Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He had heard what M. de Sevigny had achieved in Lyon and Paris. At the kill, he saw how the King kept the man by his side, and held him by the arm, and joked with him. And after the kill, the King read the last batch of dispatches, which all reflected the single conclusion: the threat to Paris was over. So M. de Vigne became witness to a moving and extraordinary ceremony: when the King of France placed his hands on the comte de Sevigny’s shoulders, and requiring him to kneel, with borrowed sword and gilt spur created him a knight of the royal Order of St Michael.

  And that, thought M. de Vigne, was going to shake a few birds from the tree-tops. It was the premier order of chivalry, granted to the great of the civilized world: to kings and princes and generals. There were only 36 Knights of the Order of St Michael. The late King James of Scotland had been one. And Charles V, the great Emperor, now retired to his monastery in Spain, whose son Philip was conducting this war with such lack of confidence. And of course, the de Guise family. The Cardinal of Lorraine was its Chancellor.

  Returning to Paris in the wake of the hunting party and watching the King dismount at the Tourelles, his hand on the comte de Sevigny’s shoulder, M. de Vigne began, in his head, to plan a number of letters. This was a man to be cultivated, and he knew who would be glad to have warning of it.

  During the supper that followed, sumptuous as befitted the ending of a national emergency and the honouring of its manipulators, Francis Crawford asked for and received permission at last to leave Paris, and take up with the army his proper employment.

  ‘That is,’ said the King, his soft, wine-moistened lips smiling within the silken black beard, ‘we shall expect regular news of you at Saint-Germain. I have told you we are leaving also. The air in Paris is bad. Her grace the Queen is unwell. My daughter of Scotland has been abed coughing these three days, and asking, I understand, why her subjects take no trouble to visit her. I tell her Paris must come before Scotland.’

  The Cardinal of Lorraine was not present. ‘And the crown of France before her princes,’ said Queen Catherine kindly. It was true, she did not look well. The white skin of which she was so proud had a sallow tint round the nose and the mouth: the prominent eyes, damp with the force of her coughing, were downcast.

  Then she lifted them, and it was to be seen that the impression of submissive intelligence was one she was well used to conveying. She said, ‘Then you do not regret, M. de Sevigny, that our selfish affection has brought you honour in France, instead of in Russia? I remember well my uncle of Albany praising the abilities of your grandfather. Our Scottish friends over here have a saying, Ecosse notre foi; la France notre coeur, which moves me.’

  There was a third part to that statement which none but her Scottish friends, Danny Hislop hoped, were aware of. Seated far down the company, he tried and failed to catch Lymond’s eye.

  His mood was sardonic. Short; ugly; sharp as a razor, Danny Hislop the Bishop’s by-blow from Ayrshire had owned no superior before joining Lymond in Moscow and still struggled, from time to time, against the knowledge that in Francis Crawford he had perhaps met his match.

  He had watched Lymond, under Jerott’s furious eye, accept yet another of the golden chains intended to keep him in France, and he wondered what game he was playing. There was no doubt that he had been hell-bent on getting to Russia. Chiselled into each of Danny’s eardrums was the precise language Lymond had used when they brought him back from Douai. And now, when you listened to him, the shifty bastard, there was never a damned fuero to be heard. Lymond said, ‘How could I have regrets, Madame? Thus poulticed with the gold of pleasure, and with such brave consolations?’

  He did not, on the word consolations, look at the Queen’s ladies of honour, nor did Catherine d’Albon glance at him. But a little colour, Danny noticed, rose in her well-bred face as she sat, her hands in her lap, and her mistress, replying, smiled dryly. ‘I hear, my lord count, that your wife is leaving for England.’

  ‘She is travelling north,’ Lymond said. ‘She should pass through Paris in a day or two.’

  ‘While you are in Picardy. A charming young person,’ said Queen Catherine, ‘for an Englishwoman. I trust her kin will find her another mettlesome husband. And when she has gone, we must see that you have time for gentle companionship. The Maréchale tells me you have hardly spent more than the night hours at the Hôtel St André, and sometimes not even those.’

  ‘Not from choice, I assure you,’ said the King’s new commander, and this time, looking across, bowed gravely to the Maréchale’s daughter.

  The girl acknowledged it with composure but her flush, Danny noted with interest, had become deeper. Pestered beyond endurance for information about Lymond’s intentions, Jerott Blyth had let fall a week ago that Catherine d’Albon did not play a part in them.

  It turned out that Lymond had told him so. Danny Hislop, who was an unstinting admirer of Jerott’s appearance, his wife and his reputation, was still to be overwhelmed by his acumen. Any fool could see that the d’Albon girl and her money were the bargain clause in an invisible contract. And Lymond, being Lymond, would take the girl, he was convinced, whether he settled in France or he didn’t.

  The angelic Marthe, of course, the viper-tongued glorious step-sister, didn’t want M. le comte to remarry. Neither did the little man with the broken nose, Archie Abernethy.

  Danny Hislop was not entirely at ease about Archie. Danny remembered a dark night at Lyon, and Archie arriving at the Hôtel de Gouvernement in the small hours of the morning with the printer Macé Bonhomme. They had brought Lymond home, impossibly drunk, and with a clean contusion at the back of his head in which no one appeared to be interested. Mr Crawford, said Archie, had now and then lost his footing.

  The type of man who could fool an elephant was unlikely to have the same triumph with Daniel Hislop. It seemed odd to Danny that a menagerie trainer should also dabble in soldiering. Seven years ago, they said, Archie had attached himself to Lymond in Rouen, and had divided his time ever since between the Somerville girl and his lordship.

  Jerott, when applied to for enlightenment, merely said irritably that he supposed Archie had required a new owner. Adam, when asked the same question in Lyon, had seemed to view the little man as an ancient retainer. It would be interesting to see what skill, if any, he had in the battlefield.

  After Russia, campaigning in France, would be like conducting a war in a chicken-dish. Danny looked forward to demonstrating to the moody Mr Blyth what he had missed by his absence from Russia. He regretted that Adam, anchored at Lyon awaiting the Duke de Guise’s arrival, could not be here, equally blessed, to support him. If, as they set off for camp, he noticed Archie Abernethy’s knowing black eyes upon him, Danny Hislop paid no attention.

  The Duke de Nevers was in the château of Compiègne; the only senior field commander left when the boiling wrack of Saint-Quentin had seeped away, and with him was the veteran de Thermes from Piedmont, who had left Paris only a day or two ahead of M. de Sevigny, bearing with him the agreed plan of strategy.

  To M. de Thermes, the plan was his brain-child, and to carry it out thus no hardship. The Duke de Nevers, after four weeks of complying with a stream of equally ingenious projects, was only too pleased to have Lymond in person to help him.

  When angling for power in France, tact was necessary. Tact and unremitting success in battle, in bed and in throneroom; with no wake of disgruntled princes to pacify. So far, it seemed to Danny, Lymond’s grasp of these principles seemed exemplary.

  There followed a week during which he was unable to feel patronizing any longer, or even to watch Archie Abernethy, for the simple reason that he was being run into the ground with hard labour. Eighteen thousand troops were then quartered between Compiègne and the old royal palace at Verbene, and ten thousand more arrivals were imminent.

  There were quarters, and food, and weapons and even money waiting for them all, just as there were provisions and extra men, when they were needed, for all the hard-held towns and fortres
ses still in French hands around them. Bands of horses went out daily to Corbie and Péronne and Amiens and Abbeville, taking what was required and bringing back information. Other bands departed with special orders. They looked for and routed the foraging parties sent out by the Spaniards whose vast army hovered so near on the frontiers. They harried and hindered the Spanish forces attempting to rebuild and fortify the fortress towns which marked the watershed of the Spanish advance into Picardy: Saint-Quentin, Noyon, Le Catelet, and even Ham itself, where King Philip sat, closeted with his secretaries, his interpreters and his commanders in the citadel.

  The object, as Lymond had made it properly clear before ever he arrived in Compiègne, was not to lure the Spanish army out to fight. It was to stand solidly across its path and harass it through the worsening weather of autumn until fretful, unpaid, disease-ridden and weary, the Duke of Savoy’s quarrelling army of Germans and English and Spanish should be impelled to give up and disperse.

  For a week, Danny was out every night, sometimes with a company of Germans; sometimes with Swiss. Jerott was allotted longer expeditions: at one point he worked out of Amiens with de Lansac for almost two days, and got back to Compiègne with a graze from a hackbut ball that killed his horse under him. He was thankful to find that Lymond was off with a party of German pioneers, doing something inexplicable with a couple of carts spread with tarpaulins.

  Jerott had his scratch dressed, slept for six hours, woke, ate and discovered that Lymond had returned and left again for Péronne in the interval, leaving fresh instructions for himself and Danny. A quarrel about precedence had broken out among the German officers and he marched in and settled it, meeting Danny on his way out to collect a new gelding. He had not lost the knack of command, he was pleased to discover.

  Danny, who looked hollow-eyed, said, ‘Have you heard? He’s made the wells of Le Catelet undrinkable. Originality at any price. The Swiss, in their Swiss way, say he knows how to take Dame Fortune by the hair. The Germans, in their German way, say if he wants to lead them again, he will have to bloody well increase their stipend. You know he had all the grain fields laid waste but kept the vines standing to gripe all the Spaniards? The rotten bastard. If I were St Michael I’d disown him.’

  Jerott, who was saddling his horse, did not bother to look up at the limpid eyes and teased sandy hair, waning from the baby-pink brow. He was beginning to get the measure of Danny. He said, ‘Where are you going?’

  ‘To take some culverin this side of Noyon, and then fall into bed for a lengthy four-minute sleep. I wish I’d stayed in Lyon. I wager Archie wishes he’d stayed in Lyon.’

  Jerott mounted. ‘We all get out of condition at times,’ he said; and moved off at a brisk gait to where his troop of soldiers was waiting. Danny, gazing after him critically, was aware of a twinge of approval. He hoped that nothing about him revealed it.

  At the end of the week, a courier from St Germain brought the daily mail from the King, and among it, a handwritten letter from Henri. In it, he commanded the comte de Sevigny, in mock severe terms, to leave disporting himself in the field and return to his master at Poissy, where on Wednesday, September 29th, his Majesty would give the annual banquet for the chevaliers of the Order of St Michael. M. de Thermes, if his business were done, was to return with him.

  ‘Not us?’ said Danny hopefully, when summoned for instruction.

  ‘Not you,’ said Lymond. ‘Or Jerott or Archie. You would drink your soup with your gloves on.’ The cracking pace of the week, with its sharp fighting and hard riding and bold exercise of authority suited him, if no one else, as the crisis in Paris had also done. But he was wrong in one respect: Archie did not stay in Compiègne but appeared at his side, without comment, on the far side of Creil. Challenged, he merely opened his black eyes and said that if Mr Crawford was going to play at being a knight, then Mr Crawford would need a squire to hold his petticoats up for him.

  If he counted on the presence of thirty men at arms around him to preserve him from immediate castigation, he was, as it turned out, correct. He was still with the newest chevalier of the Order of St Michael when, dressed in white with the one-armed silver cloak and the heavy golden collar of shells, he worshipped with his brethren by the broken marble baptismal font of St Louis in the church of Notre Dame de Poissy, and then walked in procession the short distance to the royal monastery behind the Usher, the Herald, the Clerk, the Master of Ceremonies and the Chancellor of the Order, there to feast under the handsome beams of the Dominicans in the presence of the King, glimmering in pearls and velvet and satin. The next morning, instead of the quick departure he had counted on, the comte de Sevigny, with Archie still in attendance, accompanied the King of France on the four-mile ride from Poissy to the castle of Saint-Germain, there to join the court and to visit the sick-bed of that spoiled young monarch, Mary of Scotland.

  It was warm. Whatever decision King Philip might be taking at Ham it would not, unfortunately, owe anything to the inclemency of the late autumn weather. The poplars at the edge of the forest were yellow, but the other trees were barely tinged yet with russet: there were full-blown roses still in the formal gardens round the Old Château, foursquare in its red-trimmed cream stone, with the modern balustrades and urns trimming its roof-walk. Beyond that were the half-built walls of the New Château, rising on its terraced gardens above the loops of the Seine. From there, one could see the roofs of Paris, and even the white towers of Saint-Denis where the royal owners of Saint-Germain would one day be laid to rest. Some kings enjoyed the reminder more than others.

  Mary of Scotland received her subject the dilatory Mr Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny in her bedchamber, which had recently acquired a new stucco frieze and a set of gold-fringed bed hangings for which she had been campaigning for months. In the nine years since she had been sent, a child of six, to take shelter with her kindred monarch in France she had never had enough money to spend: never dresses as resplendent as the little French princesses; never a household as lavish; never a governess she had really liked since the King had been indiscreet with Mary Fleming’s mother and instead of tolerating it, the Queen and Madame Diane had made her go back to Scotland.

  There was no reason in the world why gentlemen should not take their pleasure with ladies of their own rank, provided it was properly done, and etiquette was not openly flouted. But it remained a pity that the King, by doing so, had thoughtlessly deprived Mary of Scotland of Lady Fleming’s assistance. And the bastard, Harry, was five, and freckled, and peevish.

  She had told them to admit Mr Crawford, when he came, without chattering to him. The chin-cough being intermittent, she was not in bed. She had arranged herself picturesquely in a low, sling-seat chair with a fur rug over her knees and her auburn hair brushed out under its cap, so that it lay like raw silk on her shoulders. She sat haughtily still, because when she moved, it broke into snake-locks. Then the chamberlain’s knock came at the door, and Janet Sinclair looked up from her sewing while la Fleming, as instructed, answered it.

  Mary of Scotland, who had extremely sharp hearing, noted that she did not chatter, but that the incoming gentleman paused and greeted her with an amiability verging on the irregular. Then he turned, waited for his introduction, and walked forward to kneel, with correctness, by her wolfskin.

  He was far fairer than the Cardinal. The hair below her hand was breathtaking in its brightness, and his blue eyes were lashed like a woman’s.

  ‘We had expected you before, Mr Crawford,’ said Queen Mary of Scotland. ‘We wished to congratulate you on your courageous efforts to help his Majesty the King prepare against the enemy, in the absence of Monseigneur my uncle in Italy. He will wish to commend you.’

  She had rehearsed it, and so she said it. But Mary Fleming, watching from her place beside the nurse and Beaton, whose mouth was slightly open, guessed what hardihood it had taken.

  ‘Thank you,’ said Lymond; and kissed the hand offered him, a little belatedly, and rose. ‘Is there some manner i
n which I may serve you?’ It was not, now, the man she remembered from the days of her childhood.

  Mary of Scotland moved, dislodging the pools of combed auburn. It was the stifled end of an impulse to rise. She had learned to laugh and talk and even confide in messeigneurs her uncles the Duke and the Cardinal of Lorraine, but although she was a Queen and they were only princes of the blood still they towered over her, golden, invincible, filling the room, like an organ, with the invisible roulades of power.

  This man was the same. Perhaps he had been the same six years ago and not the pretty courtier, decorating every bedroom, which the randy gossip of the nursery had made him out to be.

  She said, ‘You may sit. We have some news from Scotland. The English have tried to seize the islands of Orkney, and have failed with great losses. The Queen-Regent our mother also speaks of French and Scottish raids on the town of Berwick and other places on the Borders, killing five hundred English and taking two thousand prisoners. She mentions particularly the brave part played by my lord of Culter, your brother.’

  ‘Her grace is too kind,’ said the comte de Sevigny, the faintest edge on his voice. Mary Fleming hoped that her mistress had noticed it.

  ‘Because of these actions,’ continued the clear, French voice implacably, ‘the Queen-Regent our mother considers that Lord Grey of Wilton may be summoned back to England, or at least will lose most of his army. Thus those who fight in Scotland serve France as well, if not better than those who remain.’

  She made the mistake of pausing. ‘My brother is fortunate,’ said Mr Crawford agreeably.

  However overpowering he might have seemed, he was not, in fact, her uncle. Mary of Scotland’s young, timbreless voice lifted half a tone and gained in clarity. ‘His highness the Dauphin and I are to be married in the spring time. We shall require the services of wise and brave men to lead our people the Scots in our absence. You have our guerdon, Mr Crawford. His Majesty of France would readily grant remittance of your bargain for that purpose.’