I’m trying to save you. I’m trying to save myself, if you like. And Catherine. And Austin.’
‘They will marry someone else. Perhaps someone who loves them,’ Philippa said. ‘Can’t you forget what is behind you? Can’t you accept this gift for what it is? Or don’t you believe, don’t you see what it is?’
‘I see it,’ Lymond said. ‘It is out of my reach.’
There was an open box on the desk beside Philippa, and within it a bone pen, and a knife for trimming it. She stretched out her fingers and lifting the knife, laid it on her narrow palm. ‘Then,’ she said, ‘if you can slash your wrists from self-pity, you can hardly keep me from cutting mine, can you?’
He pushed himself from the grille. ‘Stop play-acting,’ he said. His tone, suddenly changed, held in it a note that was quite outside the usual.
Philippa allowed her calm gaze to dwell on him. ‘Why not? I thought we were speaking of death and dishonour? You would advance to your grave and I should join the ranks of your numerous dead: Diccon and Salablanca, Tosh and Christian Stewart; Oonagh; Will Scott and his father; Turkey Mat and Tom Erskine; the dog Luadhas; the child Khaireddin.… What shall I say to your son when I meet him? Don’t be surprised: your sire loved me also?’
The penknife shone in her hand. All he had to do was grasp her and take it. She added, gently, ‘It seems a just ultimatum.’
He said, his voice deathly tired, ‘You know that if you take one step nearer; if you lift that blade to your wrist, you have beaten me.’
The knife flashed and quivered on her palm. ‘I came here to defeat you,’ Philippa said. She added violently, ‘By any means.’
Against the gold and crimson and brown of the books, supported by Ovid and Cicero, by Virgil and Dante and Petrarch, Francis Crawford was standing now very still, as if the air was a burden to him. He said, ‘If you bring yourself to do it this way, I don’t think either of us could survive it.’
His face had radically altered. As she saw it, he turned to the shelves in a movement wholly involuntary, and the lances of candlelight followed him. He said, ‘Let us be ourselves.’
Grief caught her by the throat. Grief and anger.
This was what Marthe had wanted.
The penknife dropped to the ground, and lay shining. Philippa said, ‘It is your life.’ But it was said only in defence, and in protest. After a long time she said, ‘Very well.’
But this time he made no reply. Instead she heard a cruel intake of breath, such as a surgeon hears under the scalpel; and she saw that he had lifted his hands to his face, pressing so hard that his fingers were bloodless, with the shadow-wreaths of his collar voile cast on them. She said, ‘What is it?’
‘Another escape,’ he said. His voice shook, like a light bough in a storm just beginning. ‘I want you to go.’
She said, ‘I did this to you. What can I do?’
He didn’t answer. She seized a chair and dragged it up for him. ‘Sit. Francis, tell me what happens?’
He found the chair with one hand and dropped into it. He was shivering violently. He said, ‘Can you go? And send Archie?’
She caught his wrist, intent on finding its pulse; but was defeated. The delicate lace of his cuff covered even the heel of his palm. He drew a breath and said, the rising paroxysm shuttered hard by the bone of his hand, ‘Very soon, I shall be extremely sick … which will be a very great pity. Archie knows what to do. It would help me … if you went away.’
The words followed her as she ran down the long parquet floor and returned, running still, followed by Archie. To the sense of them she paid no attention. She followed behind as, his hand on Lymond’s arm, Archie guided him, lightly touching, down the passages to his apartments. And there, it was Philippa who held him when, as he foretold, Francis Crawford was sick, quite desperately so, for a long time. Then she found and measured a potion of sorts under Archie’s directions and brought it to the high bed where Archie had already installed his master.
He lay still, sunk in pillows, his eyes heavily closed; and when he opened them as she sat beside him, she saw with a kind of angry despair that they were not clearly trained on her features. J’irai donc, maugré toy … She wondered if, afterwards, he would remember all he had said this evening.
She said, ‘Try to forgive me. But try to remember.… There is a difference between absence and death. And you are needed.’
He had no strength and no resistance left; nor any saving stock of the wit and the detachment which had been his most precious qualities all the time she had known him. His lips parted, and his eyes rested open on the place where he thought he might find her.
‘Every other woman since Eve,’ he said. ‘Except you.’
Chapter 5
Le prince Anglois Mars à son cueur de ciel
Voudra poursuivre la fortune prospere
There were then twenty days left till the wedding.
How, in twenty days, do you create for a man a new and irresistible motive for his existence? And how, this done, do you preserve him and his family from a blow so devastating as to be, in some ways, worse than self-destruction?
And lastly, how do you achieve all these things while (concealing your grief and your anger) you prepare a spoiled, imperious, charming fifteen-year-old girl for her wedding?
It was noted, in those first days of Easter Week, that the sardonic habit of the young comtesse de Sevigny, refreshing as ever, verged more than usual towards the acid. She had no sympathy with the heated squabble over which two demoiselles possessed the necessary rank, not to mention muscle power, to support the bride’s twelve-yard train into the Cathedral Church of Notre-Dame in Paris, although she did supervise the safe, if acrimonious, shuttling between Paris and Fontainebleau of jewels for its embroidery.
A crown was having to be made because the Scottish Commissioners, to everyone’s surprise and annoyance, had failed to bring with them the Scottish Crown Matrimonial for use at the ceremony, and refused to send for it.
Richard, tackled about this, had been extremely vague and Philippa, abandoning a private theory through sheer pressure of work, went off to a stormy rehearsal of the children’s share in the wedding banquet entertainment. The twelve wicker unicorns, wheeled but not yet caparisoned, proved only that the makers had no idea of the battering power of small, fat six-year-old princes. The de Guise and de Valois children rammed them at one another while Lord Harry de Valois, sadly and with a slow cry of boredom, fell through his, the red Fleming hair engulfed like a flue brush.
Two hundred masks from Ferrara arrived as a bride’s gift to Mary, and instead of being placed in the gift-room, got used at a private and riotous party in the rooms of
the Duke of Lorraine, who could not be chastised for it as the King was cultivating him, and he claimed, pressingly, to be in love with Mistress Philippa, anyway.
The Scottish Commissioners agreed to take the oath of fidelity to the Dauphin as King of Scotland after the marriage, which pleased the Dauphin, who had settled in with a household of three hundred and his abominable jester called Chicot, who collected women’s garters. The Lyon King of Arms had a smiling discussion with the King of France’s principal officer at arms over the manner in which he proposed to quarter the Dauphin’s arms with those of Scotland, at the end of which the two herald courts ceased to speak to one another.
It was agreed that the bride’s eldest son should be King of France and Scotland, and that her eldest daughter, if she had no sons, should be Queen of Scots only. If the Dauphin were to die, it was settled, his Queen could either stay in France or return to Scotland as a widow, her jointure continuing to be paid whatever happened.
The Seven Planets and the Nine Muses both decided at the last moment to demand new bolts of cloth and different dressmakers, and Mercury’s staff disappeared and turned up, to much recrimination, in pawn with the silver snake missing. The Paris Master of Works came three times to consult with the Duke de Guise about the wooden gallery which was to carry the bridal procession to the Church of Notre-Dame, and the staging on which the wedding was to be carried out on the church threshold. The third time he went off and got drunk in a tavern at Fontainebleau and had to be found and carried away by Adam Blacklock, who with Danny and Jerott began to make an appearance, suddenly, in the vicinity, along with a number of other experienced captains.
A firm arrangement was made whereby, at the imprisoned Constable’s instigation, emissaries for peace from both the Spanish and French factions would hold a secret meeting almost at once between Péronne and Cambrai. It was decided with reluctance to omit jousting in fancy costume from the wedding programme, at a time when every provident man needed the money for weapons.
The dishes and entertainment for the wedding breakfast in the Bishop of Paris’s palace were decided on, and the same for the evening supper and ball in the Palais de Justice, the details being worked out by the Duke de Guise with the help of the Prince of Condé, whose brother, the Cardinal de Bourbon, was to conduct the marriage. It was decreed by his grace of Guise that all Scotsmen of rank, whoever they were, should have entrance to the evening banquet.
It was later decreed, after some tactful prodding, that all Scotsmen of rank should be admitted to the evening banquet, provided they were acquainted with the watchword Brede and Ale. The price of the watchword, starting at two sols, had got to ten by the middle of April.
The largest army so far recruited in the King of France’s reign began to draw together, paid for by gold newly raised by the Cardinal of Lorraine, and building towards an eventual muster at Verdun, on the Metz road so recently travelled by the comte de Sevigny and his fellow-leaders. The organizing of it, because of the partial preoccupation of the Duke de Guise, fell on the shoulders of M. de Nevers, M. d’Estrée, M. de Sipierre and other veterans of the Calais war, who each in turn found that the bulk of it had already been dealt with by Mr Crawford.
For twenty-four hours following the destructive confrontation in the Library Lymond had not been well enough to go out, but this only Archie knew, and Philippa at a remove, through Archie. After that, he was completely and methodically occupied and much away to the east, in the company of armourers, sappers, masters of camp, harbingers, master gunners and an assortment of experts not usually required for a wedding.
There was a rumour, borne out by the Maréchale de St André’s unusual benignity, that she had confronted the comte de Sevigny with a coy remonstrance over his lack of warmth towards his fiancée, and he had been politely savage in his rejoinder.
That took place, Philippa suspected, as an after-effect of the Library. There was a further rumour that Catherine, running from the room, had cried that she wasn’t proposing to marry M. de Sevigny anyway; and certainly her eyes were unusually red for some days. Then, about the middle of the month, her father the Marshal returned for six weeks’ parole from his prison at Breda and Lymond was mon cher François again, with St André’s hand on his shoulder wherever he went. Piero Strozzi, who had had a diplomatic attack of catarrh as usual during Holy Week, raised less laughter than usual by demanding which of the St Andrés the boy intended to marry anyway.
The Duke de Nemours was put down, with much ribaldry, to partner the prettily pregnant wife of the Duke de Guise in the dances after the wedding breakfast instead of Mademoiselle de Rohan who, as everyone knew, was also plein’ comme un oeuf, and bellicose with it.
On April 15th, the same prettily pregnant wife of the Duke de Guise was delivered of a son, six months after the Duke’s return from the Italian wars, and no one made any public comment at all, although perhaps for an interval it drew Queen Catherine and Madame de Valentinois imperceptibily closer.
A rumour that the Sieur de Brissac was to return to Piedmont in order to support the Turkish fleet and twelve thousand Janissaries in a landing at Genoa was officially scotched.
The Prévôt and échevins of Paris were formally invited to attend what the sieur de Chémault, Master of Ceremonies, had begun to call the most celebrated marriage ever made and visited the Cardinal of Lorraine to inquire about dress. Happily, the Cardinal of Lorraine informed them that they were to wear silk robes of the town livery, at the monarch’s expense. There followed, among themselves, a long and lethal quarrel on the subject of collars.
A rumour that the Sultan of Turkey entertained hopes of suborning the new French Grand Master in Malta turned out to be true, to the joy of Danny Hislop, in whom was budding a sharp curiosity about the Order.
M. de La Rochefoucauld, calling at the Palais to attend on the King, informed Madame la comtesse de Sevigny that some packets for Lord Grey had arrived at his house from England, and that the courier had expressed a wish to see her. Madame de Sevigny, rising sharply in the middle of a financial discussion on the usufruits of the duchy of Touraine and the comté of Poitou, sat down again, and continued to be bodily present throughout the entire remainder of the dowry conference, but absent as soon as it ended.
The courier, a merry gentleman with a brown beard, gave her some cheerful greetings from Sir Henry Sidney, some others from a Spanish gentleman called Alfonso Derronda and two kisses, which he delivered, from Jane Dormer and Nicholas Chancellor. He also gave her, from inside his pourpoint, a letter with the Sidney seal.
It bore, within it, a brief note from Sir Henry, certifying that the paper inside had come from the banker specified by Marco Schiatti, and represented a document deposited there by one Leonard Bailey of the manor of Gardington, England.
She took it to her room in the Palace to open it, but in the end she found she need not have troubled. For this paper, too, was a blank.
*
Strange to sit in her chamber, among the plotting, the laughter, the fighting, the lovemaking, the dancing, the luxury, the sycophancy and feel alone and afraid, bereft of judgement and confidence.
Stranger still to remember, with a dull and damnable irony, that under this roof another human being was alone and beleaguered, in a sense she had never yet known. And that they could not bring comfort to one another.
For an hour, she had held him between her hands, his hair under her cheek, his racked body gripped and sheltered by hers. The proximity which, half an hour before, would have destroyed him had come and gone disregarded in the landslide of action and anxiety. Afterwards there was no harvest for the long, aching nights: no recollection of the geometry of a lissom back, or of the firmness and warmth of filmed lawn under her steadying fingers. And Francis, she supposed, must be empty-handed as she was.
And now, this further burden, of which he knew nothing as yet.
What to do? Bailey, it seemed, had made no copies of Sybilla’s confessions: had trusted to no banker the information
which she or the Lennoxes would pay so much to receive. All he had done was to trick her into wasting time.
Where then were the originals? She could try the Hôtel des Sphères, where she had first seen them. Perhaps he had simply replaced them, laughing, in the same desk. Perhaps he had found somewhere to hide them. What he did not know was that she had a key. She would have no trouble in Paris, in finding someone to use it, and to search the whole house for the papers. Someone, that is, who had no skill in reading or writing, but could recognize a seal, and a superscription.
This she could and would do. It was the only thing left. For if the papers were not in the rue de la Cerisaye, there were no means by which she could trace them.
*
The Court moved to Paris. For two hundred years, no heir to the French throne had been married in his own country. Wedding fever and hopes of largesse gripped the populace. On the Tuesday before the marriage, the betrothal ceremony took place in the new Château of the Louvre, at which the Excellente Princesse Madame Marie d’Esteuart, Royne d’Escosse, stated that of her own free will and consent, and by the advice of her lady grandmother the Dowager Duchess of Guise and the Deputies of the Three Estates of Scotland she took the Dauphin Francis for her lord and husband, and promised to espouse him on the following Sunday, April 24th, in the face of Holy Church.
A ball followed, at which the royal hosts, their relatives and the princes and princesses of the blood performed a number of long, correct dances to the sounds made by a hardworking collection of hautbois, flageolets, viols, citterns, and violins, playing as loudly as possible.
Philippa de Sevigny, standing with the other ladies of honour watching her mistress, did not dance, being on duty.
She did not, in any real sense of the word, serve her mistress that evening either. The previous night, true to her plan, she had dispatched to the Hôtel des Sphères the small and inconspicuous thief someone had found for her. And that afternoon, she had walked out to meet him and with sinking heart, had received his report.
