Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Lymond heeled the door shut and stood watching her.

  Marthe straightened, her arms full of silver. ‘Where is Jerott?’

  ‘Where hast thou hung the carlish knight? And where bestow’d his head? Drunk as a wheelbarrow,’ said Lymond. ‘I thought you would approve. And it’s ever so much kinder than handcuffs. What have you discovered?’

  Before Philippa could answer: ‘You will find him on your doorstep tomorrow,’ Marthe said. ‘Begging to be re-admitted to the great corps of St Mary’s.’

  ‘As the gentleman said, Though you were not roasted, madam, it was a pity you had not been a little scorched,’ Lymond remarked. ‘He has asked me already. I have told him that he may join me, on condition that he brings you along with him. I see no reason why your inconvenient responsibilities should fall on my shoulders. What have you found?’

  With regret, ‘Almost nothing,’ Philippa said. ‘Again. Some of the books you might expect. A few drug pots and nasty packages. Some horoscopes of well-known nonentities. All the signs of the Zodiac. If you’re the first of November, you’re Scorpio. A large reporter of his owne Acts. Prudent of behaviour in owne affairs. A lover of Quarrels and theevery, a promoter of frayes and commotions. As wavery as the wind; neither fearing God or caring for Man.’

  ‘Better,’ said Lymond coldly, ‘to be stung by a nettle than pricked by a rose. What does your panegyric say?’

  ‘I’m not going to tell you,’ said Philippa. ‘But although the horoscopes are mostly missing, she kept a ledger of subjects and birth dates. You and Marthe are both in it.’

  ‘Well?’ said Lymond. ‘New gripes of dread then pierce our trembling breasts. Tares or wheat?’

  ‘No information at all except birthdates. You and Marthe aren’t twins. She was born in ‘24, two years before you. But there’s no sign of a surname for her.’

  It was obvious that he did not care. But he said, ‘And no clue therefore to Marthe’s parents, or the Dame de Doubtance’s family?’

  ‘None,’ said Philippa. ‘There was a nephew of the Lady’s called Cholet, but the branch seems to have died out. She doesn’t seem to have thought it worth including their horoscopes.’

  ‘Whereas,’ said Marthe, ‘she thought it worth while including the Crawfords. Don’t force him to ask. Read the dates out.’

  But Philippa had given the book already to Lymond. ‘Look. There are seven names under Crawford, but you and Richard and your mother are the only ones living. The splendid first baron, of course, born in ’75 and his wife, born 1477, Honoria Bailey. Then in 1495 his son, the nasty Gavin, second baron Crawford of Culter, who married Sybilla Semple, born in ’88. And then Sybilla’s three children, of whom you are one. That, at least, we are sure of.’

  ‘Are we?’ said Marthe with interest.

  Lymond, running his hands through the ledger, left Philippa to answer. ‘We talked downstairs about trying to trace three witnesses. We heard of these people in England. What they witnessed …’ She stopped, glancing at Lymond.

  ‘Go on,’ he said, without looking up. ‘I am unlikely, under the circumstances, to be discomfited.’

  ‘… what they witnessed was a pair of deeds by Sybilla, declaring that Mr Crawford and his young sister were hers, but not born to her husband.’

  ‘Bastards?’ said Marthe. Her eyes were shining. ‘But brought up as if they were Gavin’s?’

  ‘You have it,’ said Lymond. ‘At the end of the day, look what divine bounty we bring you.’

  ‘And the true father?’

  ‘No one knows. But look, there are the entries,’ said Philippa. ‘Richard, the eldest son, born in 1516 and legitimate. Then in ‘26, Mr Crawford. Then, three years afterwards, Eloise, the young sister who died.’

  ‘You should make a Jesse window of it,’ Marthe murmured. ‘So that is what you are looking for? The name of Sybilla’s lover? Then I wonder perhaps if I have found it?’

  She had, at last, Lymond’s fullest attention as well as Philippa’s.

  ‘Where?’ Lymond said. He laid the ledger aside.

  ‘Inside the dais,’ Marthe said. ‘Come and see.’

  There on its side lay the baldachine chair. Beside it the blackened carpet, felted with dust, had been lifted.

  Below were the boards of the dais. And cut through the boards a deep cavity, within which something lay, wrapped in bandaging.

  Marthe said, ‘The moving chair tripped some sort of lever. I saw the carpet had sagged and investigated. I haven’t taken anything out.’

  She hadn’t taken anything out, Philippa thought, because she hadn’t yet resolved to reveal it. Until just now. Until she had the pleasure of knowing that Francis Crawford, too, had no lineage.

  She watched Marthe lift the package, and Lymond receive and unwrap it.

  It was small, and inside were only two objects. One of them was a key. The other was a folded sheet of thick yellow paper, with the name Francis Crawford in an unknown hand above the deep-printed wax of the signet.

  The key, large enough to fit a main lock, was finely made: for a house, one would say, of no mean size or quality. ‘It doesn’t belong here,’ Marthe said. ‘It might suggest the house of Doubtance at Blois. Or perhaps Sevigny. Or of course, some house here in Lyon, for that matter. I could take it, if you like, to a locksmith.’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Philippa sourly. She ought, she knew, to be grateful that they had a large door to find, instead of a box or a drawer or a casket. What could possibly be behind it defied her jaded powers of conjecture. She said to Lymond, ‘And the epistle?’

  He lifted the letter.

  She gave him a paper-knife but he did not use it. He broke the seal with a single impatient movement which tore the sheet and sent the splintered wax flying. Philippa swallowed a cry and sat like a dog as he read it. And Marthe, without speech, did likewise.

  He was, of course a volatile spirit. And no doubt, in their overt concern, they looked ludicrous. His eyes lifted, and switched from the brown to the blue gaze devouring him. Then he said, his voice hoarse, in a whisper:

  ‘His children let be fatherles

  Hys wife a wydow make

  Let his offspring be vagabondes

  To beg and seke their bread:

  Wandring out of the wasted place

  Where erst they have bene fed.

  And so let hys posteritie

  For ever be destroyde

  Theyr name outblotted in the age

  That after shall succede …’

  They relaxed. ‘What is it?’ said Marthe impatiently.

  ‘A record of death,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘The death of an unbaptized male child in Lyon: parents unspecified; date of death November 20th, 1526. Signed by a physician with an unreadable signature. Witnessed by the same priest who attended my mother and who, as we know, is dead also.’

  There was a pause. Then Philippa said, ‘Did the child have a name?’ He was smiling.

  ‘Yes,’ he said; and tossed the torn sheet in her lap. ‘Can’t you guess? It was called Francis Crawford.

  ‘I do not exist. What you have in your hand is my death certificate.’

  Chapter 6

  La splendeur claire à pucelle joyeuse

  Ne luira plus, longtemps sera sans sel

  Avec marchands, ruffiens, loups odieuse

  Tous pesle-mesle monstre universel.

  When they left the Hôtel Gaultier it was after midnight, and there was heavy mist like a sleeve through the courtyard.

  The fog altered their plans. Instead of returning as they had come, Lymond dismissed the four men at arms and, shrouded in hooded cloaks lent them by Marthe, he and Philippa set out on foot, the quiet way.

  Jerott had been asleep. Marthe, half-heartedly, had suggested they stay until morning. Stupid with overstrain, Philippa had listened gratefully to Lymond pointing out with acerbity that some minor affairs might require his attention.

  The war was his business and this, for him, had been an interlude. She admi
red his detachment, and also his hardihood. Untrained by the Russian steppes, she was lured by self-interest only out into that dank sticky blackness. She wanted her bed. And she could not face the prospect of the cold ashes, the wrinkled mattress, the wounding brilliance of any haven Marthe might offer her.

  The appalling news of those last moments in the Dame de Doubtance’s room showed no signs of weighing on her companion. She wished she could feel the same, with all her plans cut from under her feet. How did one discover who Lymond was, if he was not Francis Crawford? Whom had Sybilla substituted for the dead son she had borne, whose father was not Gavin, her husband? An unknown infant, whose full sister happened to be Marthe? Or was the other tale one had heard partly true: had Gavin, in turn, fathered children on some woman in France, and had he compelled Sybilla to accept one of these, and pass him off as her own?

  Grasping Lymond’s cloak, she negotiated the cobbles, still thinking. They were not to speak, he had told her.

  He had also given her, handsomely cased in jewelled leather, his own poniard to strap at her girdle.

  The fog was so thick that the darkness had curdled to lead-colour, smudged here and there by a whorl of vapour with a seed of shrunk light in its middle. But for that, and the emanations of fish and cooking, of oil and urine and horses, they might have been ranging an unsanded tiltyard instead of this long, narrow street of tall houses. There seemed to be no one about, but she knew, without being told, that Lymond’s right hand rested on the hilt of his sword, while his left kept it still in the scabbard. Their spurs removed, his soft boots made no more sound on the cobbles than her slippers, through which every dropped nail and wood-shard and rope-end forced its impression.

  The mouth of the rue Chalamon appeared suddenly ahead on her left, defined by the three rows of lit windows which bridged it; and then faded in a freakish swirl of the fog. They were half-way to the bridge. Then they had to cross it, and climb up the network of streets to the Hôtel Schiatti. Philippa wished she had protested more vigorously against this odd idea that the horses should go back without them. Because Lymond was the Voevoda of all Russia and a friend of her mother’s, it did not mean that he had more common sense than a Somerville of Flaw Valleys.

  She wondered, plodding along, how far she was right in trusting Marthe with the key as she had done. There were several likely locksmiths in Lyon. And if nothing came of that, she herself would follow the other faint trails: she would visit Sevigny, Lymond’s home in the Loire valley, and from there try the locks in the Dame de Doubtance’s other house in the district.

  It was empty, Marthe said, with all the money transferred to the Schiatti, and all the treasures to her rooms here in Lyon.

  That might well be so, but she wanted to see for herself. There was something else also she wished to do, of which she had said nothing to Marthe. Jerott had found for her, unsurprised by her interest, the name of the convent where Marthe had been reared. It was near Coulanges, and close to both Blois and Sevigny. And now that she knew Marthe’s age, she could ask to search through their records.

  She still found it hard to believe Marthe’s true age with all those fine-skinned blonde looks to refute it. But then, the Schiatti had been disinclined, for other reasons, to accept what she had told them of Lymond. The Constable was sixty-four; Piero Strozzi fifty-seven; the Marshal de St André fifty-two. The leaders of nations did not appoint young men to have overlordship of their armies. It took many years to establish a famous squadron of mercenaries. It required a man of exceptional power and maturity to attain, as M. le comte had done, the principal post in all Muscovy.

  But whatever else he was not, Lymond was the infant a few weeks old whom Sybilla had brought home to Scotland that winter of 1526. Powerful he certainly was and mature, heaven knew, he had shown himself over and over to be. But he was also, however much he might wish to disguise it, only thirty years old in reality.

  Which was, however, old enough to compel instant obedience when he said, as he did now, in a murmur, ‘Stand there and keep quiet a moment.’

  He had drawn her to the side of the road, and up the steep kerb to a doorway. She waited, eyeing her husband as he stepped back, fading into the atmosphere. It seemed, on the whole, a fatuous idea to remain there when she could guard his back, at least, with the dagger. Just before he vanished totally, Philippa stepped down from her doorway and followed him.

  In fact, he walked back twenty yards and then halted. Philippa halted behind him. Months of esoteric training in the Sultan Suleiman’s virgin seraglio had taught her, if nothing else, how to move silently. She had used her skill in the Hôtel Gaultier, to insinuate herself after Lymond. In point of fact, it came to her, she had really spent a large proportion of her young life following Lymond. Madame la Maréchale might be forgiven for imagining it was with an ulterior motive.

  Marthe had thought the same. It was tedious, and a little undignified. Standing there, just within sight of the blurred shape of her husband, Philippa thought crossly that the formal nature of their relationship ought really to be self-evident. Quite literally, Lymond never touched her. A few times, in the past, he had struck her. But his threat tonight, needless to say, had not been serious.

  He had a temper, but it would hardly drive him to injure her. Now his response was merely to detach himself from personal contact. Looking back, she could not remember a conversation veering on the intimate from which he had not withdrawn immediately. He had had of course, in the past, more than enough of being devoured alive by the consuming interest of his admirers. A boy called Will Scott, back in Scotland. An Archer, they said, called Robin Stewart. Jerott, perhaps, long ago. Small wonder that Francis Crawford today took routine precautions to repel invaders.

  And of course, that was it. Standing there, her eyes blank in the fog, Philippa saw plainly so much which had escaped her. The dismissals she had suffered; the exchanges he had broken off; the measures he took, when he remembered, to dampen the ardour of any impressionable fool who might dream of clinging to him.

  Such as herself. She remembered the ringed, picturesque hands on which she had fixed her eyes, and their abrupt withdrawal. It was not only in the eyes of the world that her pursuit of Lymond was being put down to a blossoming schoolgirl devotion. Warily, Lymond himself had considered it time to start taking precautions.

  Shame and anger ran tingling over her skin and sank into her stomach, twisting all her tired organs. Like beads on a rosary, small encounters turned and winked in her memory. Occasions where he had seemed grateful, or pleased, or approving and where the moment of rapport had vanished. Before, clearly, the underlings could become over-excited. Reasonably, he had had enough of torrid devotion. All he wanted now were experienced people to go to bed with, like Madame la Maréchale and Güzel and Oonagh O’Dwyer, who had borne his son and then perished.

  She understood all that perfectly. The wounding thing was that he should not think her capable of simple goodwill with no overtones of childish infatuation. She remembered, chilled, his nervousness, and Marthe’s, when she had questioned his reasons for requiring a divorce in the first place. The possibility that she would hold him to this marriage must have haunted him since the day it was contracted. She needn’t fear, after all, that he would be nasty to Austin Grey, or to anyone else who came courting her. He was more likely, she thought sourly, to encourage them warmly to compromise her.

  Transmitted by some freak of the fog, Lymond’s voice said, apparently in her ear, ‘If you call out, I shall kill you, my child. Did you imagine I should not know you another time?’

  Where there had been one person, there were now two; and no longer in the dark but hazily lit in the swimming glow from the rue de Chalamon archway. And it was a child Lymond had caught: a muscular ten-year-old in bare feet and tunic who kicked and twisted and bit in the expert, impervious grasp as Lymond drew him into the tunnel, and darkness.

  Following hurriedly, Philippa cannoned into them before she could stop herself. The child
wrenched himself free. He was two paces away when Lymond’s hand, sweeping round, caught him a blow on the jaw that jarred him back to the wall again, staggering. He began to slide down, his tousled head lolling.

  Before he reached sitting-position, Lymond had unbuckled his belt and turning him round, had lashed the boy’s arms hard together. Then he rose, the weight of his foot on his captive, and pulling a thin package from the child’s tunic, tossed it over to Philippa.

  The fog lapped and coiled in the indirect light from the archway. She opened the package.

  In it were some steel darts and a blow-pipe. ‘I recognized him in Marthe’s kitchen,’ he said. ‘He tried to kill me on the bridge yesterday. If you had attended to a simple request to stay in a doorway, I should not have needed to hit him.’

  ‘I thought,’ said Philippa curtly, ‘that you might need your poniard. Was this why you sent the horses first as a decoy? You knew that the boy would send word when you were leaving?’

  ‘It seemed likely,’ said Lymond. ‘Then I asked Jerott to lock the kitchen door so that the child couldn’t betray the change of plan to whoever is paying him. One hopes that it isn’t Jerott who is paying him. Or Marthe, of course.’

  ‘You don’t mean that,’ said Philippa.

  ‘You overrate me,’ said Lymond. ‘So does Danny Hislop. He thought I didn’t like manhandling children as a matter of conscience. You! What are you called, you?’ He had switched to French again.

  The boy had recovered. He sat, his bound hands against the bridge wall, and blasphemed. Lymond picked up his sword from where he had laid it and poised it, with great care, across the tendons of the child’s ankle. ‘There is a lady here,’ he said. ‘Do you understand? We do not wish to know why Abaddon in the bottommost pit will be receiving you. We wish to know who paid you to try and kill us.’