Checkmate (15 page)

It gave them, also, a profusion of openings. Hanging gardens contained jets of water which could be diverted and pools into which the unwary could be enticed in the darkness. Fruit hurtled down
(Pesches de Corbeil! les pesches!)
and Tyndale’s snake, in a glorious mélange of colour
(Tussssssh! Ye shall not dye
 …
)
burst from the vats of a dyeshop.

Walls handsome with stone frieze and tracery were not hard to climb, any more than garden ramparts with vine and trellis and niche, whose cage or pot or plaque or classical amphora might suggest a ponderous helmeting. And there was alway something to use, a row of melting grey plates from a kiln shelf: a slither of fish; a bag of pepper, left by a spicer, which touched off a sneezing and barking that spiralled up all the wide turnpike and flew trouncing back from the roof vaults.

Philippa had carried the pepper. Francis Crawford had a flask of neat spirits, filched from an apothecary’s windowledge. He broke the neck at the top of the staircase and splashed it into the channelled stone handrail below him. Then he snatched down a sconce and set fire to it.

They fled hand in hand to the rooftops, and flung shut the hatch on the fire and the shouting. ‘It won’t spread,’ said Lymond swiftly. ‘It will hold them a little.’ And stood for a moment on the dizziest edge of the roof-peak, bright and breathless and smiling.

His eyes were on the south; his hands held two flaming brands which
streamed in a soft flowing air that had melted the fog to scraves and streamers wreathing the chimney tops. Fed by flame and by moonlight his hands and hair and shirt contained their own glow, like the globe of a sorcerer.

But he was not a figment of daydream or of fantasy. He was the quick-witted man who had raced with her; the man whose strong wrists had pulled her from trouble; whose laughter recognized, more than his own, her buffoonery; whose voice had whispered, sung, exclaimed or cursed, with equal felicity, carefree as birdsong on top of their striving.

Whose essence, stripped by necessity was, it now seemed, warm and joyous and of great generosity.

He stood, his eyes on the plunging rue de la Orfeverie below him, and intoned, gravely and musically.

‘By the grace and ineffable Providence of God, the only Unoriginated, and Infinite, Invisible, Inexpressible, Terrible and Inaccessible, Abiding above the Heavens, Dwelling in Unapproachable Light, and with a Vigilant Eye inspecting the Earth at suitable intervals …

‘Adam Blacklock has got off his backside and done something about the bloody uproar eventually.’

Philippa dragged off her cap and pushing back her drenched hair, looked below them. He was right. At last the alarm had been raised; the troops mobilized. It seemed that all the streets from the river were flowing with pebbled silver, rising higher and higher and flooding now to the roots of their building as Lymond, shouting, caught their gaze with his voice and his fire-brands. Then he dropped them and spoke to the night air. ‘Well, it’s impressive, you know, but there’s a thing in’t, as the fellow said drinking the dish-clout. The bastards might dodge out the back way.’

‘The side way,’ said Philippa, peering. ‘They’re forcing open a door to the ruelle.’

‘Are they, dammit?’ he said. ‘Then let’s stop them!’

To stop them they had to arrive first at the head of the ruelle. There should be, said Lymond, a tavern there.

To reach it, Philippa fled with him round and round spiral stairs, across landings, along balconies, into arches and doorways and courtyards. There was a tavern there. They went through it like gimlets through butter and gained the top of the ruelle, up which all that was left of their enemies was painfully staggering.

The ruelle Punaise was less a street than a near-vertical drain between houses, roughly stepped and little more than the width of one person. Because they were tired, their former pursuers found speed beyond them. Because, below in the street, the first of the troops were arriving, the climbing men slipped and staggered and fell in their fear but kept running, for at the top of the ruelle lay the steep road to the wall, and the hill of Fourvière, and freedom.

Until the last moment, indeed, they hoped to reach it. They saw the mouth of the ruelle above them, open, empty of people. If they discerned,
through the sweat, a certain unevenness on the horizon, it seemed no more, very likely, than a profile of the stone and pebble and mud of the vennel. They were not to know that the outline was that of eight four-gallon blackjacks, arrived there by a neat piece of leverage.

By dint of the same leverage, they released themselves, one by one, as the group of men neared the top of the ruelle. Eight full barrels, naturally, would have occasioned a profound maceration. Eight empty barrels were not very pleasant: they knocked every man off his feet and then kicked him belabouring down all the stairs and into the arms of the soldiers.

Lymond watched them judicially, calling out strikes and setting off each barrel at the required angle. Towards the end he found some boules and bounced them down as well: they hailed upon barrels and footpads and trilled, with ringing reproach, on the rising helmets of the pikemen beyond them.

‘Whoops! That was Adam,’ said Francis Crawford, watching open-eyed the progress of his latest invention. ‘Serve him bloody well right. Syne Sweirness, at the secound bidding, Came lyk a sow out of a midding. Am I running about; are you running about so that the fat officers of the Christian Crown of France can lie in the Hôtel de Gouvernement, taking advantage of the wife of the Maréchal? Mind you,’ and he chose a spot at the top of the steps and sat down, surveying the scene with continuing interest, ‘no one could say that we hadn’t brought ourselves now to the attention of this majestic metropolis.’

Philippa sat down as well rather weakly, and watched. The barrels, trundling down, had done their worst with the miscreants and were now cutting swathes through the rescue team. The boules, flashing in the new torchlight, ricocheted still from step to wall to other less fortunate targets. She saw Adam, getting up, fend off another just before it capsized him and Danny Hislop, behind, caper hurriedly. She further realized that what she was seeing was not the effect of miscalculation.

Perched beside her, a clutch of gaming balls in his lap, Francis Crawford was making his own strictures felt with all the artistry of a practising juggler. Danny, sweetly struck on a fine point of balance, disappeared as she made her discovery and the sergeant, a man of some presence, flung his arms up and tumbled back, shouting. Restored at a stroke, Philippa cheered and jumped to her feet, seizing a boule as she did so. She aimed, and shied.

Melodiously, Lymond supported her: ‘And eek the buttokes of hem faren as it were the hyndre part of a she-ape in the full of the moone.’ His voice was husky with laughter. ‘Go on. The one with the beard. He’s an Anglophobe if ever I saw one.’

The one with the beard disappeared. Behind him, in slow succession disappeared also the Prévôt des Marchands and the column of officials and magistrates who had been mounting the ruelle behind him.

Whooping, Lymond sprang to his feet and in his face was child and man; Kuzúm and Francis Crawford; triumph and mischief and a ridiculous, thoughtless delight that made her seize his hands and fling them apart and say, ‘Francis! Francis, you fool.
This
is what you should be!’

A cock crew, far away, disturbed by the uproar.

And as in that grotesque shrouded room, the air deadened. The noise below her sank into dumbness; the colours faded; the brightness dwindled and perished in ashes.

‘What a very uncomfortable remark,’ Lymond said. His face, from wholly blank, became blankly benignant. He said, ‘Perhaps I should. I’m afraid I am more like Abraham. A godly man, you remember, but the denial of his wife … was such a fact as no godly man ought to imitate.’

He stopped. His fingers, courteous prisoners, remained suspended inside her grasp, clearly desiring freedom but unwilling to impose it.

Philippa opened her hands and released him; and as if she had once more restored him his tongue he went on, with gentle apology. ‘But I am no godly man. I’m only a commander of some experience, who knows how to ask a tired army to throw its heart into a citadel and follow it. Forgive me.’

He straightened. ‘Here is Archie. And, good God, the Schiatti cousins, a bouquet in one hand and a bell in the other. They will see you safely home.’ He smiled at her. ‘Clever child. Even for a Somerville, my dear, it was an irresistible performance.’

He smiled again, turning to leave her. Assured, experienced, equal to any minor contretemps, however embarrassing, he had saved her from blundering further. Sitting motionless on the steps she watched him stroll down to address Adam and Danny and give them their orders; to dispose of the men they had caught; to seek out the injured; to visit and arrest the three merchants whose names the boy Paul had given them. His voice carried to her, propounding, instructing; replying. Despite his rough hair and clothes his authority, his command of himself and of others had never been more in evidence. She had been a fool, of the kind she and Kate had no patience with.

She had been artless, and addled, and excitable. She had demanded his friendship, and at his instance had lightly abjured what might follow: Latreia, the superior worship of adoration, and Douleia, the inferior worship of honour or reverence. He had given her friendship and hoped perhaps against hope to receive in return nothing more.

But the wine had been too strong for her, as it had for the others; and like the others she had stepped from the safe shores of friendship. She stood now in another country, whose sun burned and whose air was too rare for her breathing. And she stood there alone, with the words of a warning for company:

*

Four hours after that, at six o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, August 17th, a royal courier swept with his train down the Gourguillon and hammered at the Hôtel de Gouvernement portals. He was admitted at once, and after a long delay, was brought to speak to the King’s chief envoy, M. de Sevigny.

At eight o’clock the Consulat were notified that their presence was required by M. Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny. By nine, the Crown officials were with him. By that time he had also seen the captain of the city guard, and had given orders to his own officers, his men at arms and his servants. And before anyone, had spoken to Madame la Maréchale de St André, going with measured pace about her dispositions, a little more erect, a little less superbly groomed than was usual.

At noon, in his first free five minutes that morning, Adam Blacklock dropped exhausted into a settle and heard tolling round him the bronze bells of Lyon, mourning the news which had laid low the city. The news of a defeat in the north such as no French army had suffered since Agincourt.

On St Lawrence’s Day, with twenty-four thousand men and the chivalry of his country behind him, the Constable of France had set out for Saint-Quentin, besieged by the troops of King Philip.

Old-fashioned and cross-grained and headstrong, the Constable had compounded, it seemed, blunder on blunder. He had tried to send a relief force through the marshes. The saga that followed was painful: a tale of sunk boats and labouring marches, of mistaken paths and faulty spy-work and a childish stubbornness beyond anyone’s crediting. The results, spreading outwards in shock through the nation, were such as to reduce men to silence.

Only four hundred and fifty men had managed to enter Saint-Quentin. The rest had been cut to pieces by Count Egmont, the lieutenant-general of the King of Spain’s cavalry.

They said twelve thousand had been killed, and in one day the manhood of the best houses in France either dead or wounded or prisoner. Among the missing were Guthrie and Hoddim, the two Scottish captains turned off by M. de Sevigny. Among the dead were the Counts of Villars and Enghien. Among the wounded and captured, the Constable himself and his son; the Dukes of Montpensier and Longueville, François de La Rochefoucauld and Jean d’Albon, Maréchal de St André, Governor of the King’s city of Lyon.

Two French leaders had escaped. The Duke of Nevers and the Prince of Condé remained near Saint-Quentin to reform and make fresh levies. But the thousand men in Saint-Quentin, under Admiral Coligny and his brother d’Andelot, must give way beneath the combined assault of the entire Spanish army. And when they did, the road was open to Paris.

What had to be done now was obvious, even if the King had not sent to command it. Until help came, Lyon must rely on its present small force under Adam himself backed by Hislop. And Lymond must go to Paris, where the court, fled from Compiègne, was to entrench itself.

For in the absence of captains and Constable, of de Guise and Strozzi in Italy, of de Thermes and Brissac in Piedmont, there was no one left to save France, if the King of Spain marched upon Paris.

Adam thought, his face sombre, of Fergie Hoddim and Alec Guthrie. And of the contrivance which had sent Lymond away from the King’s eye in the first place, and which now looked like bringing him the rôle of saviour of France which the Constable and the Duke de Guise had both coveted. To stand at the side of this monarch as he had stood by the Tsar. And to face, in the oddest upshot of all, an English army under Lord Grey of Wilton.

Five minutes’ rest was all Adam could afford, and he was already on his feet when yet another summons came from de Sevigny, brought this time by Danny, curtly efficient, with none of his usual ebullience. He did not know what Lymond wanted, or who was with him on this occasion. Adam shut the windows against the beat of the bells, and went off soberly.