Checkmate

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘The bloody fool,’ said Guthrie angrily. ‘Hence he wanted to have the first mill to himself. I don’t suppose he is steering it. How could he steer it, if he’s got the match already lit …’

  He stopped speaking suddenly. In the dark his eyes met and found Jerott’s. Then he said, ‘If he was going to set the powder off, he should have done it by now. Look how close he is to the bridge.’

  Jerott Blyth said something under his breath that no one could hear. Then to Lancelot Plummer he said, very clearly, ‘Tell me something. Did he ask you to light the match?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Lancelot, surprised. ‘I handed it up to him in the mill. He needed a hand to get aboard because he had to keep the gunpowder dry. Then I came back to you. You remember.’ He looked round at them all. ‘What is it?’

  Guthrie said, ‘He needed a hand to get aboard because he was blind. Jerott. Jerott, stop. There is nothing you can do.’

  *

  The Authie was lower than normal, and the current therefore was a busy one, spinning the mills round and round as well as jarring and tilting them.

  It needed a strong stomach to handle the buffeting, and a strong head to keep thinking straight in spite of it. To the six men in the second mill, it had been an experience they were extremely glad to abandon. To the man alone in the first, braced against heaving wood with a burning slow match in his hand, it was a matter of assembling all the senses he had left, in the absence of the vital one just denied him.

  Half-way through the work of the evening, the headache had begun to beat through all his senses, tightening into the dizzying whiteness of pain which was part of the most grandiloquent kind of seizure. It had been a gamble with providence, all through the highly satisfactory byplay in the village. The bark of the firing, when even the sound of a cough was hard to put up with, had been the signal for the scintillating distortion, and then the blurring he had been waiting for. And now indeed he was the river, the barque and the oars in a manner more autocratic than the poet could ever have dreamed of.

  His task was to drive the mill through the main current up to the bridge, without lodging it on either bank or blocking the second mill which must be following him.

  He had hoped to use a plank to steer with, as the others had planned, or even his weight, moved from side to side of the frail wooden building. And if he could see nothing, at least surely he could hear the turmoil of midstream, and sense the quiet of the banks and deep pools he should keep from.

  What confounded him there was the racket of the machinery. It was as if some monstrous milling were already in process: a crop of iron grinding between brazen rollers within walls which boomed and echoed like drumskins, crushing his mind with its violence. (O mill, what hast thou ground? Precious thy wheat! It is not oats thou hast ground, but blood-red wheat …) And if another such was coming behind him, he could not hear it, any more than he could hear the sound of the water, or the shouts of the soldiers, or the distant rap which was the firing of hackbuts.

  There would have been a certain splendour in crashing straight into the bridge, except that he did not wish to be rescued unconscious; and in the river he would be his own master. So he knelt, sliding and swaying, and touched the slowmatch to the fuse, keeping it there for a long time to make sure that it caught. Then he blundered purposefully about, thrown from wall to wall of his vessel until he found the open space of the door.

  For a moment he stood there, and as once Philippa had done, forbade his mind to fly to its homing.

  A fisherman’s voice, heard long ago, returned to him with sudden brilliant clarity:

  Ta femme sera de la sorte

  Dans les parois de ta maison

  Comme est une vigne qui porte

  Force bons fruicts en la saison.

  Then it seemed that an impatient voice said ‘Come!’ So he dropped from the mill, and the cold swirling flow of the Authie received him.

  He did not know, as the others running along the banks could see, that he was in the path of the second mill, coming lurching along the surface behind him. He did not know either how short a fuse he had given his gunpowder.

  It blew up when he was still very close behind, tossing the river into waves and sending out a wall of heat that struck him in the face. Planks fell. Because the charge was small, the mill did not disintegrate. It did, however, begin to burn with great fury and also to move much more quickly, so that to the men on the bridge, it looked like a fiend from hell rushing roaring and rattling upon them.

  They ran for their lives. They were mostly in safety when it struck, exploding the four or five culverin. The mill broke through all the supports, dragging out ropes and chains and flinging into the air the boats which had formed part of its structure. Then, unfurling pure flame from its fragments, the mill paused, swung, and then picking up speed moved on downstream, the river slapping its banks in great copper combers behind it.

  The shock sweeping back from the bridge caught the second mill for a moment and stopped it. It danced high on the crests, lifting and falling, and finally began to move forward to collide with the bridge in its turn, collecting a streamer of flame as it did so.

  In sailing to the bridge, it overran a great deal of wreckage, among which was François de Sevigny, who sensibly had stopped swimming because he was hurt, and because at every stroke his head and shoulders and ribs were flailed with tumbling stone and jerking timber. Nor, of course, could he know where to swim.

  … Et tes fils autour de ta table

  Arrangez, beaux et verdissants,

  Comme la jeunesse agréable

  D’un plant d’oliviers fleurissans …

  The voice stopped.

  He was already sinking when the mill struck him.

  Chapter 8

  L’ennemi grand vieil dueil meurt de poison …

  Plus ne sera le grand en faux sommeil,

  L’inquietude viendra prendre repoz.

  The following day the heatwave broke, and the three squadrons of the English fleet which had been standing off the French coast between St Valery and Etaples, eight miles from Montreuil, raised anchor and, after hovering for some time, sailed off for home.

  To Philippa, nearing the end of her voyage to Berwick, the change of weather made little difference. The night before her arrival she had been seized by a terror of such a nature that, unable at last to contain it, she had hammered on the door of Adam’s cabin and had spent the rest of the hours of darkness dressed, with Adam sitting beside her and all the tapers in the room blazing and swaying with the heave of the vessel.

  Adam, himself terrified by the look on her face, could find nothing to comfort her and finally stayed quiet, giving her the support of his repose and his silence until, in the small hours of the morning, she suddenly said, ‘Oh put out the candles! Put out the candles! They are burning me,’ and burst into stormy sobbing.

  He put them out, and gathered her in his arms and held her, until the dawn showed green through the spray-filmed glass. In the morning, he told Austin that Philippa was unwell, and wished to be alone. Then returning to his own cabin he sat for a long time unseeing; but whatever it was she had received, nothing of it came to him.

  For the Scottish Commissioners sailing out of Dieppe, the change of weather came three days too late. The wind which had brought the English fleet to St Valery confronted the small Scottish fleet in mid-channel, both with an enemy and with an adversity of weather they could not circumvent. Already one day out on their long-delayed journey home, they were forced to turn tail and run back to Dieppe, there to hope for such lodgings as the governor could find them until conditions for their departure improved.

  The two vessels carrying the nine commissioners and their immediate suite entered harbour first, followed by the other ships with their remaining servants, baggage and the horses, and lastly the Governor’s escorting squadron. Stepping ashore with her son Culter’s hand under her arm, Sybilla observed that the five Commissioners on the other ship had not been
so ready to disembark; and then, with growing attention, that the traffic to the La Barbe seemed at this moment to be more ingoing than otherwise. She pressed Richard’s arm, and with John Erskine, also curious, following them, walked past the tangle of ropes and stacked fish creels to the other ship.

  They had just reached her when M. de Fors himself appeared at the top of the gangplank, his short cloak swinging about him, and striding down, put each hand on an arm.

  ‘You are to go to your lodging. Don’t go up, I beg you. I have no wish to alarm you, but there is a sickness aboard, and we do not yet know what it is. We shall tell you all we can discover shortly.’

  ‘A sickness? In twenty-four hours?’ Richard said sharply. ‘Who is ill?’

  ‘Who is not ill?’ said the Governor grimly. ‘Half the servants who came aboard and all your friends. There are physicians with them now, and once we know what we have to deal with, we shall have them taken ashore. Meantime no one is leaving the ship.’

  ‘If it is the plague,’ Sybilla said, ‘then we are all a danger to you. We have spent every day of the last weeks together with the others.’

  ‘That I should recognize,’ de Fors said. ‘It is nothing anyone here has seen before. But Dieppe is a seaport. Who knows what sick air travels from the New World and abides in her wharfs and her timbers? I shall give you what news I can, as soon as I can.’

  He would perhaps, have turned away then, but his path was blocked by Lord Seton, newly disembarked from the Culter’s ship, the Archbishop behind him. Seton said, ‘What’s this? Illness? A slight affair?’

  ‘A slight affair, Lord Seton? No,’ said M. de Fors soberly. ‘I am sorry to tell you that there is not a man among your colleagues there who can rely, as you may, on seeing his homeland again.’

  *

  Sick men are rarely lodged in great houses. This time, the Scottish Commissioners were not invited to sleep in the House of Jean Ango or in the Governor’s Castle, but were given what rooms could be found in those houses which could offer them food and service, for the servants, least well nourished and more overthrown by their fate, began to die first of all those who had sailed on La Barbe.

  That was on the third day, when it was known that the mysterious illness was not the pest, but something whose symptoms included a gripping pain in the entrails and a burning fever, so that the victim could neither rest nor contain nourishment but called out for water, incessantly.

  Of the five Commissioners on the Barbe the oldest succumbed the most quickly. Only the two young men, Fleming and Lord James Stewart, were able to keep on their feet; although Fleming made no other progress and moved from wall to wall of his room, suffering bout and remission without recovery.

  The Queen’s brother, perhaps more worldly or perhaps simply quicker-witted, had drunk salt water at the first onset of sickness and had hung by his heels from his bed, so they said, vomiting out the infection before it had time to breed in him.

  It was true, when he came to see Lord Culter at the small house he shared with Erskine that he was weak; but there was no fever in his brain as he lay back in the tall chair they offered him and said, turning his gaze round them all, ‘You do not suppose, do you, that this was an accident?’

  He was the first to put into words the thought which had been present in all their minds for three days. No one expressed incredulity or even the mildest surprise. Richard said, ‘If it was not, why are we not all ill?’

  ‘Perhaps the cooks on the Soleil were honest,’ Lord James said. ‘Or perhaps those of the Roman faith were exempt from the mandate. Were Reid and Fleming not intended to go on the Soleil originally?’

  John Erskine said, ‘I changed with Fleming at the last moment. I wish I had not. He is at the threshold of life.’

  ‘And you are thirty years older. He has a better chance,’ Lord James said.

  Richard said, ‘Does the theory hold? I was never invited to go on the Barbe.’

  ‘No,’ said Lord James Fleming. ‘But de Sevigny is your brother.’

  ‘Perhaps so,’ said Richard curtly. ‘But it was he who sent us our only warning. I didn’t believe him. I may have been wrong.’

  ‘You know him better than I do. I don’t believe he had a hand in this poisoning. I do believe he has thrown his lot in with France, and that the de Guises believe they can probably influence all the Culters through him. I have no doubt,’ said James Stewart, ‘that this was an attempt to get rid of us; or notably, an attempt to get rid of me. Our return to Dieppe was quite unforeseen. We should have sickened at sea and quite probably died there, without suspicion or remedy.

  ‘I shall live to make them regret it. But Robert Reid will never see his garden at Kinloss bloom again.’

  *

  Robert Reid, Bishop of Orkney, was brought from his ship to the common room of the house in which he had twenty-four hours still to live. Because he had much gear and no servants, as well as a longing to see the faces of friends about him, he had his bed placed there, with his coffers beneath it, and was able to talk, weakly, when Richard went to see him, and Beaton and John Erskine and finally, Lord James, the best-liked and most respected of all the new generation of his antagonists.

  It was Lord James who, shocked at the nature of the room, urged him to have himself taken upstairs but Reid, following his lips, only smiled. ‘I am well where I am, so long as I can tarry. Long have you and I, my lord, been in plea for purgatory. I think I shall know before long whether there be such a place or not.’ And as Lord James began to speak of religion—‘No, my lord—let me alone, for you and I never agreed in our life, and I think we shall not agree now at my death.’

  ‘Will you go home?’ Lord James said. ‘My lord of Cassillis has asked for it.’

  ‘I am a naturalized Frenchman,’ Bishop Reid said, ‘or so they tell me, and the years of my learning in France have not been unhappy ones. Why should not this carcass stay here, instead of stinking a ship on the high seas?’

  Then he looked up at the young man, his eyes no longer tranquil, but anxious and angry.

  ‘I go to my God, but my heart is torn at leaving my country. Is Satan loose there? Is it a sin to refrain from striking one’s brother for the good of his soul? I tell you, there is no war worse than the war when each man is fighting for Paradise.’

  ‘I do not want war,’ Lord James said. ‘There are others like me. Be at rest.’

  ‘Then you must teach,’ Bishop Reid said. ‘Point to history. Remind your people of themselves. Remind them of the city-states, small as we are, who because of their smallness could know one another, and rule wisely, and flourish. It is not enough,’ Robert Reid said, ‘to offer justice. The laws of men, the laws of God himself are not enough unless you know the heart, the tongue, the brain, the gut of your people.… I once heard a man speak, who had understanding, and the promise of vision. He was called the Master of Culter.’

  ‘Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny,’ Lord James said. ‘You may be right. We shall never know. I have just heard from Paris today. He is in Amiens, and dying.’

  There was a pause. Then, ‘Do you say?’ said Bishop Reid. ‘I will pray for him. There breaks a crutch Scotland never knew it possessed.’

  *

  The Governor of Dieppe imparted the unfortunate news himself to M. le Maréchal de Sevigny’s mother and brother and, a good man, was surprised and distressed when it was the brother, the Earl of Culter, who suddenly covered his face with his hands, while the mother said nothing, but sat like one of Master Cellini’s goddesses, her face cast in metal.

  M. de Fors said, ‘If you desire to go to Amiens, then of course I can have post-horses made available to you whenever you wish it. He lies at the Logis du Roi, and there are friends with him. But you may feel the journey too harrowing.’

  Then Sybilla looked at him, and he dropped his eyes, reddening. ‘If M. de Sevigny can suffer it,’ she said, ‘then I suppose we, his family, should not find it beyond us.’

  *

 
; They had poured sand on the paving bricks outside the Governor’s Palace in Amiens, and it bore stamped upon it the tracks of the many horses and men who had passed that way or lingered, watching since François de Sevigny had been brought there.

  The sight of the sand, and the people, told Francis Crawford’s family only one thing: that he lived as yet. Because they were not expected, they were hindered at the doors of the red and white towered building and it was Jerott Blyth, striding downstairs to silence the disturbance, who stopped in appalled recognition and then, without asking how they came to be in France, gave, sharply, all the necessary orders for the lodging of their retinue and led them without further delay up the turning staircase inside.

  Before a doorway on the second floor he stopped and looked at Sybilla and at Richard, his hand supporting her arm. ‘Do you know what to expect?’

  ‘They told us,’ Sybilla said, ‘that he was wounded, and that they believe the hurt to be mortal. That is all that we know.’

  Jerott said, ‘It happened a week ago, but he did not recover consciousness, and now never will, they tell us. In time, his heart will stop.’

  ‘You look,’ Sybilla said, ‘as if you have had no sleep since it happened.’

  ‘The King’s physicians are here,’ Jerott said. ‘He has had the finest …’ He broke off.

  Sybilla said, ‘What is it, Jerott?’

  And Jerott said, ‘He didn’t mean to come back, and I brought him.’

  Richard said curtly, ‘You can’t be sure of that. He may live to thank you yet.’

  In Jerott’s dark, deep-set eyes there was an emotion too profound to give rise to either concord or rebuttal. He said, ‘You had better see him,’ and opened the door.

  The silence of the room flowed out like air from a snowfield.