Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  He walked up and down again, the stiff folds of his coat swinging and buffeting the delicate furniture. ‘It would suit you to know now, hey? Well, it would suit me to ponder the business. There’s no hurry from my point of view, mistress. Every week I stay is twice paid for. And Sybilla and her dear son will be here, won’t they, at least until the royal wedding?’

  Philippa got up and said, ‘What, then?’

  He walked forward and took her arm, just above the elbow. He was a big man, taller than she was, and broad with it even in age. His flat fingers, the joints bunched and reddened, moved a little, smoothing the silk on her sleeve. ‘You make a good case,’ he said. ‘Considering the Crawfords are no business of yours, and that piece of misbegotten trash is just divorcing you. Why spend your savings on them?’

  ‘I can’t think,’ Philippa said. ‘My mother always said I had more money than I knew what to do with.’

  ‘Aye,’ he said. He did not let her go. ‘They have all the old arts of enticement, that family. So my sister Honoria found out, and her son Gavin, although the Crawfords never bewitched me, among them. Is there anything you would not do, Mistress Philippa, for Francis Crawford?’

  Courage, Kate always said. Nine-tenths of every attack is bluff. The art is to know when to call it. She did not shake her arm free. She merely said, ‘The offer is ten thousand pounds, Mr Bailey. Nothing more.’

  Kate, Kate … This time it isn’t bluff. She felt his other hand rise and settle, first on her arm, then, sliding up, on the bare skin of her neck … and over … and down. Then the broad padded mass of his doublet closed upon her, hard as a bolster, and his breath steamed on her face as his open mouth descended quickly.

  If she used the flat of her hand, or her knee, or the heel of her shoe, he would throw her out, and do what the Lennoxes wanted. She got her head free then, and snapped at him. ‘If you indulge yourself now, Master Bailey, you will not have your money, for I will not send for it.’ And, as the pressure continued: ‘It’s your life you are risking,’ said Philippa clearly. ‘If you go on, I shall make it known to Mr Crawford, whatever the consequences.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said. He disengaged very slowly and stood breathing thickly. ‘I remember. You said there would be no divorce if he mounted you. So … is it possible? You jib because you have a maidenhead still to barter?’

  ‘You should take a beginner’s course in almost any well-run seraglio,’ said Philippa shortly. ‘It would adjust certain gaucheries in your language.’

  He ignored that. ‘A virgin under this monarchy, and with a fortune!… I cannot believe it!’ said Leonard Bailey; and in his voice, quite plainly, was a puzzled excitement. ‘What milksop lovers have you had, that you have reached twenty without a single passage, a single conclusive joust in some antechamber, or grotto, or window embrasure? I have known no man born who could not achieve his business with a woman at court, if he felt like it.’

  ‘Perhaps my approach is too subtle for them,’ Philippa said. ‘Master Bailey, with ten thousand pounds, you can buy all the court ladies you want, and the window embrasures to put them in.’

  He smiled. His nostrils spread, and his lips; and you could see that his mind had shifted, for the moment, from the promptings of his appetites. She waited, holding her breath, and staring at him.

  ‘But that would not hurt the Crawfords,’ he said. ‘No. Go home, Madame de Sevigny. Collect all the money you have. Wait. And, in my own time, I shall tell you the price. If there is one.’

  She was free. She tempted fate by using no more arguments. ‘It is your life, Master Bailey,’ she said. ‘I should advise you to put off no time in safeguarding it.’

  The men still stood on guard outside the door as she passed through. She supposed Bailey called them his servants. There were two more in the hall waiting, he said, to escort her over the snow to her lodging. Which was shrewd of him. For that way she could not linger and watch who left the house with the papers.

  She hoped Madame Roset would be safe. She should be. He wanted to stay in that house, and she was a witness: he needed her. And there was no way of removing her, that she could think of.

  He squeezed her fingers and kissed them, taking his leave, and she walked from the house with her keepers, the three sets of prints tumbling and gouging the smooth, sparkling white of the garden. The bodyguard answered no questions, but stood while the gatehouse porter, scolding, brought servants running to guide her over the swept, slippery flags of the Hôtel de Guise courtyard.

  As she entered the doors she saw them still there outside, watching.

  Her grace of Scotland, said Célie, had sent for her.

  It was, as one had guessed, a matter of the dressmaker’s continued shortcomings. Philippa did what she could, through the raging pain in her head, to rectify it.

  The headache lingered a while but did not approach, she was glad to find, a degree of virulence which might incapacitate her.

  For that, you had to expose your sensibilities to attack for very much longer; and take no one into your confidence: least of all those already nearer to you than you wanted.

  She was busy all day but at night found herself too tired to sleep. When she finally closed her eyes before dawn, she was awakened almost at once by the noise of somebody frantically sobbing. It was not until she felt Célie’s brusque arms around her that she realized that it was herself.

  Chapter 8

  Freres et seurs en divers lieux captifs

  Se trouveront passer pres du monarque.

  Conducted by the glittering red and blue tabards of the Lyon Court, the procession of the nine Scottish Commissioners for the Queen of Scots’ wedding wound into Paris some three days afterwards, impeccably escorted by François de Sevigny, brother to one of the Commissioners, and by Claude d’Aumale, brother to the great Duke of Guise himself.

  All the way from Dieppe, the names of de Guise and of Sevigny had filled the air, through the speeches and the noise of the hackbuts and cannon. Lymond had sent for the Tapkana, his specially built canopied sledges, and the first part of their journey was spent Russian-style running over the flat snowy chalkfields, with pennants streaming and bells ringing in the crisp air.

  He was not averse, his brother noticed, to reminding the populace who he was. Even d’Aumale’s jewelled hats and furred cloaks drew fewer eyes than the Voevoda Bolshoia in his black fox fur hat, balancing on his light sleigh, reins in hand. Along with everything else, Richard Crawford concluded, Lymond had come to enjoy adulation.

  Except once, long ago, over an estrangement with his wife Mariotta, Lord Culter had never been jealous of the young brother he had seen grow from babyhood. Until the moment Francis had left home at sixteen, a prisoner of war to the English, Richard knew him solely as a blond and delicate boy, interested only, it seemed, in reading and music, whose apparent fragility concealed a will of steel, and a turn of phrase which could wound like a sword-cut.

  Most of all, he remembered the hatred which lay between Francis and Gavin, his father. It was on the violent, heavy-witted older man that Francis had practised his verbal play, to no benefit to himself. Some of the floggings Sybilla prevented, for of course, Francis was always her favourite, and the favourite too of Eloise his sister.

  But he had failed often enough to weather the storm, and had had to stand by while his books burned, or his lute lay in splinters. It was to be expected that when he became in turn a leader of men, Francis should prove hard on others; should observe no laws; should fight, regardless of method, for victory.

  Hence had come the misunderstandings which had led Richard once to hunt down his brother in order to deliver him to the justice he thought he deserved. Later, learning to know him, a friendship had grown: odd, irregular; at times surprisingly deep. And at times marred, it seemed wantonly, by Lymond’s excesses and his own lack of trust towards Richard which again and again had caused his older brother anger and misery.

  No one in Scotland was ignorant of Lymond’s growing statur
e: in France, in Malta, in his embassy for France to Turkey. It had seemed possible that he might outgrow his wildness: that the virtues he did possess, and the depth and constancy of his relationship with Sybilla might bring him at last to safe harbour.

  But then, Francis had not come home after Turkey, and the tales of his doings there and in Africa were not slow in coming to Scotland. There followed Russia, and his brief visit home where it became finally clear that he had changed: that all the ground gained during those painful years had been lost. And most distressing of all, that the sheet anchor had gone: that he had made up his mind to break for all time with his mother.

  It was this discovery which had led Richard last year to attack him: a futile reaction, and one he would never have been driven to make but for all the years of growing attachment between. For what Francis was doing to Sybilla, Richard believed there was no forgiveness.

  He had hoped, after that bitter encounter at Dieppe, that the schism, painful but wholesome, would now be complete on Sybilla’s side as it was on Lymond’s, to see her through the coming difficult weeks. And certainly, the bloodless formality of the relationship Francis had since maintained with them made it easy for her to keep her distance, and her thoughts to herself.

  But although she could dissimulate, Richard was wiser than once he had been. He watched her when Lymond was there, moving cordially among his eminent countrymen, agreeably talkative, encouraging Beaton or Rothes or Cassillis or Seton to tell him about their troubles in Scotland; amusing young Fleming, who still worshipped him; impressing, you could see, the Bishop of Orkney who once, for God’s sake, had tried him in Edinburgh for an outlaw.

  James Stewart and Erskine of Dun, one noticed, were less communicative. Rumour had it that they had already had a brief encounter with Lymond on his first day in Dieppe; and had caught him, perhaps, in the same temper that he had displayed in the house of Jean Ango. At any rate, the magic had failed to work in this instance.

  In which case why, of all the company, did Sybilla choose to spend most of her time with these two?

  Because, his observation told him, she saw, as he did, that something lay between them and Francis. And because, as ever, the matter of Francis occupied her still, to the exclusion of virtually everything else.

  After that, everything he saw confirmed it. The rejection he had hoped for had not taken place. Thrust into her son’s daily company Sybilla faced, in the weeks ahead, a test of endurance far harder to bear than his desertion.

  After Berwick, after Dieppe, one was not fool enough to go to Francis, cap in hand, and plead yet again for a reconciliation. On Lymond’s part the separation was quite clearly final, and had been before he left Scotland. What Richard needed to know were his reasons. And then, to the best of his powers, to convince his mother that Francis would never return to her.

  To be private with anyone in the midst of such pageantry was not easy; and less so if every obstacle is placed in your way by your quarry. It was not until Rouen that Richard found his brother alone; and then only by dint of following him into his bedchamber when he walked in, divesting himself of his elaborate surcoat and proceeding swiftly to change it for some plainer clothes, brought him by Archie.

  It appeared he had an appointment with a sculptor called Hérisson, and was not willing to linger. Neither did Archie show any sign of budging. Richard closed the door and said, ‘Perhaps you can give me an answer while you are dressing. What is the source of the trouble between you and Sybilla?’

  ‘Ask her,’ Lymond said. Archie, unfolding garments from a coffer, did not look round.

  ‘I have. She says I am not to concern myself with it. It seems to me, in view of her age and frailty, that I must concern myself with it.’

  ‘Is this supposed to be something new?’ Lymond said. He picked up a shirt and slid into it. ‘You seem to have charged often enough at that particular target to be fit to stop a bull by his horns in full fury.’

  ‘Is it to do with Eloise?’ said Richard bluntly.

  Lymond’s full attention was being given, briefly, to the knotting of his shirt-cords. ‘Did Sybilla say it is?’ he said. He looked for his doublet armhole, found it, and slinging the garment on, began to fasten it.

  ‘No.’ Richard, harassed, turned to look at Archie and Archie’s black eyes, unwinking, outfaced him. Richard said, ‘I don’t want to hear your miserable secrets. But for Sybilla’s sake I want some answers. I once accused you of wanting your sister dead. I did you, perhaps, an injustice. The fact remains that she told me …’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ Lymond said. ‘Unless you wish to follow me into the street, I am afraid we must abandon our gossip. So full of fruyte and rethorikly pykit. Gloves. And no, the other hat. Money?’

  Richard said, ‘She told me one night that she had no wish to go on living, and that if she did, it could only harm you. She was thirteen years old.… Can you not stand still, and look me in the face, and give me an answer?’

  ‘No,’ said Lymond. He had gone now, fully dressed, to the door of this room where he turned, Archie behind him. ‘If you are asking, did Eloise make no effort to avoid the explosion which killed her, the answer is probably yes. If you are also asking, was I her lover, the answer is no. After all,’ said Lymond, ‘that would be incest.’ And with a click, the door closed finally after him.

  That night, Richard retired early and drank himself grimly insensible while Lymond, with faultless bonhomie, was adorning his third Hôtel de Ville banquet. He did not know that Sybilla, who had also excused herself, took the occasion to trap Archie Abernethy at last in her room and confront him with an inquiry. ‘I believe, since Richard is incapable for the first time in fifteen months, that my two sons have had an encounter?’

  ‘I wouldn’t know, my lady,’ said Archie.

  ‘But you do know about Mlle Marthe,’ Sybilla said. She had never uttered that name to him, or to either son, until that moment.

  Archie’s lined face did not change, but his black eyes were not without pity. ‘Aye,’ he said. ‘Ye’ll ken, she was wed to Master Blyth.’

  Sybilla said, ‘I know you are attached to my son, and must therefore regard me as an enemy. But I should like you to tell me. Does Francis mean Richard to meet her?’

  He knew her and respected her, and had nursed her grandchild as his own, but he was also a man who spoke his mind, and sharply if need be. ‘Lady Culter,’ said Archie Abernethy, ‘only a man who hated you would do such a thing.’

  She stood up then, staunchly upright in spite of the seventy years she carried, and said, ‘Forgive me, Mr Abernethy. You see, I have no guide lines left. I can do nothing to help him. You cannot know what it means to me that you are with him.’

  There was a pause. Archie did not drop his eyes. Presently he said, ‘His defences are good. But it is his friends that will bring him low, not his enemies, Lady Culter. Keep you out of his way. That’s the best advice I can give you.’

  *

  At Paris, they were met outside the gates by a hundred gentlemen and a band of Archers of the King’s Guard with pipes and tambours and escorted to the Place de Grève for the City’s welcome; and thence over the river to the Maison de l’Ange, the large residence in the rue de la Huchette which the Crown utilized for its more important guests. There, they were received by the King’s Maréchal des Logis; and there took place the ceremony of the Corps de Ville’s gifts. The Commissioners received the double quarts of hippocras and boxes of dragees and gilded cotignac, the yellow wax flambeaux and the pâtés of Mayenne ham and the double marzipan of Lyon, gilded; and listened to and replied to the speeches. Then, at last, the nine official representatives of her Majesty the Queen Dowager and the Three Estates of the Realm of Scotland were allowed to retire and compose themselves.

  Lymond went straight to the Hotel St André.

  He knew, by the abandon with which the gates were flung open that his suit was known, and had prospered. Before he reached the top of the steps Marguerite, Maréchale de St
André, was waiting there, dressed more splendidly than he had seen her in Lyon, as befitted a noble lady, the mother of a courted heiress. Only her eyes, as he bent to kiss her hand, dwelled on him in a manner less than maternal and her voice, scolding him, was softer than was its wont.

  ‘Cher ami, I hear you have been extravagant to the danger of your health. You must not act à la bizarre when you are wedded to Cathin. I trust your mother and the Earl are in good health?’

  ‘You shall meet them before very long. I have your permission, then, to address your daughter?’ said Francis Crawford. ‘I should try to make her content.’

  ‘I know she will be content,’ said the Maréchale de St André. ‘I am not happy, my dear; but if one should have you, then I should prefer it to be a child of my breeding. She is waiting for you.’

  *

  How long she had been waiting he could not imagine but she was there, sitting upright and alone in the smallest boudoir, with her black hair shining over her shoulders and her skirts of rosebud velvet spread all about her. Crystals, circling her throat, were her only ornament.

  No one accompanied him into the room. He closed the door gently behind him and saw her colour rise as she turned her head, but she kept her perfect composure.

  ‘A wife, a spaniel, a walnut tree,/The more you beat them, the better they be. I learn,’ said Lymond, ‘that you are willing to undergo unmentionable risks?’

  She had risen to curtsey to him. Now, standing, she faced him, unsmiling still. ‘It is my mother’s assent which brings you here,’ she said. ‘I have said nothing yet, M. de Sevigny, for nothing has been said to me.’

  ‘It is a principle of Archidamidas,’ Lymond said, ‘that he that knows how to speak, knows also when to speak. You know, I think, who and what I am. I have the word of the King that on the day after the Dauphin’s wedding I shall receive the final annulment of my present marriage. When I have my release, may I hope that you will become my wife?’