Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  From the curtness of the reply, he guessed Lymond was working; and on entering, the first thing he saw was a candle-lit table loaded with papers, with more in boxes stacked on the floor. The campaign had been relegated, he observed, to a side desk, whose neat piles of maps and plans and papers and folders bore witness to the rest of the evening’s work. Half undressed under a sleeveless over-robe, Lymond was standing over one of the heavy boxes, sealing it. He said, ‘How was Jerott?’

  ‘Unhappy,’ said Adam. ‘I’ve just paid two tavern servants to come with me and see him home safely.’

  Lymond blew out the taper and, lifting a ring, pressed the cartouche into the soft wax and held it there. ‘Thirst, the devil of the desert. He didn’t invite you into his house?’

  ‘He was unconscious,’ said Adam shortly. ‘No. He chose to take me in the first place to an inn. We had supper and wine there.’

  Lymond slid the ring on to his fourth finger and lifting the box by its handles, placed it with the rest on the floor. Then he straightened, and walked to a cupboard. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘I am going to have a cup of Charnico. What will you have?’

  Adam shuddered. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘I am still going to have a cup of Charnico,’ Lymond said. He showed no fatigue. The demands of his profession seldom seemed to weigh on him, Adam knew from the past. Even after that long address to the burghers he had been perfectly fresh; and since Douai, noticeably, he had deferred not at all to the weaker flesh of his captains.

  Now he poured his wine and sat down in the chair next to Adam’s, the silver goblet held poised on his fingertips. He said, ‘Aut nulla Ebrietas, aut tanta sit ut sibi curat. Under stress, Jerott always took refuge in drink.’

  Adam said quietly, ‘Not only Jerott. But this is a habit of very long standing.’

  There was a little silence. Then Lymond said, ‘Is it affecting his commerce?’

  ‘No,’ said Adam. ‘The company is flourishing: he has a good business head and is well thought of. His wife deals in antiques. They trade from the house Marthe was brought up in. The old couple died.’

  Lymond savoured his wine. The pounced gem-cut seal on his ring flashed as he let the cup rest on his chair-arm. It was incised, Adam saw, not with his coat of arms, but with Russian characters. Lymond said, ‘Marthe is a bastard. The couple who lived in that house were a usurer-dealer called Gaultier, who called himself uncle. And his patron, an elderly woman who dabbled in mysticism. When they died, the house and fortune were both left to me.’

  Adam was silent. Jerott had told him that, ramblingly loquacious before the weeping had started. The Dame de Doubtance, the old woman who had made mad prophecies for Francis Crawford, and dying had left him everything, no one knew why. Unless it was because Marthe, brought up nameless and parentless, was sufficiently like him to be his twin sister.

  Lymond said, ‘Naturally, I offered both to Jerott’s wife, since the Dame de Doubtance had virtually reared her. But though as you may have observed we are as twoo buddes of the same tre, we do not always see eye to eye with one another. She refused.’

  ‘But accepted the house?’ Adam said.

  ‘Jointly with Jerott,’ said Lymond. ‘The Dame de Doubtance’s own rooms she kept intact for me. If the marriage founders, one or other will have to give up his tenancy.’

  Naturally, he had guessed. He knew Jerott. And presumably, in the four years since he had discovered her existence, he had come to know Marthe as thoroughly. Adam said, ‘He adores her.’

  ‘And yet he takes his friends to a tavern. His own marriage is in trouble. What then,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘does he think of mine to Philippa? You know my wife is a virgin?’

  Adam thought of leaving the room, and then decided, blearily, to go through with it.

  He said, ‘Jerott asked if she was. He says you married her three years ago in Turkey and parted immediately. He says it was a wedding of convenience, to be annulled when you got back to England. He says you’ve been back for five months, and if it hasn’t been dissolved yet, it must be for your own private reasons.’ Adam paused. ‘He has some tall stories, even for Jerott, about what happened on that journey to Stamboul.’

  Francis Crawford raised his eyebrows. ‘You are hoping I am going to tell you it was all due to Jerott’s vivid imagination, but of course, it was perfectly true.’

  He lifted his cup, smiling and twisted it, admiring the entwined lizards and winged duck-head ornament. ‘The little attack of blood-frenzy in Algiers; the fat Turk I was good to, on Djerba. The whores … the opium … the bastard I propagated on an Irish kern’s mistress … Jerott knows it all. And Jerott would have me boiled in hell and strained through a cloth if I behaved to Philippa as my dear Marthe is no doubt behaving to him.… You know she is in Lyon?’

  Adam sat up. ‘You’re talking of Philippa?’

  ‘Staying with the Schiatti. She has been invited to call on Marthe at six tomorrow afternoon. So have I, in a message from Jerott. If what you say is true, why should Jerott choose to throw Philippa and myself together?’

  ‘He didn’t know,’ Adam said. ‘I swear he didn’t know Philippa was in Lyon.’

  ‘But Marthe did. So Marthe isn’t afraid for Philippa’s virtue. Marthe wants us to meet there tomorrow. I wonder,’ said Lymond, ‘why?’

  Adam shook his head. A scar, thready in the flickering candles, marred the thin, distinguished lines on his face, and his hands lay open on his lap, their sketching days over now that there was no great band of fighting men on whom to exercise daily his talents. Lymond rose with eloquent ease and said, looking down at the other, ‘You should have stayed with the Muscovy Company.’

  ‘I know,’ said Adam. He got up.

  There must have been something over-critical or over-searching in his expression. Francis Crawford lifted his open hand and arming the other man with sudden force, walked him to his threshold and released him beyond it. The slam with which the door closed reverberated through all the stout floors of the Hôtel de Gouvernement.

  Madame la Maréchale recognized it, as perhaps he intended. Lymond was clearing away the last of his papers when he heard her door open. He waited, listening, but there was no further movement. He finished therefore what he was doing and then, pouring himself another cup of wine, walked to his own door and opened it.

  Candlelight spilled from the double carved door of her room, defining the tall shadow of her robed figure, standing there. Her black hair, unconfined, fell straying over the silk of her night-shift. Her face, freshly painted, was young in the kind, golden light and her scent, invading the corridor, reached him where he stood in turn, the cup in his fingers. She said softly, ‘Have you finished your wine? I can offer you some.’ And waited as, seasoned, desirable, he came to her through the quiet passageway.

  Chapter 4

  Le capitaine conduira la grande proye

  Sur la montagne des ennemis plus proche.

  The next morning the pots of war boiled, and the merchants of Lyon discovered, as Danny Hislop remarked, what they were paying for.

  At dawn the first messengers began to come in: from Berne and Metz; Marseille, Mâcon and Turin. A little later, the chief officers of the Consulat arrived to report and confer, followed by the members of the new safety committee and the captain of the guard. Danny Hislop left shortly with a book of orders, to accompany them. Adam stayed behind with Lymond’s secretariat, correlating the reports as they came in and transmitting the resulting instructions as the comte de Sevigny issued them.

  He had been up at dawn, Adam knew. Depressed and faintly liverish, he resented Lymond’s unclouded acumen; his competence; his unflagging versatility. He had heard, last night, the door of Madame la Maréchale’s room open. He had heard it open again, some time later, and another door quietly close.

  They said that whatever Lymond might elect to do in a woman’s bedchamber, he never slept there. Irritated, Adam lifted the list he had just been given and began stabb
ing pins into maps. Lymond had been quite right. He should have stayed with the Muscovy Company.

  Marguerite de Lustrac, Maréchale de St André, came downstairs a little late; superbly corseted; a little ponderous; her aura heady as peaches, sun-ripened and perfumed in a silversmith’s workshop. She brought them spiced wine and almonds with her own hands and Adam, sharp-set by then, was glad of them. But she was charmingly dismissed after ten minutes: she had hardly withdrawn, smiling, before Lymond had the table cleared for the next item on his agenda.

  It was an appallingly hard morning’s work.

  Outside, the sun blazed, close to its zenith. At eleven, the travails in the Hôtel de Gouvernement came to a brief halt for dinner. Just before twelve, the small, broken-nosed man called Archie Abernethy left the Hôtel Schiatti where he served and looked after his young mistress Philippa, and proceeded to walk downhill through the town to the river.

  The last street to cross his path was the Grand’Rue, and on the opposite side of that was the cobbled square round which the Petit Palais and the Hôtel de Gouvernement were built. It was cool where he stood, under the arch spanning the rue de Garillan. Archie Abernethy folded his arms, and disposed himself inconspicuously in a corner, and waited.

  A monk came out of a side door in the square, wearing the habit of the noble order of the Chapter of St John, which demanded of its chanoine comtes a minimum of sixteen quarterings on the escutcheon. The man called Archie Abernethy, detaching himself silently from the shadowy neck of the rue de Garillan, moved out into the busy Grand’Rue and, mingling with the passers-by, followed him.

  As might be expected, the monk turned to his left and walked south, towards the Cathedral. Almost immediately, however, he changed direction and took the right-hand road into the rue Berthet, and then turned left and right again up the steep slope of the rue Tirecul to reach the highest lateral street on the hillside, the Montée St Barthélemy.

  This he followed, climbing up to the left until he came to one of the small ports in the town wall. Passing through a good deal behind his quarry, Archie Abernethy found himself among green trees, on the heights of the Fourvière hill. Noiseless on the deep grass the little man climbed the hill until, just below the chapel, the monk found an outcrop of rock by a clearing and turning, halted to enjoy the view. His pursuer stopped also.

  Below them, the mottled, dun-coloured roofs of the city descended the hill to the water. Across the river the Presqu’île lay in sunshine, the painted ships crowding its quays and fringing the window-brocaded frontage, and the vista of roofs and tall chimneys above it. Behind that stretched the Rhône, and the rolling country beyond its one bridge. And furthest of all, glimmering in the sun-hazy sky, the Alpine snows of the gateway to Italy.

  The hubbub of the city lapped them, low and muted as sea-surf, rising and falling; bearing a cry, or the sound of a bell on its wrack. On the hill, there was birdsong and silence and the smell of warm herbage and myrrh from the chapel.

  There was a shrine tangled with ivy overlooking the outcrop and beside it a spring, and a small statue, decently carved. The monk, turning, dipped both his hands in the water and then, shaking free of the stifling hood, cupped his face in its sweet, mossy coolness. His hair, burnished gold in the sunshine, was innocent of any tonsure. And the supple fingers, laced over his eyelids, identified him to Archie Abernethy as clearly as the rich fabric glimpsed under the habit.

  With a crack, a rotten bough broke in the wood and fell from branch to branch with a hiccoughing swish. The little man with the broken nose turned, startled, to watch it.

  He removed his gaze from the monk for only a moment, but it was enough.

  He heard no one moving. Only a hand gripped his thigh and another his arm and grunting, he found himself jerked from his niche and forced hurtling through the air, somersaulting to the edge of the outcrop. His knife was wrenched from its sheath. He hit the ground with his shoulders and roared as his feet plunged and stamped into vacancy. He began to fall just as Lymond’s voice said ‘Archie!’ and Lymond’s hands, still wet from the spring, gripped him with all their sinewy strength and drew him back up to safety.

  Archie Abernethy lay on his back gasping, and his mistress’s domineering spouse stood over him, eyeing him coldly.

  ‘And what the bloody hell,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘do you think you are doing? Trying to prove to somebody that I can’t protect myself?’

  The small, sun-tanned man with the grey beard sat up and rubbed himself where it hurt most. ‘Ye didna ken it was me,’ he retorted.

  ‘No. I thought it was that pot-bellied oaf from Midculter who was watching the house all this morning. Why?’

  ‘I wanted a word wi’ ye,’ said Archie placatingly. ‘I would have nudged ye in the street, but I fell to wondering if anyone else was following ye. I couldna approve of the heid of an army wandering about the like o’ yon with all the work still to do. What do I call ye … milord Count?’

  ‘Mr Crawford will do,’ said Lymond tersely. They had known each other, if fitfully, for seven years. He returned to the spring, rinsed the dust from his hands and picking up Archie’s knife, threw it to him. ‘With all the work still to do, as you say, I have to go down soon. You don’t seem to have lost any of your native effrontery.’

  ‘I do well enough,’ said Archie. ‘I stayed in Scotland while ye were blowing your tucket in Russia. When Mistress Philippa came to tell us she was going to France, your leddy mother teilt me to go with her.’ His black eyes, sharp in the seamed face, scanned every change in the other man’s countenance.

  ‘Philippa called at Midculter?’ said Lymond. He had drawn out a handkerchief and was drying his fingers one by one on it, slowly. ‘And how is the third baron Crawford of Culter?’

  ‘Your brother is well,’ said Archie shortly. ‘And all the bairns, and his wife. They consider your place is in Scotland.’

  ‘So I hear,’ said Lymond agreeably. ‘Unfortunately for almost everyone, I have no intention of going there. Do I gather Mistress Philippa is in France to fetch me?’

  ‘You ken better than that,’ said Archie tartly. ‘If we’d known ye were in Lyon, she’d never have come here. She was going to Blois to track down some bluidy papers, but Mistress Marthe answered her letter first, and told her to come here to begin with.’ His black eyes rested on Lymond’s downcast blue ones. ‘She means you and Mistress Philippa to meet in her house.’

  ‘By shifty means and crooked ways. I have realized that,’ said Lymond. ‘Ah, and who is he apart, marked out with sprays of olive and offering sacrifice? Perhaps she is anxious to have nieces and nephews.’

  ‘She also says,’ pursued Archie, who was used to this, ‘that she suggested the ultimatum that kept ye from Russia. If that makes mair sense to you nor it sounds like.’

  Lymond lifted his eyes. ‘So you’ve seen her?’ he said. ‘Yes, it makes sense. Someone told Piero Strozzi on his way north to Court that this divorce was proving troublesome, and that the way to keep me was to defer it. I was informed Mr Blyth was responsible.’

  ‘No,’ said Archie. ‘He wants you to go back to Russia.’

  ‘And take Marthe with me, I suspect,’ said Lymond. He studied Archie. ‘You know what these papers are, that Philippa is looking for?’

  ‘I guessed,’ said Archie. Under the tanned hide, his neck had reddened.

  ‘You needn’t let it disturb you,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘I am not the only man whose wife has diligently attempted to prove him a bastard. The novelty lies in the fact that my lady mother apparently allowed her to come here and do it. And, of course, Mistress Marthe, whose share in the family tree no one can deny, even if no one can begin to explain it.… You came here, therefore, to warn me about Marthe?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Archie. ‘And Mistress Philippa says, can you talk with her privately before this afternoon’s meeting?’

  ‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘I have no intention of meeting Mistress Philippa privately, either before or after this afterno
on’s meeting. What she does is of no possible interest to me: my reputation doesn’t rest on my parentage. The quicker she finds what she is looking for, the sooner presumably she will get out of France and cease troubling us.’

  ‘I’ll tell her,’ said Archie grimly. His neck was still red. He said suddenly, ‘Why did you come to the hill?’

  Lymond looked at him, and for a moment perhaps, might have answered. Then he said crisply, ‘To look at the view. You have seen Marthe. You have seen me. You are staying with Philippa. You can only be loyal to one of us.’

  There was a little silence. ‘Do you say?’ said Archie Abernethy. ‘Then I suppose I must be Mistress Philippa’s man.’

  He bowed neatly and, refraining from limping, stepped off the ledge and moved downhill through the undergrowth.

  Francis Crawford, standing still, watched him vanish. Faint upon the air, the treble voices of boys floated behind him in plainsong: a recorder, uncertainly played, picked up a counterpoint and accompanied them. Birdsong veiled it in notes of dazzling sound as he moved downhill, his habit drifting through ferny shadow. Above his head, corridors of luminous green rose up to the sunlight, leaded like a rose window with wrought twigs and delicate filaments. Cascades of green light fell on his path and damasked all the tall tree trunks descending below him; arresting him with blinding dazzlements.

  Between the bright particular leaves he looked down for the last time on the city: the misty tesserae, grey and beige and brown of the tall, garden-hung buildings; the four square towers, ochre and grey of the abbatiale; the copper-verdigris patina of the smooth river; the pure, cold snows like a lamp in the distance which, as he watched, dimmed over with mists, leaving nothingness.

  Then, walking briskly, he stepped from the hillside.

  *

  Returned presently to his cabinet in the Hôtel de Gouvernement, M. de Sevigny isolated with clinical exactitude all the errors of execution which had occurred during the past hour and corrected them, with an acid ruthlessness which reduced one man to tears and Adam to silent, blind fury.