Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘My excesses are other,’ Lymond said. He picked up his half-full glass. ‘But I don’t refuse wine like this. You have heard what the merchants’ loan to the King is to be? Six hundred thousand crowns, a hundred thousand of it without interest. On touche toujours sur le cheval qui tire. Or, whom God loves, his bitch brings forth pigs. Your reports were invaluable.’

  ‘Is Polvilliers coming?’ Jerott asked. Against the window, his face was hard to read, although the candlelight glimmered on the figured silk which clothed his finely built body; and on the powerful legs, and the rings on the strong, swordsman’s hands.

  Lymond said, ‘Hell, Jerott: you gave me half the information yourself. It’s true enough. The prospects are as fair as they can be. The cantons have promised to help us raise eight thousand Ku’milchers, and I’m clearing the ground round them and putting two thousand Germans into that fortress as soon as I can. Mâcon will have three thousand Switzers. I have someone working on one of Polvilliers’s captains as well. He might desert. He was well treated once as a prisoner. You know the sort of thing that has to be looked after. It all requires money.’

  ‘I wondered what you were doing, that was all,’ Jerott said. He left the window, looked vaguely round for the wine and finding none, rang a bell and waited. ‘It’s hard to get well-trained servants. Marthe has to travel a good deal to buy stock. She’s as well known as Gaultier was. You can see. She makes more money than I do.’ The door opened, and he turned his head. ‘God’s bones, you took your time coming.… Oh.’

  It was Marthe, with another flask of wine in her hands. She said, ‘We find it a little hard to keep servants. They don’t always work on the same time-adjustment as Jerott. I should have had a second flask ready: I’m sorry.’ She met Jerott’s dark eyes and said to Lymond, ‘I think you might sit down, even if no one has asked you. Have you been questioned yet on your triumphs in Russia? Jerott is longing to ask you.’

  ‘He has been talking about you, and your successes,’ Lymond said. ‘And thank you, but I have enough wine. How is Philippa progressing?’

  The lint-blue gaze lingered on him, caressingly. Marthe placed the flask at Jerott’s side and subsided in a sigh of wide, harebell skirts on a foot-stool. ‘Forgive! and never will I aft trespass. She is half-way through: the acme of speed and efficiency. Why don’t you settle for marriage with her, my Francis? A little house well filled, a little land well tilled, a little wife well willed …?’

  ‘After Russia?’ he said with amusement.

  The schooled face accepted everything, smiling. ‘Don’t you think Philippa worthy of you? Or is she finding you a little too experienced for her? What effected the transformation?’

  ‘She was trained at the English court,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘Mary Tudor on top of the ministrations of Güzel would alter anyone’s habits.’

  ‘I had forgotten,’ said Marthe. Whimsically, the disarming blue gaze scanned her step-brother. ‘Of course, she was taught by Güzel. Then you must certainly forget your divorce and do your duty by her, my gallant Francis. Think of the continuity!’

  For a moment no one spoke. Then Lymond got to his feet. ‘I have a better idea. You marry her,’ he suggested.

  Neither the words nor the sense had filtered to Jerott, who was staring from sister to brother, his black hair faintly dishevelled. He said, ‘You don’t mean it. You can’t mean it, either of you. Philippa went into this marriage, assured that it was only a paper one. I was there. I remember how it happened. My God, Francis … She’s Kate Somerville’s daughter, an innocent hardly more than a schoolgirl. If she’s turned out a prize, it still gives you no damned right to talk about bedding her.’

  ‘That was Marthe’s share in the discussion,’ Lymond said. ‘I merely sat displaying passive resistance. If I may put it so crudely: should I wish satisfaction, I hardly need to resort to my wife.’

  ‘Then why are you still here?’ demanded Jerott. He sat, his face blurred with claret, peering at Francis Crawford in the dusk. ‘Devil take it, you were overlord of a country. You had the Tsar and his minions running pecking like poultry, so Adam says. Why don’t you go back? Or are you waiting to force that girl back with you?’

  Wildly, Lymond stared at him. Then he turned, and in an explosion of breath slapped his hands on the sideboard and rested his weight over them. Crusts of wax, jarred from the candles, lay about him. He said softly, unlocking each separate syllable, ‘I am trying to go back. I thought, believe it or not, that nothing could stop me from going back. I was wrong. Marthe has stopped me. She suggested to the French that my divorce should be withheld unless I fight for them.’

  He looked at Marthe as did her husband, his mouth a little open. ‘Mother of God,’ said Jerott Blyth stormily.

  ‘I beg your pardon,’ said a firm voice from the doorway. A wash of light brought clarity suddenly into the darkening room and bestowed a robust chestnut gloss on the bare head of Philippa Somerville entering with another candlestick in one hand. She advanced, aiming the flame at her husband and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing. Do I gather you stayed in France because of a bargain?’

  Lymond turned round and laid his hands on the edge of the sideboard. Then he looked at his step-sister.

  ‘Yes,’ said Marthe and stayed precisely where she was, sitting on the low stool, staring with curling lip at her husband. ‘I suggested it to Piero Strozzi. They say the Tsar is power-mad. By the end of a year, there will be no controlling him, or the Russian army. There is little chance of it now. That is why Adam and his other captains have been trying so hard to prevent Francis from leading them to disaster. And why his wife has conspired to keep him in West Europe also. Is it not allowed,’ said Marthe dulcetly, ‘for a sister to protect her brother?’

  Philippa set down the candlestick with a thump. ‘Is that true? You’re here only because they won’t give you a divorce otherwise?’

  ‘I’m sorry. Are you insulted?’ said Lymond.

  ‘Why do you want a divorce?’ said Philippa bluntly.

  Stricken silent, three by no means inarticulate people looked at her. Then Lymond, speaking carefully, said, ‘Because, I assume, you would prefer to be free.’

  Philippa’s clear brow wrinkled, and then smoothed again. ‘I suppose I should,’ she said. ‘But on the other hand, the Pope is old and I’m in no particular hurry. Was that the only reason?’

  ‘No,’ said Lymond. The double candlelight underlit his hair and his eyes and his cheekbones, all of them untrustworthy evidence. Philippa, from long experience, watched his hands, long-fingered and resilient, pressed hard on the walnut frieze of the sideboard. He removed them. He said, ‘In this far from seemly conversation, I suppose I had better bring in the name of Güzel.’

  ‘Yes. Well, we all know about Güzel,’ Philippa said. ‘But you told me once you didn’t intend her to have any children. So why after all this time feel bound to marry her? Wouldn’t she have you without it?’

  ‘Yes. Do tell us,’ said Marthe with interest. ‘Wouldn’t she have you without it?’

  There was a brief silence. Francis Crawford said to his wife, ‘I am not sure if I follow you. Am I to assume that you are willing to dispense with a divorce if I wish to escape from France and find my way after all to Russia? I am, of course, delighted. Only the change of policy is, may I say, a little tardy?’

  Philippa Somerville stood with her hands clasped and viewed, a little pale, the spectacle of Lymond losing his temper. She said, ‘Don’t be silly, it would be stupid to go back there now, unless you had to. That’s what I wondered. I wondered whether it might suit you instead to stay in Europe and marry someone important. Or whether it would do if you simply went on sleeping with people like Madame la Maréchale.’

  ‘Where the spirite is, there it is always sommer,’ said Francis Crawford semi-automatically. He was gazing at her. ‘Go on. There must be other options. Sum fra the bordell wald nocht byde Quhill that thai gatt the Spanyie Pockis?’

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p; Philippa said patiently, ‘All I am trying to point out is that you may please yourself. With or without a divorce, I am quite capable of making my own arrangements.’

  ‘What? Who with?’ Jerott had jumped to his feet. ‘Damn you, Francis,’ he said.

  Lymond paid no attention. He relinquished the edge of the table and moved gently forward until he stood over Philippa, his hands clasping one another behind his straight back. He said, ‘I hit you once, on the jaw. Do you remember?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Philippa. She added, ‘You hit me another time, on the arm.’

  ‘Oh? I had forgotten that,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Why?’

  ‘It happens all the time,’ Philippa said courteously. ‘I was where someone didn’t want me. If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt. Are you going to strike me?’

  ‘I am considering it,’ said Lymond. ‘Jerott is now convinced I am corrupting you. Fortunately I know, if Jerott does not, when you are speaking from conviction and when you are being deliberately and spitefully obstreperous. You have never made any arrangements outside marriage and you have no intention of making any, even if I felt constrained to break my agreement and start back to Moscow tomorrow.’ He lifted his eyes to Jerott. ‘The Somervilles,’ he said tartly, ‘are adept at sheer, bloody, domineering interference.’

  Jerott sat down. He said, ‘I don’t understand’; and then, after a moment, ‘Christ, Francis. Have you got into the Maréchale’s bedroom already?’

  Lymond began to laugh. Slightly weak with relief, Philippa looked at Marthe and found Lymond’s sister already staring at her with an odd look, not entirely friendly, which she failed to interpret. Jerott, receiving no answer, seized the flask of wine, tipped some into all the glasses and pushing Lymond’s across the table said, irritably, ‘Well, come and sit down and tell us. Have you——?’

  ‘I heard you,’ said Lymond. He dropped into a chair, elbows on knees and tented his hands over his eyes, still laughing silently. After a while, he looked up and said, ‘You know how it is. Au travail, on fait ce qu’on peut, mais à table, on se force. If time allowed, I should be delighted to discuss my private life in every choice particular with all of you, but it really isn’t relevant.

  ‘As soon as I’m released from my obligations, I’m going back to Russia, whether there is a place there for me, or whether I have to make it. I should break my pledge and go now, if I didn’t know very well the kind of revenge this monarchy would take. Also, if I might make the point, I myself wish to be freed.’

  ‘To marry Güzel?’ Marthe said. ‘Or take a bed-fellow to Russia with you?’

  Lymond smiled, and leaning back in his chair, placed his ringed hands together, master of himself, unpleasantly, once more. ‘There was a suggestion,’ he said, ‘that the Tsar could find a better, younger, wealthier match which would be worthy of me, Güzel would be sent to a nunnery.’

  ‘You said she was with Prince Vishnevetsky,’ said Marthe. She was not smiling.

  He opened his fingers expressively. ‘So the Tsar’s suggestion may prove very timely. Would it trouble you if I excused myself from the inquisition and asked Philippa what she found in the documents?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Philippa shortly. She sat down and stared at the soiled parquetry floor, her hair falling forward. ‘I recited the names of the three witnesses to the only servants still left who belonged to the Dame de Doubtance. Nobody knew the two women. The third witness, the man, was a priest. They remembered him. He died ten years ago in a fire in his house, leaving no records and no relatives.’

  ‘Witnesses to what?’ Jerott said; and Philippa looked at Lymond, who glanced at the elaborate German clock on its bracket and got up. ‘You aren’t old enough to be told yet,’ he said. ‘Philippa, have you finished?’

  Philippa gazed up at him. ‘I haven’t finished,’ she said. ‘And you haven’t started yet. We have the rest of the house to search: remember? The harvest is great, but the labourers are few.’

  ‘Oh, confound you. In the dark?’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Faint, faltering and fearful? Importuned?’

  ‘Unless you would prefer to come back another day?’ said Philippa with forgivable acidity; and lifting the torchière, waited politely for Marthe to lead them to where the Dame de Doubtance’s inheritance lay, locked and waiting for its reluctant beneficiary.

  Chapter 5

  De feu volant la machination

  Viendra troubler au grand chef assiegez.

  Sera laisse feu vif mort cache

  Dedans les globes, horrible, espouvantable.

  Antique, adamantine, rich as Daedalus’ honeycomb, the house of Gaultier did not easily give up its privacies to the chance-met foreigner to whom, so surprisingly, the Dame de Doubtance had willed it.

  The Lady’s own rooms, locked since her death, were the last to which Marthe led Lymond. Before that, as if constrained to prove her custodianship, she moved ahead of him with her candle through the strange uneven passages and up the winding turnpikes of all the great house, from the stone-flagged kitchens where the servants huddled, staring at them, to the vaulted warehouses on the quayside where Jerott’s stock-in-trade lay stacked, in bags and barrels and boxes.

  In Jerott’s stockrooms, his office and his cabinet was the only order in all the brooding jumble of chambers. Swept, stacked, spartan in their furnishing they bore the last vestiges of the sea-going knight-hospitaller he had once been. And to Philippa, following silently on the heels of her husband, it was painfully clear that this was so because Jerott cared for these rooms himself. Shirt-sleeved in the darkness he stood beside her now, a little heavy footed, as Marthe swept her candelabra around, and Philippa asked him questions. There was nothing else of moment to see: only empty rooms, bare of panels or chests or armoires. Wherever the Dame de Doubtance had kept her secrets, it was not here.

  Then she took them up the winding stairs and along a high, open gallery to a door so low that she stooped, unlocking it. The key took a long time to turn and the door, when it swung slowly open, showed them only the foot of a narrow, worn staircase, stretching up into darkness.

  Marthe turned and facing Lymond, proffered the candlestick to him. ‘At the top is a curtain and another door, which leads into an anteroom. On the left of that is the Lady’s bedchamber. On the right of the antechamber is her study, her oratory, and a suite of other small rooms. There is a locked door at the far end, where her visitors could enter without Gaultier seeing them.’

  ‘And on the left?’ Philippa said. ‘Beyond the Dame de Doubtance’s bedchamber?’

  ‘Nothing,’ said Marthe. ‘There is no other door from that room, and the windows are sealed with bronze shutters.’

  ‘You aren’t coming?’ said Lymond. In the airless dark, the pointed flame in his hand drew the eyes of all the tongued gargoyles, and painted the gallery rafters in ribbons of satin and charcoal. A fading of river-mist, sunk from the chimneys, lay waist-high below in the courtyard, bearing the dim lotus-heads of the orange trees.

  Marthe said, ‘She has not told me to come,’ her voice tranquil. The Dame de Doubtance, to hear her, might not have been three years and more dead in her grave.

  It disturbed Jerott. He made a sound of exasperation, and his wife turned on him instantly. ‘If you are unhappy, go back to my room. There is wine in the flask.’

  ‘Or come with me?’ said Philippa. ‘If Mr Crawford will let us follow him?’

  As she spoke, the gallery darkened: Lymond had passed through the low door already. His voice, in a canon of echoes, came to them hollowly from the steep, thin-leaved stairs. ‘I am Hermes, Conductor of Souls. Come if you wish. Come if you dare. All things arise from Space and into Space they return: Space is the beginning and the final end. There isn’t much of it here: watch your head on the newel-post.… I have found the curtain. Jerott, do you remember the curtain? We came this way, the
only time that we called on her. And the doorway. I am opening the door …’

  Philippa, stepping through from the gallery, was half-way up with her kirtled gown and her candle when Lymond stopped speaking. Jerott, behind her, put his hand on her arm and with a movement unexpectedly lissom swung himself up before her and round the last curve of the staircase.

  The curtain Jerott remembered was now pulled fully aside, but the door beyond was only half open. Silhouetted in the light of his own candle, Lymond stood there on the threshold, his hand on the door edge, looking at something unseen on the floor. Jerott said, ‘What? What is it?’

  ‘An empty room,’ Lymond said. ‘And a sacrifice. Where was the Dame de Doubtance buried?’

  ‘By the Roman Amphitheatre,’ said Jerott. ‘Apparently. She arranged it herself beforehand.’

  ‘Not in hallowed ground? Why?’

  ‘Not because the Church stopped it,’ said Jerott. ‘They never proved that she practised black arts; only that she cast horoscopes and sometimes performed acts of healing. It was because of the way she wanted to be buried. And even that was better than her first choice. She was mad. She wanted them to embalm her enshrined in her baldachine chair.’

  Without moving further into the room, Lymond lifted the flame in his hand. The light fell on a small, tapestried room, simply furnished with a coffer, some stools and a plain hooded fireplace in which the ashes of its last fire still lay, overlaid with a shroud of grey dust. On the coffer stood a group of wire cages, empty and open. And on the floor beside it, another tall cage lay on its side, with husks and sawdust and bird droppings strewn about it.

  Lymond said, ‘She wanted her creatures buried with her? I suppose she would. No one would care for them. Gaultier was dead. Marthe hadn’t returned yet, bringing Jerott. They wouldn’t resist. Perhaps they sensed she was dead. Only the dog didn’t want to die.’