Checkmate (6 page)

Danny jumped. ‘Excessively happy to see you,’ he said, with truth. He altered rapidly the nature of his expression.

The Governor’s wife said, ‘I see, of course, that you have been playing some sort of game with M. de Sevigny. There is no need for an apology. Why don’t we all seat ourselves, and I shall ring for refreshments?’

‘You see?’ said Lymond to his wife. ‘There is no difficulty. You may even sit down, if Mr Hislop will spread his cleaner handkerchief over that chair. I do not think you want any refreshments.’

‘You are so kind, Madame la Maréchale,’ said Philippa gratefully. ‘But of course, we must not impose on you. I didn’t mean to intrude. I had no idea my husband would recognize me. Mr Crawford didn’t even know I was in Lyon.’ She paused, and adding, ‘My breeches are quite clean,’ sat down with a great deal of aplomb on a coffer-seat.

After a moment, Madame la Maréchale followed her example. Only Lymond remained standing, looking down on her, and Danny, watching rapt from the door. Lymond said, ‘No. I didn’t know you were here. Not after you gave the slip at Dieppe to my man who was following you.’

Dirty hands folded primly in her breeches lap, his wife gazed serenely up at him. ‘I didn’t know it was your man,’ she said. ‘Archie said we had better get rid of him.’

Lymond said, ‘I called him off in any case when I heard Archie was with you.’ He looked down at the fan, which he had taken from her fingers, and Danny thought, he doesn’t want an audience. On the other hand, he isn’t going to dislodge the Maréchale. He wondered why in heaven’s name Philippa had come to Lyon in the first place.

Lymond looked up and said, ‘Did you want to speak to me? Or merely have a look at the papers from the Hôtel Gaultier?’

His wife gazed winsomely at him. ‘I thought perhaps I could slip in with the boxes and then sit and go through them at leisure. While M. Schiatti had them, he wouldn’t unlock them for me.’

‘And you didn’t want to risk asking me for permission?’ Lymond said. ‘After what happened in London, you were extremely wise.’

She looked up, found him watching her, and looked away again, smiling nervously for the Maréchale’s benefit. She said, ‘You don’t need to remind me. I stopped you from going to Russia.’

‘Temporarily,’ Lymond said. ‘However, so did Guthrie and Hoddim and Blacklock and Hislop here. Danny will confirm. They survived the experience.’

‘Just,’ said Danny. He didn’t see why he should have to connive at a falsehood. Philippa looked at him. ‘Mr Crawford has dispensed with our services,’ said Danny. ‘Alec and Fergie are fighting for the Constable. Adam and I are with him only until we can be found posts in other companies.’ He could feel, in front of him, Lymond’s unspoken rancour.

The bedraggled child on the coffer turned slowly to look at her husband. Then she said, ‘I wouldn’t call that a very balanced reaction. What will you do to me? I interfered with your freedom of movement a good deal more than that.’

Mesmerized, the Governor’s wife gazed at M. le comte de Sevigny, who was gazing in turn at the speaker. He stirred, laid the fan on a table, and then addressed his wife concisely. ‘They were under my orders, and they disobeyed my orders. For what you do I have no redress, nor do I require any. If any circumstance of my life displeases me, I am more than capable of setting it right without outside interference. In the meantime, you wish to look at the papers bequeathed me. You may do so. I have no objection.’

Danny, who had been holding his breath, promptly released it. Madame la Maréchale, who had felt little but contempt for the creature’s escapade, experienced for the first time a shadow of pity. She stood up and so, tardily, did the comtesse de Sevigny.

Philippa said, ‘The trouble is, you would say all that anyway.’ She gazed at her husband, her grimy brow wrinkled sadly.
‘If only
we could get Güzel here for you!’

Danny made a loud, painful noise with his nose. Lymond, who had not been prepared for it either, just avoided vocalizing his reaction. He said, his skin flushed to the roots of his hair, ‘She might not be prepared to emigrate.’

‘No,’ said Philippa. She paused. ‘It has
all
been rather … adolescent. I hope you will overlook it. You do mean I may see the papers? There are more, you know, at Marthe’s house. She was going to help me. I was to call on her at six tomorrow.’

Moving to the door, he stood, arrested in the moment of opening it. ‘What a coincidence. So was I, at Jerott’s insistence.’

They looked at one another. Then Lymond added, ‘Suppose we share the Kittasoles of State and go together? Where are you staying? Or wait. I should be able to guess. As a guest of the Hôtel Schiatti, with the family sworn not to tell me?’

She nodded, and Lymond’s grim mouth relaxed. ‘Don’t brood over it,’ he said. ‘Madame Marguerite knows the English are crazy. I shall call for you at half-past five.’ And with Danny saluted her briefly as, escorted by the Governor’s wife, the girl in servant’s livery descended the stairs to the courtyard.

They did not hear Philippa repeat, handsomely, her apologies to her
hostess. Or hear her add, cheerfully, that she had met the Maréchale’s daughter in Paris.

Madame, smiling, was not forthcoming. ‘She enjoys her work. Catherine, you will know, is one of the Queen’s demoiselles of honour.’

‘Well, she’s on her way to Lyon,’ said Philippa cheerfully. ‘At Queen Catherine’s warm insistence. I think there’s a very good chance that M. le comte will take to her. Next after dark night, the mirthful morrow, you know.’

Not for the first time that evening, Madame la Maréchale de St André gazed at the wife of her guest with an astonishment edging on horror. Within her desk upstairs at this moment was a letter. In it her husband the Marshal begged her to humour this whim of the Queen’s: to bind the comte de Sevigny closer to the French crown by the gift of the richest heiress in France, their only daughter.

Marguerite de St André had been less than beguiled by the prospect. Knowing what she now knew of the Count’s style and his person, she was reluctant for other reasons altogether. But at no time had she expected the man’s wife to know of the plan, far less support it.

She said, ‘My daughter, Madame de Sevigny, has a sizeable fortune. Do you imagine that your husband is a suitable spouse for her?’

Philippa pondered. ‘I haven’t heard of any complaints,’ she said with honesty.

Complaints.…

‘More than most men,’ said the Governor’s wife carefully, ‘my lord of Sevigny seems to have led a life of some … irregularity. You do not resent this?’

‘Well: not, of course, the Rose-tree of the Garden of Fidelity,’ said the comtesse de Sevigny, ‘but there would be very little point, I should say, in resenting it. You know.
Zyf you know or you knyt, you mayst you Abate: And yf you knyt er you knowe, Than yt ys to late
. He has a wonderful——’

‘What?’ said Madame la Maréchale. She was beginning to feel the faintest fondness for Philippa Crawford.

‘… mistress,’ said Philippa apologetically. ‘That’s why he wants to get back to Russia. None of us would mind his having Güzel with him, but we do think he ought to stay in France. Perhaps Catherine is the very person to keep him.’

‘Perhaps she is,’ said the Governor’s wife, and saw, with some disappointment, that her footmen had arrived to take the young lady home to her lodging.

‘Catherine, or someone else suitable.’

*

Lymond was still up when Adam returned, very late, from his evening’s freedom. He saw the light under the door, and, after flinging his
cloak on the bed beside Danny, returned to the master suite to tap for admission.

From the curtness of the reply, he guessed Lymond was working; and on entering, the first thing he saw was a candle-lit table loaded with papers, with more in boxes stacked on the floor. The campaign had been relegated, he observed, to a side desk, whose neat piles of maps and plans and papers and folders bore witness to the rest of the evening’s work. Half undressed under a sleeveless over-robe, Lymond was standing over one of the heavy boxes, sealing it. He said, ‘How was Jerott?’

‘Unhappy,’ said Adam. ‘I’ve just paid two tavern servants to come with me and see him home safely.’

Lymond blew out the taper and, lifting a ring, pressed the cartouche into the soft wax and held it there. ‘Thirst, the devil of the desert. He didn’t invite you into his house?’

‘He was unconscious,’ said Adam shortly. ‘No. He chose to take me in the first place to an inn. We had supper and wine there.’

Lymond slid the ring on to his fourth finger and lifting the box by its handles, placed it with the rest on the floor. Then he straightened, and walked to a cupboard. ‘Sit down,’ he said. ‘I am going to have a cup of Charnico. What will you have?’

Adam shuddered. ‘Nothing,’ he said. ‘Thank you.’

‘I am still going to have a cup of Charnico,’ Lymond said. He showed no fatigue. The demands of his profession seldom seemed to weigh on him, Adam knew from the past. Even after that long address to the burghers he had been perfectly fresh; and since Douai, noticeably, he had deferred not at all to the weaker flesh of his captains.

Now he poured his wine and sat down in the chair next to Adam’s, the silver goblet held poised on his fingertips. He said,
‘Aut nulla Ebrietas, aut tanta sit ut sibi curat
. Under stress, Jerott always took refuge in drink.’

Adam said quietly, ‘Not only Jerott. But this is a habit of very long standing.’

There was a little silence. Then Lymond said, ‘Is it affecting his commerce?’

‘No,’ said Adam. ‘The company is flourishing: he has a good business head and is well thought of. His wife deals in antiques. They trade from the house Marthe was brought up in. The old couple died.’

Lymond savoured his wine. The pounced gem-cut seal on his ring flashed as he let the cup rest on his chair-arm. It was incised, Adam saw, not with his coat of arms, but with Russian characters. Lymond said, ‘Marthe is a bastard. The couple who lived in that house were a usurer-dealer called Gaultier, who called himself uncle. And his patron, an elderly woman who dabbled in mysticism. When they died, the house and fortune were both left to me.’

Adam was silent. Jerott had told him that, ramblingly loquacious before the weeping had started. The Dame de Doubtance, the old woman
who had made mad prophecies for Francis Crawford, and dying had left him everything, no one knew why. Unless it was because Marthe, brought up nameless and parentless, was sufficiently like him to be his twin sister.

Lymond said, ‘Naturally, I offered both to Jerott’s wife, since the Dame de Doubtance had virtually reared her. But though as you may have observed we are as twoo buddes of the same tre, we do not always see eye to eye with one another. She refused.’

‘But accepted the house?’ Adam said.

‘Jointly with Jerott,’ said Lymond. ‘The Dame de Doubtance’s own rooms she kept intact for me. If the marriage founders, one or other will have to give up his tenancy.’

Naturally, he had guessed. He knew Jerott. And presumably, in the four years since he had discovered her existence, he had come to know Marthe as thoroughly. Adam said, ‘He adores her.’

‘And yet he takes his friends to a tavern. His own marriage is in trouble. What then,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘does he think of mine to Philippa? You know my wife is a virgin?’

Adam thought of leaving the room, and then decided, blearily, to go through with it.

He said, ‘Jerott asked if she was. He says you married her three years ago in Turkey and parted immediately. He says it was a wedding of convenience, to be annulled when you got back to England. He says you’ve been back for five months, and if it hasn’t been dissolved yet, it must be for your own private reasons.’ Adam paused. ‘He has some tall stories, even for Jerott, about what happened on that journey to Stamboul.’

Francis Crawford raised his eyebrows. ‘You are hoping I am going to tell you it was all due to Jerott’s vivid imagination, but of course, it was perfectly true.’

He lifted his cup, smiling and twisted it, admiring the entwined lizards and winged duck-head ornament. ‘The little attack of blood-frenzy in Algiers; the fat Turk I was good to, on Djerba. The whores … the opium … the bastard I propagated on an Irish kern’s mistress … Jerott knows it all. And Jerott would have me boiled in hell and strained through a cloth if I behaved to Philippa as my dear Marthe is no doubt behaving to him.… You know she is in Lyon?’

Adam sat up. ‘You’re talking of Philippa?’

‘Staying with the Schiatti. She has been invited to call on Marthe at six tomorrow afternoon. So have I, in a message from Jerott. If what you say is true, why should Jerott choose to throw Philippa and myself together?’

‘He didn’t know,’ Adam said. ‘I swear he didn’t know Philippa was in Lyon.’

‘But Marthe did. So Marthe isn’t afraid for Philippa’s virtue. Marthe wants us to meet there tomorrow. I wonder,’ said Lymond, ‘why?’

Adam shook his head. A scar, thready in the flickering candles, marred the thin, distinguished lines on his face, and his hands lay open on his lap, their sketching days over now that there was no great band of fighting men on whom to exercise daily his talents. Lymond rose with eloquent ease and said, looking down at the other, ‘You should have stayed with the Muscovy Company.’

‘I know,’ said Adam. He got up.

There must have been something over-critical or over-searching in his expression. Francis Crawford lifted his open hand and arming the other man with sudden force, walked him to his threshold and released him beyond it. The slam with which the door closed reverberated through all the stout floors of the Hôtel de Gouvernement.

Madame la Maréchale recognized it, as perhaps he intended. Lymond was clearing away the last of his papers when he heard her door open. He waited, listening, but there was no further movement. He finished therefore what he was doing and then, pouring himself another cup of wine, walked to his own door and opened it.

Candlelight spilled from the double carved door of her room, defining the tall shadow of her robed figure, standing there. Her black hair, unconfined, fell straying over the silk of her night-shift. Her face, freshly painted, was young in the kind, golden light and her scent, invading the corridor, reached him where he stood in turn, the cup in his fingers. She said softly, ‘Have you finished your wine? I can offer you some.’ And waited as, seasoned, desirable, he came to her through the quiet passageway.