Checkmate (43 page)

From his great height Lord James, who had not yet sat down, looked at the cloudless, delectable face with its intolerable vivacity. ‘If you do,’ he said, ‘you will have to fight Richard, your brother. He has joined the Calvinist party.’

The ravishing smile remained, although the answer delayed by a second. ‘Has he?’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Was that wise of him?’

John Erskine said, quickly, ‘I shall save Lord James the trouble of pointing out that it depends whether you are considering his spiritual or material welfare. With Lord James and the Earl of Rothes and myself, your brother signed the Covenant in December by which all friends of the new religion have undertaken to maintain and establish the Word of God and His congregation. He has been our wise friend in all we have done since, aiding us so that preaching and interpretation of the Scriptures may proceed privately in quiet houses, until God may move the Dowager to grant public preaching by faithful and true ministers.’

‘I am sure there is a purpose in all this,’ Crawford said. With airy impudence he had slung round him a length of chamlet, sober side outwards, and cowled and robed in it was reclining, tented hands pointed upwards. He added, staring at them, ‘I shan’t induce him to re-enter the puddle of Papistry, if that’s what you’re afraid of. He hates my guts. In between arranging that the preaching and interpretation of the Scriptures may proceed privately in quiet houses.’

Lord James said, ‘We have no doubts of Lord Culter’s constancy. We wish to know where your faith stands.’

‘Why?’ said Crawford with distinct querulousness. He added, ‘I thought we were discussing pourpoints.’

Lord James Stewart took a turn to the window and back. He said, ‘If you take a ball through your breastplate tomorrow, a pourpoint will not preserve you from hell.’

‘No, but my breastplate would,’ said Crawford irritably. ‘It’s a new kind I had made in Russia. Anyway, who isn’t going to hell?’

‘Richard your brother,’ said Lord James ill-advisedly.

‘Then that settles it,’ said Lymond, satisfied, and began folding his draperies. ‘Do you fancy I might persuade a doublet-maker to cut one of these by tomorrow? There must be five Scottish Commissioners still corrupt enough to admire it.’

A rawboned hand, closing fast on his arm, caused the cloth to fall and the young man to look up, astonished. ‘You offend me,’ said the Queen’s half-brother. ‘And your memory for favours received seems a short one.’

‘There is no argument about the favours received,’ Crawford said. He made a single, smooth movement and his arm, without apparent effort, freed itself. ‘Good God, here am I with stockings in either hand, panting towards restitution. I merely require you to keep my soul out of the general conversation.’

‘And your brother’s soul?’ said James Stewart. He was drawling again.

‘I understood,’ said Lymond, ‘that you had that in hand.’ He rose, collected his draperies, and moved rustling to deposit them on the window seat. ‘And, of course, he will fulfil all your expectations. Richard is your man for high moral tone and sound values:

His smile, full of effervescent charm, was turned on them both. ‘Forgive me, gentlemen. My lapse has made me behindhand already. If you mean to stay longer, I shall leave you and find Madame Bouchard.’

John Erskine stood up. ‘Madame Bouchard is not in the house, M. de Sevigny,’ he said. ‘And the door is locked. I told you I remembered you as a boy. I remember also the face of the Bishop of Orkney when he emerged from a Scottish courtroom ten years ago, and told me of the impassioned plea for nationhood he had heard from a man then judged guilty of treason. I have watched the same man today degrading his dignity and ours in an effort to deny his own nature. Why?’

Lord James, folding his tall body, sat suddenly down. The gorgeous creature by the window did not move, nor was there a notable change in his plumage. But by some means it was made clear that against the latticed panes of the casement stood a man trained for war, and with skills of a sort which had protected Lyons; had saved Paris; had recovered Calais for an alien monarch. Lymond said, ‘To avoid precisely the type of discourtesy to which I now appear to be committed. I am sorry, Master Erskine. I talk to no one behind a locked door.’

John Erskine walked quietly to the door, unlocked it, and returning, took his place, standing, on the other side of the embrasure from
Lymond. He did not look at James who had been within an ace, he was aware, of preventing him. He said, ‘Our motive in locking it, if it matters, was to spare you the embarrassment of an interruption. Unless the comte de Sevigny of today is really so different from the Master of Culter of ten years ago?’

Perfectly at his ease, the decorative young man he was addressing leaned back on the shutters and studied him. ‘I hope so,’ Lymond said. ‘When you were twenty, Mr Erskine, you killed a priest in the belltower at Montrose. Would you do so again?’

It made him gasp, a ludicrous thing: he must be failing. He heard Lord James’s harsh voice cutting in: ‘You will refrain, Mr Crawford, from pointless—and actionable—accusations. Father Froster’s death was an accident.’

Lymond did not even look at him. ‘I am sure of it,’ he said directly to Erskine. ‘But would you have such an accident now? At twenty you looked back on Flodden, and on the deaths of father, grandfather, granduncle and uncle at the hands of the English. If Catholic Mary dies, and Protestant Elizabeth comes to the throne, will you feel the same about the English now?’

Erskine returned the blue stare with a look in which there was no atom of cynicism. He said, ‘If my cause requires it, I shall court them. From which you may draw two conclusions. I have shed the brashness of twenty, and I have learned to subjugate the lesser good to the greater. But I still serve my country.’

‘Mr Crawford also perhaps has learned to subjugate the lesser good to the greater,’ said Lord James abruptly. ‘I feel, John, your approach is too spiritual. The situation is plain enough to any practical man. While the Catholic powers have been at war with one another, Calvinism has flourished both in France and in Scotland, where the Queen Dowager has had to countenance it because she required the support of its adherents.

‘Now with the taking of Calais, the wars of France and Spain and the Papal States may all be drawn to a close: already the Cardinal of Lorraine is urging the King towards new and violent steps against heresy. In Scotland the Queen Regent is likely to receive orders from her brothers in France to take a stand against the new religion. Already there is unrest over the grasp France is exercising in Scotland: the principal officers of State, the main strongholds, are all French already. There is talk, since her nobles refuse to cross the Border to wage war on England, of still more French troops sailing to Leith under the Vidame de Chartres.’

He paused; the pale royal eyes raking the intransigent figure before him: of the man he had never before met, whose exploits at fourth or fifth hand he had half heard, half caught like echoes without ever finding a man, except perhaps his dead uncle Tom Erskine, who could attempt to assess their value. Then he said, ‘You are a Scotsman: a man of eminence in your own field, who once appeared to interest yourself in the affairs of
your country. What you are about to do, and what you are about to leave undone will both affect us. You say you mean to go to Russia. My information is that you cannot survive there. I do not know you. I should expect you however at least to avoid obscure martyrdom.’

‘I am perhaps a little more optimistic than you are,’ Lymond said. ‘The Tsar is a hard man to cross, but then so am I.
Corsario a corsario
, as the saying goes,
no ay que ganar los barilles d’agua.
’

‘… Whereas in France,’ said Lord James Stewart, as if he had not spoken, ‘you have fame, office and property with only one cloud on the horizon: soon you will be expected to declare yourself openly for the established church or the new religion. If you choose the Catholic Church, your future will be proscribed, for no man, however able, can rise higher in France than the de Guises. And if you choose the new religion, you will court death as surely as in Russia.’

Lymond was smiling. ‘Whereas in Scotland, you mean to convey, the possibilities on either side are almost unlimited?’

‘That is just what I mean to convey,’ said Lord James Stewart.

‘And the choice is mine. I can march into Scotland at the head of a French and Catholic army and fight the Reformers at the Queen Regent’s side, while retaining all my revenues and my goods in both kingdoms. Or I may abandon all I possess in this country and return to support the cause of yourselves and my brother—if, that is, my brother does not succeed in making a shred-pie of me with his fists or his dagger beforehand. I hardly know which to consider.’

John Erskine said stiffly, ‘It is not hard, if you allow material prospects to be your sole arbiter.’

Lymond said, ‘I thought, according to his lordship, that we were being practical.’

‘We are,’ said Lord James curtly. ‘Let us continue to be so. Any man joining our faction in Scotland will lose all his French possessions and will find little favour with the Queen Dowager during her lifetime. When her mother the Dowager dies, Queen Mary will stay here in France with her husband the Dauphin and later, one supposes, as joint queen of France and of Scotland. Meanwhile Scotland will be ruled by a regency. And by then, this party will be so strong that the regency will be unacceptable by the Scottish people unless it is a Calvinist one.

‘Some of the men you will speak to are despondent,’ said Lord James Stewart. ‘Some see no future for Scotland save as a Catholic province of France. I have no such fears. No country so far separated from another need call it master. In name, the monarch of France for some time to come may call himself King also of Scotland. But the Regency, and those who brought the regency into power will be the rulers of Scotland, nourishing it on their native wits and goodwill, and leading it to dwell in the pure light of the only true religion. That is our plan. And there were those who told me that you might be man enough to join us.’

‘As a member of the Russian Orthodox Church,’ Lymond said, ‘I
could arrange to have the Water of Leith blessed at Epiphany. Otherwise the spiritual yield of the arrangement would seem to be as small as the material one. I am sorry that a drunken ride of mine should have so misled you. I have no interest in Scotland. All I can promise is that I shall not be beguiled into leading an army against you.’

‘You will forgive us,’ said Lord James Stewart, ‘if we fail to break into applause. What if the King of France does use force to put down the new religion in Scotland, and your brother and his house are all slaughtered? Will you not then come hurrying back?’

There was a little silence. Then Lymond said, ‘Yes. Indeed, I might.’

The Queen’s brother stood up.

‘Wait!’ said John Erskine suddenly. To Lymond he said, ‘You do not trust us, and we have not been open with you. Our people in Dieppe have received letters from Admiral Coligny, now in prison at Gand. We know what you did for his brother’s wife in the Hôtel Bétourné last autumn. That is our third reason for approaching you.’

He could not tell from the other man’s face whether or not he found that surprising. ‘I see,’ Lymond said. ‘And you attributed to me the highest spiritual motives. I am flattered, but I must disillusion you. I owed a slight debt of chivalry to the Maréchale de St André, who was also present at the Communion. Public exposure and confiscation of all the family goods might also have blighted somewhat my forthcoming marriage with her daughter.’

He turned to James Stewart. ‘I shall either return to Russia, or, if your forebodings are totally realized, I shall remain in France with my bride, adorning and strengthening, if I may so put it, the court of your sister Queen Mary. She is a fervent Catholic. She will be bitterly disappointed to hear of the course you have chosen in Scotland.’

‘You threaten?’ said Lord James, smiling.

‘Hardly,’ Lymond said. ‘There is nothing you say or do that is not already known to the Queen Dowager and her daughter, and also, of course, to messeigneurs her uncles. I think you should take care, that is all. Religion in recent years has become a political sport, and politicians are more skilful than honest men at extracting themselves from disasters.’

‘I rather think,’ said John Erskine of Dun, ‘that Mr Crawford intends us a compliment.’

‘It is the least I can do,’ said Mr Crawford, picking up his neat bales of cloth, ‘after your gallant intervention of yesterday. You did not say what colour of stockings you fancy? Or perhaps your faith restricts you to black. Nothing, as every advocate knows, shows off a fine leg to better advantage. Black then, and a lace handkerchief to weep into at the wedding. Have you brought the Crown Matrimonial?’

The unexpected question, as he turned at the door, caused Lord James to look at him sharply. ‘The Scottish Regalia are in Scotland,’ he said.

‘Good. I should keep them there,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Gentlemen, until we meet tomorrow, I am your grateful and admiring servitor.’

The bow he made, with the bales, was quite admirable; and presently they saw, from the casement, the same bales being affixed to a packhorse. A short while after that, the comte de Sevigny himself emerged, followed by his man and the woman Martine. He kissed her hand, mounted, and accompanied by Abernethy, crossed the yard and disappeared into the streets of Dieppe below the castle.

A difficult young man, they had been told, thought John Erskine. How difficult he could not have dreamed; nor could James, standing silent beside him. Then James said, ‘A brilliant rogue. We do better without him.’

‘Perhaps,’ said the other man thoughtfully. ‘Indeed, he blocked every sally but one. Until you told him, he did not know his brother was a Calvinist.’