Checkmate (21 page)

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 fortresses 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 in 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.’

It had been settled today: this marriage which whispering vulgarians throughout the court had been saying would never take place. He was perhaps the tenth person she had told: the sweet satisfaction of it wiped away all her irritation, even when he answered, ‘Your grace has my heartfelt good wishes. But does your grace think that the hills of Tweedsmuir will please Mademoiselle d’Albon?’

His voice, even when he was baiting her, betrayed nothing but the politest inquiry. Queen Mary said, ‘Your wife knows the Lowlands and has lived there. Would it not be more praiseworthy to take your marriage unrevoked back to Scotland? Or must you wait until your brother is killed in some battle? We are told there is no one else to bear arms but small children.’

‘We are all mortal,’ observed the comte de Sevigny kindly. ‘Should my brother succumb while the children are in their minority, I should have to appoint some kind of regent. My career, like your grace’s, lies in other
directions. And should France be unable to annul my marriage I shall, with the greatest reluctance, have to travel eastwards.’

He had made the obvious point. The Pope, having made friends with the Imperialists, would be less amenable now to granting favours to the kingdom of France which had abandoned him. Mary said, her hazel eyes direct and pellucid, ‘We had hoped your new knighthood might have prompted you to chivalry towards your wife as well as to our mother, Mr Crawford. The comtesse de Sevigny is quite charming.’

It was not etiquette to rise until formally dismissed. But his intention of shortly leaving the room was as plain as if he had stated it. He said, ‘I am an ardent admirer of both ladies. But I do not wish to be married to either of them.’

She said, ‘You are impertinent, sir!’

It pulled him up, just a little, you could see. He said, giving her his every attention for perhaps the first time, ‘I beg your grace’s pardon. I have been redirected so often against my own interests that I am a little wary, perhaps, when all my friends seem to approach me with wheellock arquebuses in their hands instead of handkerchiefs.’

She lost no time in taking him up on that. ‘Would it be against your own interests, M. de Sevigny? You have a comté and many other possessions. Few men at the start of their career are admitted as a Chevalier of the Order of St Michael. Your redirection, as you call it, does not seem to have harmed you greatly so far.’

‘Quite the reverse,’ Lymond said. ‘It keeps me also within the light of your presence. Nothing in Scotland, your grace, could possibly provide such an inducement.’

‘How can we believe that?’ Mary said. ‘If we ask you to perform a service for us, and you will not do it?’

‘You mentioned two services,’ Lymond said. ‘You asked me to return to Scotland and I have to say there, with regret, that his Majesty of France has asked of me the opposite; that for the promised twelvemonth I should stay here at his side at the French court. You asked me also, I believe, if I would refrain from annulling my marriage.’

He paused, and Mary did not interrupt. The interview, which had seemed so unpromising, looked like continuing at least with some frankness. It did not necessarily mean, thought Mary Fleming, that she would obtain what she wanted from it.

Lymond said, ‘There, I must lay two points before your highness. My wife is English and therefore less acceptable, both in Scotland and in France, than a French lady. And secondly the relationship between man and wife is, I humbly put to you, a private one, and not subject to the wishes of princes. In this instance, much as I revere your grace, nothing could bring me to alter my decision.’

She never really knew when she was beaten. ‘We thought,’ said Mary of Scotland, ‘that a man of war must be flexible? You forget, M. de Sevigny, that we know your wife. She is fully acceptable in France and,
as we know from our aunt, has been made welcome in time of peace over the Border. Perhaps we know her better than you do. Would it not help you, before closing your mind, to spend more time with her?’