Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  That night, Lord Grey made a speech to his troops from the bulwark, thanking God for the day’s success, praising his men and exhorting them to noble endeavours. In their hands, he said, lay the safety of Guînes; and he took oath before them, and asked his men to take oath in their turn, that the defenders of Guînes would die rather than betray any weakness, or surrender.

  After that, they had to erect a new vawmure by entrenching six feet deep in the bulwark, and dawn of Tuesday showed that his forebodings were realized: the enemy had planted a big six-gun battery over the ditch in the market-place and another of three cannon on the ramparts, making a total of sixteen guns aimed at the cathouse and the flanking defence of the barbican. By the end of the morning the cathouse was intact, but not the flankers or the garden bulwark or the curtain wall; and by firing eight or nine regular salvoes an hour, the French were continually crumbling the breach.

  The noise was punishing. One’s inclination, when it ceased for a moment, was to close the eyes and fall stunned into sleep, and this was dangerous, for the batteries only stopped when another sally was being made. That afternoon it was a regiment of Swiss who approached, with some French, and sent sundry small bands to examine the breach and to try and locate the numbers and stations of the gunners. But Grey was ready, and had the positions concealed. They harassed the reconnoitring party with hackbuts and watched them retire at length with qualified satisfaction: as soon as they were back in camp, the French cannon opened up once again.

  The hours of darkness, once more, were spent in churning up mud in more trenching. Austin, at one point, came to try and persuade him to snatch some sleep and he did, for an hour: there was no point in leaving his men leaderless. He had no illusions about his command. The Spaniards were good, but they couldn’t get the last ounce from the English that he could. Bourne, helpless with gout, had lost his life defending the Mary on a stretcher.

  Harry Palmer was able, but still feeling the shoulder wound he took at Bushing last month. He also made the mistake of mixing with the men far too much. They would go with him, but they wouldn’t rise, as they might have to, beyond themselves. That was why one talked to them of honour and glory. Men would fight well for their pay, but they would die for an aspiration.

  Austin knew that. The trouble with Austin was that he believed so deeply in the chivalrous virtues that he found it impossible to refer to them.

  In war—William Grey tried not to sound cynical—in war, it was alas the opposite nature one looked for.

  The next day, Wednesday, the enemy opened fire with twenty-four cannon at daybreak, and the bombardment continued without ceasing for five hours or more, wrecking the curtain wall and driving right through the rampart and the new earthen countermure he had raised on it. He was on his feet all morning, moving between the Mary and Web’s Tower watching the effects of the cannonfire, and had just had a bench put down so that he could rest on it while he gave some directions to Palmer, with Lewis sitting side-saddle beside him, when the first telling salvo burst on them.

  It was not the first time he had been on the lee side of a direct hit on patched ramparts. Unhewn stone scythed through the air, and a blast of sky-darkening grit swept thudding against them. The bench he was sitting on collapsed, chopped through and broken by boulders. Overturned and rolling, with his hose ripped and his head battered and grazed by his morion, Lord Grey saw Lewis, sprawling, had found some protection behind a crate of currier balls. Palmer, half under the shards of the bench, was protecting his face with his arms, and after that first glance Grey did the same, letting his cuirass shield him as the fall of rubble grew lighter and he could hear, above the ring of the metal, the screams of the wounded and dying.

  They suffered their first major losses there by the curtain, and by God’s grace only, he and the two men with him were unhurt. Then, immediately, they had to face the first assault in strength by the enemy. At first they came in twos and threes, moving out of the trenches to investigate. Then came the Swiss in close order, stepping into the ditch and marching up to the breach without faltering.

  He had done what he could. Twenty of his best shots were in Webb’s, and on the other side, a score of Spaniards hidden inside the outworks set up a crossfire when the hand-to-hand fighting was at its worst. And it sufficed, for after an hour with no advance and heavy cost to both sides, the enemy blew the retire and the Swiss left as they had come, and withdrew behind the town’s wicker ramparts. Then the bombardment restarted.

  Two salvoes brought down Webb’s Tower, and killed or maimed all the curriers—his best—who were in it. The firing continued: regular, deliberate shots aimed at the Spaniards still left in the outworks and covering the resting-up and reforming of the assault troops. It was a time for recharging weapons and dragging out balls and powder; for clearing the dead and hurriedly binding the wounded: for the bustle of men obeying and carrying orders, and for everywhere words of encouragement, of commendation, of exhortation before the next big attack should befall them.

  He put two hundred fresh men into the bulwark just as the lines of steel helmets appeared again over the counter-scarf and began to move down to the moat. Many more than last time, and well slept and well armed and well led. Then, with pike and bill, it was man to man, face to face and body to body, as the afternoon wore on to dusk. All round, the human voice in all its keys from aggression to anguish to anger, supported by all the music made by metal striking on metal, or the resonance of metal on stone; or the tuneless percusssion of metal on hide, flesh and marrowbone.

  The fortress held. With his supporting hackbutters dead, his fire weapons finished, his munition boxes made inaccessible, Grey saw his men giving way inch by inch as the French, attracted by the easy fighting, began to cross the ditch unappointed and assail the widening breach. It was then that he thrust hackbuts into the hands of Austin and Harry Palmer and showed them where, concealed by the stonework, they could pick off the enemy.

  He knew Harry’s trained eye, and his determination. He had watched, over and over again, Arthur’s chagrin at his cousin’s God-given brilliance with firearms.

  Against that, Arthur was a soldier by instinct, and had killed his first man (over a dice game) at eighteen. Whereas Austin, in cold or hot blood, had never taken a life on a battlefield.

  Harry Palmer was worried too. His shoulder hurt. From where he crouched, he could see Allendale’s dark, delicate profile, bent on to the task of loading powder and shot into his weapon. The boy was a perfectionist. Knew every trick of army strategy from the time of the Caesars, and would talk about them for hours. Rode; jousted; used a bow and a sword; mastered every skill he was set to, like a tradesman. And hated slaughtering men.

  Not the person Harry Palmer would choose to trust his life to, out there in the buffeting cold of his niche, bearing down on a scrambling horde of invaders: for if Austin gave way, there would be nothing to protect Harry Palmer when they outflanked him.

  On the other hand, Allendale was an oddity. It might just prove that to have a man’s life in his hands was the spur that he needed to quieten his conscience. If he brought himself to fire, there was no one in the fort who could do it better. Come to that, there was no one else he would trust to do it at all.

  Harry Palmer loaded, caught Austin Grey’s eye, and signalled. As one, the two long-barrelled hackbuts aimed, paused, and spoke. And on the breach, two of the enemy cried out, staggered, and dying tumbled back down to the ditch.

  Swift and sure, Austin’s hands set to reloading. He was pleased and happy to find them so steady. He felt still through all his nerves the tingle of triumph he had experienced. Sick with apprehension, he had chosen his target and shot at it. And miraculously, the ball had struck the gold as it always did in the quiet of practice. He had not let his uncle down, or Sir Harry, or the brave and desperate men on the ramparts who were depending on him. He could shoot. He could save lives by shooting. And he had never known before the small, intoxicating glitter of personal victory.


  Palmer was looking at him again. Austin smiled, and sighted his weapon, and fired at the same instant as Sir Harry. And two more French soldiers died.

  They stayed at their posts firing until nightfall. Between them, they blunted the attack and were part of the reason why the French again called a retire, breasting the cold liquid mud of the ditches, their waterline leaved with the dying. Lord Grey, clapping his nephew on the back, gave him no time to speak or to think, but set him to supervise the repair work on the breach while the dead were thrust aside and the injured roughly tended and the scarce provisions told over.

  He called them all briefly together a few hours before dawn, to hear a prayer and his commendation for the way they had fought. ‘I tell you,’ he said, ‘one or two more such banquets will cool the enemy’s courage. Hold to your posts. Fight like the men I know you to be.’

  The stupidity happened after that in the crowded darkness, as they pushed and jostled about, each with his task to complete before the daylight robbed them of safety. Pain struck as Grey shouldered his way from the bulwark: a pain in his foot so intense that he thought at first it was severed and breathing hard, clutched the arms of the men on either side to prevent himself falling. Then Lewis got to him and he had himself taken indoors, quickly, before he made a fool of himself by losing consciousness. There, cutting off his blood-sodden boot, they confirmed what he suspected had happened: a soldier’s scabbardless sword had driven straight through the arch of his foot, severing tendons and releasing a gush of fresh blood which soaked all the cloths that they put on it.

  He was not afraid of blood. But he was afraid of the rumours that start when a commander disappears from the field at the darkest moment and lowest ebb of the battle. He could not stand, but he had the foot cleaned and bound tightly enough to staunch the bleeding. Then he had them bring an armed chair and sitting in it, had himself hoisted like the Bishop of Rome and carried out once again to the bitter wind of the ramparts.

  The last day dawned. As the hoar light sifted over the marshes, the Governor of Guînes saw how the enemy had spent the night.

  The moat had been bridged. Hurdles, placed across floating casks, spanned the water, already packed with faggots and fleeces. And as he studied it, the day’s bombardment began.

  It went on until three in the afternoon, and the violence surpassed all they had so far undergone. Borne from place to place, encouraging, ordering, Lord Grey decided by noon what to do. Before the battery ended, he ordered the men in the bulwark to retreat, leaving only a few to make a display of gunfire. Then he sent in his engineers to prepare to blow up the great tower whole.

  He never knew whether his plan was discovered. It was perhaps nothing but ill luck that as the fuse was being laid, the assault increased with such fury that no man in Guînes could move, or show his head. And fifteen minutes after that, the enemy’s German regiment burst through the bulwark and entering, put all those left to the sword.

  There was a moment, at the height of the battle, when Grey of Wilton lurched from his chair and thrusting to the top of the ramparts stood there, exposed in fevered despair and crazily wishing of God that some shot from the bulwark would take him.

  It was a common soldier beside him who pulled him down by his scarf, but already his longstanding disciplines had asserted themselves. Calling the rest to follow, he led his remaining suite and their men to the Keep. As the bulwark fell, the men in the base court, Wheathill’s Bulwark and the garden rampart abandoned their posts also and fled. Soon all that was left of the defenders of Guînes were together, in the ultimate stronghold. Lord Grey saw the last man inside, and gave orders to ram up the portals.

  Many years later the records were to tell how the Duke de Guise’s trumpeter, offering parley, came to the moatside that evening; how Lord Grey’s men, crowding about him, begged him with tears in their eyes to save their lives by compounding; how, after reading them a homily, he bade them return to their posts, which they did, before his lordship finally sent word that he was prepared to hear the Duke’s message.

  In fact, there were almost no English left with Lord Grey: they had been cut to pieces defending the bastions. And the Burgundians in the stronghold at Guînes were in no two minds about what they wanted done. The gates were rammed shut. The French advanced and began to lay fuses under them. And Lord Grey’s men turned on Lord Grey and threatened to throw him over the walls unless he surrendered.

  So that night a single clerk, unaccompanied, was let out at Harry Norwich’s Bulwark and waded his way with a pole over the spiked boards which filled the moat round the fortress. He had to plead his own cause on the other side, for Lord Grey’s drum had been shot in the leg and his trumpeter killed as he blew for parley. But they took him at length to the tent of M. de Guise and his brothers, and he spoke up with his offer: to yield the castle, if the garrison might be allowed to march out with bag and baggage and six pieces of ordnance, their ensign flying.

  He was sent back to the fort with a refusal, and the soldiers in Guînes threatened to cut his throat unless he returned to the French and made them accept their surrender, no matter what fate befell Grey and his captains. They pushed him out through a hole in the wall, and he, who had been kicked and pummelled by his own side, was kicked and pummelled again by the enemy’s Germans before M. de Guise saw him again, and spoke kindly, and took him back to the fort on horseback, laying about his own men with a truncheon.

  The clerk’s share in the business was finished. Next, the Duke de Guise’s own trumpeter sounded below the walls of the fortress, and proposed to Lord Grey a truce, with hostages; and a meeting in the French camp next morning.

  Lord Grey agreed. He had no alternative. His chosen hostages, Arthur and Lewis, were sent for at first light. To leave the fort, they had to walk on the naked and newly slain cramming the bulwark, some stirring and groaning yet under the flinching steps of their boot-soles.

  In their place, he received the Duke de Guise’s two gentlemen. One, tall as a tree, was Jean d’Estrée, Grand Master of the French Artillery, whose guns, the best fashioned and the best directed in the world, had just won the fortress. And the other was the architect of his downfall: the King’s new chevalier, Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny.

  One does not destroy the dignity of the dead with light words on the eve of surrender. William Grey, thirteenth Baron Grey of Wilton, stood erect, his hand on a chair, his person groomed free of mud and stone dust and powder, and greeted his hostages, his sleep-starved skin lined and as unyielding as horn. ‘My salutations, gentlemen. I could have brought my brave English to face no better opponents.’

  It was cold. The candles guttered and flinched in the grey light from the unshuttered windows and lit and obscured the undisturbed face and fine cuirass of the man they now called comte de Sevigny so that Harry Palmer, politely inconspicuous with the Grey lads in the background, had his memory and his nerves suddenly jolted.

  ‘Apples!’ said Sir Harry involuntarily.

  Lord Grey glanced up sharply. The comte de Sevigny, on the point of speaking, paused for a moment. Then turning his head, he met first the pale, closed face of Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale, and then the bearded one, tinged with fever and accusing astonishment, of the man he had last seen as Knight-Porter of Calais.

  ‘Apples,’ repeated Sir Henry Palmer; and took a step forward. ‘You were the man with the cart? Were you? In the Citadel? Then … Christ … No, I’m dreaming.’

  ‘What’s this?’ said Lord Grey sharply.

  Lymond’s eyes met those of d’Estrée, and then removed themselves civilly. He said, ‘I spent some time in Calais in disguise just before you took me at Flavy. Piero Strozzi was with me.’

  ‘Piero Strozzi!’ said Palmer. ‘Bloody hell, I sent you to Ruisbank!’ He breathed hard for a moment, his hand clutching his aching shoulder. ‘Tommy told me about you. Something to do with a tarot game.’

  The past history of the Palmer family had no interest for Lord Grey at that moment
. He said, ‘So, Mr Crawford, you indeed knew where Ruisbank was. And your bargain at Ham, like your bargain at Douai, was a ruse. I congratulate you.’

  ‘Bargain?’ said d’Estrée.

  Francis Crawford smiled slightly. ‘On the contrary. Both times, I told you the truth. I said the French meant to take Calais.’

  Lord Grey turned from him. ‘Your Scottish colleague, M. d’Estrée, is a master in the art of deception. He gave us information, when we took him at Ham, which led us to think that the Calais attack was merely a feint for a march south to Luxemburg. I told my nephew that he should have given Mr Crawford his quietus at Douai. If he had, Calais would be English still.’

  ‘I rather fancy,’ said Lymond dryly, ‘that he would have had to assassinate the Spanish high command as well. We know very well, Lord Grey, that but for the Burgundians, we should not be standing here. I might make a guess at the number of times you asked King Philip to support you. Perhaps you should also know that there are no English troops waiting at Dover. Savoy sent ships to bring them over and found that Pembroke’s army had been recalled to London. The Queen may wish to retake Calais, but the Privy Council are unlikely to sustain her. When you go to talk to the Duke de Guise, you will find there is no choice. You must surrender, or give up your men’s lives for nothing.’

  ‘You speak convincingly for your employers,’ said Lord Grey of Wilton. It was time to go. He rose to his feet and faltered, and Austin, catching his arm held him while Lymond on his other side made a swift movement. ‘I am exceedingly sorry. You are wounded?’

  No one answered. Then, ‘It is nothing,’ said Lord Grey curtly and moved, with Austin’s help to the doorway. His name and his dignity had suffered enough today and in the past at this man’s instigation, without revealing that his only wound at the battle of Guînes had come from a sword of his own side, by accident.

  *

  From pride of a different kind, he refused the first terms he was offered. For the sake of his soldiers he had made every painful concession but one: he could not, without the utter defacing of English credit, agree to surrender his flags to the enemy.