Checkmate (67 page)

‘Didn’t he wear a breastplate? He was just putting it on. But not in God’s name. That gentleman,’ Lord Grey said without especial rancour, ‘was a damned irreligious Italian, although he was reared for the Church. Forced de Vieilleville to retire with the colic, I’m told, the night before he was killed, by promoting a mischievous discussion on what he thought God did before the Creation. De Vieilleville swore he’d never meet him again, and the siege would make an end of him. Which it did, of course.’

‘Scusandosi, dicendo, io nol’ conosco. I don’t need to ask,’ Lymond said, ‘if he died recanting?’

‘You don’t,’ said Lord Grey grimly. ‘ “I renounce God; my hour is over,” he said. And when they insisted on reminding him that he would be face to face that day with his Maker: “Morte-Dieu! I shall be with all the rest who have been dying for six thousand years!” the fellow came back with. And gave up his spirit, but to whom, of course, is unknown. He was, I make no doubt, a fine engineer,’ said Lord Grey of Wilton.

Lymond said, ‘He was also a wit and a scholar. If he had entered the church instead of trying to right his family’s wrongs he would be alive today, and you might have kept Calais.’

‘And now,’ Lord Grey said, ‘there is a Marshal’s bâton begging. Who will receive it? De Thermes? De Vieilleville?’ A royal courier in Blois would hardly escape notice.

‘I was offered it yesterday,’ Lymond said. ‘Would you say that in honour I could accept it?’

‘It is, of course, the supreme accolade,’ William Grey said. ‘I suppose you know your own mind if, as a Marshal of France, you are required to take arms against Scotland?’

Philippa, remote in her corner, watched Francis. He said, ‘It seems an unlikely contingency. I might as well ask whether you would side with the Scots against England?’

Lord Grey got to his feet and took a turn, without limping, to the barred window. Then he stood, rocking lightly, and faced Francis Crawford. ‘You are a man,’ he said, ‘of dangerous acumen. May I remind you that you are also a Knight of the supreme Order of St Michael, vowed to virtue, concord, fidelity, friendship, nobility, grandeur and equality? And I, equally, am a member of the Order of the Garter, with similar requirements of chivalry. You speak of Piero Strozzi who placed his family first. To what do you owe supreme allegiance?’

‘To my name,’ said Lymond evenly.

‘As he did. It is, I suppose, every man’s right. And after that?’

From his face, as he sat motionless in his chair, Grey could not have told what Francis was thinking. He said, ‘Piero Strozzi had renounced God. But although he took pleasure, sometimes, in tormenting men with small power about him, he never alarmed his men or his superiors by making a public show of it. The task came first.’

‘He fought for the Pope,’ Lord Grey said. ‘In Italy, he kissed the hand of the Pope, and waged war for him.’

‘They say there are Huguenots among the Knight Hospitallers of St John in Malta,’ Lymond said. ‘The Grand Prior of France came posthaste to court at the end of May, I have been told, to acquire money to help the Turks attack Italy. How often has Petre changed coat? Or Paget, or Arundel, or Pembroke? Or is it a matter of changing coat, or a matter simply of keeping counsel and pursuing, as best one can, one’s chosen objective?’

‘Your line of reasoning would appeal to a great many people,’ said Lord Grey dryly. ‘It all depends of course, on the nature of your objective. The end of successful warfare is victory. The end of victory is the expression of a noble spirit, showing itself in pity and munificence. Such is the aim of each of the Orders to which you and I belong.’

‘I observe,’ Francis said, ‘the spiritual benefits, but they do apply, I believe in other fields also. Meanwhile, battles are fought not by knights, as you well know, but by mercenaries. They are employed, as mastiffs are employed in the boar season, and victory goes to the deepest purse, while the people suffer the cost of them. That is war without pride ruled by chivalry, as the Master of Game rules the hunting field.’

‘It has reached my ears,’ Lord Grey said, ‘that once you spoke otherwise to young Austin.’

She had not known that. Francis said, ‘He required, temporarily, a palliative. He spat it out, I am sure, with equal satisfaction when himself again … There are, surely, other methods of preserving the weak and the good. There are other ways of exercising courage and magnanimity. Fighting preserves a man from wrath and avarice, sloth and gluttony, envy and lechery no more than hunting does.’

‘Would you rather men unleashed them at home, or in the council chamber?’ said Grey. ‘That is the argument for waging war as a exercise; although I agree with you: to kill for such a reason is wasteful. But greed exists, and vanity. How do you propose to control these: with a smile, a prayer, a treaty? This war was begun by the Pontiff.’

‘With time,’ Lymond said. ‘And teaching. And fear of ridicule, if need be. What I cannot control is the stupid man, launched upon a war which is against his material interests. And there is no scavenger of the air, or beast of the earth, or ooze of the sea which will offend nature like two such, opposed to one another.’

No one spoke, while the eyes of the two men held one another. Then
Lord Grey said, ‘I believe you. And it faces us. But what have you done, except run with the mastiffs? You chose to go to Russia, keeping your counsel and pursuing your own objective. In Scotland, of course, to keep counsel is rather more difficult.’

‘No more than in England,’ said Lymond. And after a moment he added. ‘I saw a chance to mould a nation.’

‘Your task in your own country, I grant you, would be harder,’ said Grey. Then walking to the window he turned and said, ‘No. I am unfair. You have had reasons, no doubt, for leaving Scotland, but there is one which any man can distinguish. Amid the teeming millions of Russia, among the hosts of those vying for power in France you have made your mark promptly. I commend you for it. But in Scotland you would have no face that was not a public one. You would be a cock pheasant trapped in a hen coop. They could not afford to leave you alone until they had conned every quill in your belly. A man should be very sure of himself,’ said Lord Grey, ‘before he set out to face that inquisition. And, as well, you have England to reckon with.’

‘Then what should I do?’ Lymond said.

Lord Grey looked at him, and then at Philippa silent in her corner. ‘I see,’ he said. ‘I have been brought in to arbitrate. I am to tell your charming wife that you are right. That no man of honour could take high office in a land whose interests may compete with those of the land of his peoples. That since Scotland would give you an ambivalent welcome and Russia is far off and its welcome also in doubt, you would be best to remain as you are, a landed gentleman of title and wealth, employing the passing days hunting with mastiffs.…

‘Madam. I know your mother. I fought many campaigns with your father and looked upon him as a friend. I tell you that whatever infatuation you have fallen into, you cannot keep that man at your side. He belongs where he belongs and he will arrive there, no matter how deep you bury him. Best free him at once and save the heart ache.’

Francis was smiling. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘That was what she was hoping you would say.’

Lord Grey of Wilton looked from one to the other. ‘I am a fool? You want to separate?’

‘No,’ Lymond said. ‘We are staying together. But I am none the less grateful for your tribute. Some time, I should like my brother to talk to you about Scotland.’

Lord Grey sat down. ‘I should be willing. I make no doubt he is honest. And committed.’ He cleared his throat. ‘You know perhaps that Austin still stays with your mother?’

Lymond said, ‘I did him an injury which no man would readily forgive. But nothing can mend it. He would be better at home.’

‘I told him,’ Lord Grey said, exasperated. ‘I said, you’ve been made a fool of; they’re happy; get off home and marry a good wench from Newcastle.’

‘And he didn’t?’ said Philippa shakily.

‘That boy,’ said Lord Grey, ‘is a bundle of nerves like a kitten. Couldn’t stand the sound of cloth tearing. Stuffs himself full of volumes of chivalry, and then comes home heart-broken because some village lout hasn’t read them.’

‘He believed the harangues,’ Lymond said gently. Tor him, the army is an unhappy choice, and so is Allendale while his mother lives. He needs a post like Nick Applegarth’s at Sevigny, with an estate and some people to practise on. He isn’t lacking in fibre. I would have wished it to have turned out differently. ‘In fact,’ Lymond said, ‘I tried rather hard.’

‘I won’t ask you to read his letter then,’ said Lord Grey. ‘I’m afraid it would put you out. He tells me, though, that your men are home again.’

‘My men?’ Lymond said. Philippa, puzzled, also watched Lord Grey’s smooth bearded countenance.

‘The men who went missing, I hear, at Saint-Quentin. They were wounded and captured, so Austin says, and now appear to have escaped from the Spaniards. I can’t remember their names.’

‘Guthrie and Hoddim,’ said Francis quietly.

‘That’s right,’ said Lord Grey. ‘Well, they’re back. Your other men took them in. A party that went on for two days before three of them left for Thionville. They seem to have survived that bungle into the bargain.’

He went on to speak of his ransom. Philippa watched Francis, like herself, fail to listen. She knew from others the endless letters he had sent, the inquiries he had caused to be made in an effort to trace Alec Guthrie and Fergie Hoddim. To join her pleasure to his demanded a gesture … and here again she must abstain, while even a dog could share its emotion.

But when he turned to her next, the blood risen high under his skin, she had, she believed, banished the thought and was sitting, her hands still in her lap, smiling at him.

The three weeks of his grace passed, during which the bâton lay untouched in the parlour at Sevigny and, barring once, he did not refer to it.

Coming home from Onzain, she had said, ‘You must make your own decision. I do not need you now every day, or even every week, or every month.’

And he had said, ‘I have made my decision. I am not going back.’

She did not argue with him because the unspoken issues were clear, and she had already had her case made for her by Grey of Wilton. It was true that she did not need his care now to live; that wit was coming back if not laughter; that they could without fear separate for some parts of the day and find something of interest before, like self meeting self, they joined company again on returning.

They rediscovered trivial conversation over backgammon and pall mall and archery, and talk of another kind with the scholars who increasingly called on them. Francis brought her some books by Thevet and Gilles, and they began, with their gift of tongues, to consider some works of translation.

Poetry she did not attempt, but once, in the bright austere light after sunrise she sat down at the spinet and picked out, within earshot, a short soulless measure in counterpoint. He did not come in, so presently she abandoned it.

Now that he knew he could leave her, he took some time, she observed, to recover his acquaintance with the sun and air and wind which had been his habitat until three months previously. There were men who could engage in rougher sports with him than she could manage. He used the jeu de paume court, often alone, whenever time let him, but when he hunted or shot it was with Archie. For Archie’s silence, she knew how much they were both indebted.

Through it all he had taken no solace of drugs or of wine; nor had he offered her any. The therapy had been companionship, through all the day and as much of the night as she needed it, sitting in the long, lit grand’ salle until, at length, she could bring herself to go to her chamber. It was in that cruel, brilliant theatre of the salon that she had told him, late one night, that she was not going to bear a child to Leonard Bailey.

By then, they were already so deeply in tune that words were rarely
needed, and this was still so. The talking they did do was not in the hearing of others nor, in the early weeks, did it touch on the present or the future. Instead, he sat by her bedside and let her recall, moment by moment, all the long tale of their meetings.

It was then that she found that he had laid flat, himself, every defence against her: that she could, if she wished, enter and be received within this, the long-guarded citadel. And so she discovered, fragment by fragment, what he had never told anyone: the inner truth of all those events which, strung together, made up his unruly life. Then, of his own accord, he brought in Sybilla’s name.

‘She had … I thought she had all the virtues: grace and compassion, and laughter, and wisdom. Any lessons I learned to do with justice, with honour, with integrity are lessons I learned at her knee. A child, as you know, makes no allowances.’

Philippa said, ‘Another man might have repudiated all she had taught him.’

He was silent. Then he said, ‘She thinks, I believe, that I have. She accused me once of excusing myself any vice on the strength of my … resentment. I think once you thought the same. I suppose you are both right,’ he ended.

‘Do you? I think it would be truer to say,’ Philippa said, ‘that both of us at the time had our reasons for hurting you.’

That had been in the first weeks, and her eyes had held unshed tears, her chest ached with the pain of it. But then, the smallest, the most routine human contact had still been beyond her.

From the beginning, intuition had told him not to touch her, and intuition had kept him from speech which would define, like a cobweb in dew, the invisible thing that had happened. His love showed itself as the air does, by its infinite space and the life-giving properties of its presence. ‘I love you in every way known to man,’ he had said that night in the Hôtel d’Hercule, and in every way barring one, he had shown her the truth of it. But he had never spoken of love again. For in one night she had learned the nature of man’s love for woman, and all poetry and all music had been wrenched from her.

He understood. She thought that he had hopes of a healing of the spirit as time went on, although he never spoke of it. Once, riding with him by the river bank she had heard the voice of a solitary fisherman, uplifted in a song they both knew:

Then the tears had come, despite herself, and she had said, ‘What can I do? Your line will cease.’

And he had turned on her his clear, open gaze and had said simply, ‘Then it will cease.’

And again, his calm acceptance of the situation was not assumed. For him, it was now of no importance, as his place in the world was of no consequence. He was home, after long and harsh buffeting. And it was she, who knew his quality as Grey had done, who had to live with the knowledge that there was no channel by which it could continue; that for the purposes of the present world the flourish, so brief, was now over with.

He was home, one would say. But all that troubled her came to him, echoing and re-echoing between them. She knew every shade of his voice; every change in his breathing and hence, inescapably, when he was hurt, and the reason. Lacking the crude sturdy signposts of everyday, each had to find the other in a strange pathless glade of the mind, with dormant about them, instead of bough and creeper and trunk, the veils of a thousand threatening mischiefs to trap them.

And basic to them all, the reason why he lived, and had not made his own exit. The act by which, consciously or unconsciously, she had cried out to him:
My love is as great as yours: now will you believe it?
And then: remoter still in her consciousness:
You do not need to believe it for look, I have joined you in your gutter
.

Because of that, he would never leave her. She had meant to set him free and instead had bound him in chains.… But that, as well, was too trite an explanation for the thing that had happened. She had granted him moral sanction to bring his love into the sunlight and there, sudden, consuming and devastating to them both, had come this marriage, spirit to spirit, as positive, as devouring as the devotion sought by the monk at the altar rail.

But in the cloister, one does not live and speak daily with the being one worships. For her, with all her senses deadened and maimed, it might have been of little moment. But for her, instead, it was the single source of all misery, since she guessed the one thing he would not show her: the cost of his abstinence.

The summer days passed, ostensibly filled more and more with small and deep pleasures, and with the careful threads of those many affairs which, woven together, were to make them a fit life together. To those about them it seemed the tension was easing. To Philippa, walking with steady feet through the invisible veils of her cloud-forest, the brightness dissolved in the air, darkly filtered.

For how long can one maintain total vigilance? How long before, inattentively, one hurts, and then hurts again without meaning it? And how long, too, can strength of will last, at a pitch such as this, without destroying the structure which houses it?

She knew, from the lights in the salon, how little time he spent in his
bed-chamber. She knew from Archie the length of his rides; the violence of the games he played; the prolonged hours of his hunting. Once, returning from Blois, she had found Archie, stony-faced, rubbing down the fine, chestnut Isabela in the stables and walking into the parlour had found Francis asleep there.

She would have been thankful but for the marks of total exhaustion printed under his lashes and about the hard lines of his mouth. Shocked, she moved to his chair and unthinking, found his hand and possessed it.

He opened his eyes; and the trees of the cloud-forest toppled around her. She felt the laceration of his withdrawing fingers, and saw the force of his movements and heard the thud of wood upon wood as the door was flung shut behind him. Then she knelt by the chair, still holding the warmth of his sojourn, and closed her stinging palms over her face as the tears came.

Presently, having removed all trace of distress, she went into the grand’ salle and waited.

In an hour he came to join her, the stamp of weariness stark now against a flat pallor, and walking to the window, said, ‘Will you forgive me?’

‘Why?’ said Philippa. ‘For suffering what you have suffered for three months?’ And felt the veils rend about her, for she had broken the unwritten law: it must not be uttered. It must not be uttered, or they could not bear the pain, mirrored over and over.

So he shook his head, saying nothing; and after a moment chose a chair and sat down, not so far off as usual. An affirmation:
I have strength still. Do not be afraid
. But Philippa said, ‘I love you so much.’

All the colour there was left his face. But he only said gently, ‘Then next time, you will remember.’

So she must give him the protection he needed and so manage herself that nothing about her, her hand, her dress, her shoulder, should ever approach him. And in such a manner that, one vainly hoped, he might be unaware of it.

For how long can one maintain total vigilance?

For how long can love last, in isolation, without sinking crushed beneath its own pressure?

After that she did not go to seek him when he went out, but waited until he was ready to come to her. The fact that he continued to go out told its own story. Some things, then, were now beyond him.

So it was by accident that, one day in mid-July, she left the gardens of Sevigny and chose the path that he had taken, down to the river.

All month the heat had persisted, so that the carp gasped in their pond and the Loire shrank in its wide rushing channel, leaving dry sand and straw at its edges.

It drew Philippa by its coolness. She did not see, until she rounded a bay, that two men she knew stood on the sand, talking. Both were servants of Francis, and she saw, from the look of their horses and the
cream-tailed Isabela, loosely hobbled near by, that they had been riding hard with him. Then, far out in the river, she saw a wet yellow head in a stream of silver driving towards them, and realized what they were waiting for.

She did not want, at that moment, to speak to them. But she stood, obscured by the alders and was lost for a moment in the beauty of the moving force shearing the water; in the light on the waves and the glitter of the arching hand and arm, repeated over and over.

They were brown. He must have swum many times in the past weeks for the blond skin to take so smooth a tincture on forearm and shoulder and side; on the long line, smooth as a fish, of flank and limbs cleaving the water.

She might have known that here, unlike the steam baths of Baden, he would not only be stripped to the waist. Powerful as a machine, his arm lifted, driving him nearer and with it in her mind rose another arm, masculine also, but with muscles quilted with fat, and a bush of grey hair in its armpit. An arm joined by straining muscles to a broad, grey-pelted chest, immovable as a lichened boulder; to a sagging diaphragm and thick, plunging legs, big-boned and ashen. And the suffocating smells: of rotted teeth and stale sweat and old age, and of the voidings of a gasping and effortful maleness.

‘She is agog to see him swimming, my Sophie,’ one of the servants was saying, ‘but I’m not bringing her. I’d have to flog myself to death all night, the bitch, to make believe I was Monseigneur.’

Philippa vomited. Retching and choking, she leaned her weight on a birch sapling and then leaving it, took two steps away from the river and was sick again.

By then, exclaiming and chattering to one another, the two grooms were with her, one of them supporting Madame while the other, on her whispered appeal, brought his horse and held it. She crouched gasping against it, unable to mount, and in the end he jumped into the saddle himself, and taking her up before him, rode off carefully with her back to the château.

She heard, as she went, her husband’s voice from the water, putting a question; and then the other groom’s, answering, as he picked up a towel to throw to him.

They would use, to him, the same, jocular reassuring tone in which they had comforted her. ‘It comes to the best of wives, Madam. You will make a fine boy, never doubt it!’

While he, listening, would enter her mind, and would know what had happened.

*

Which makes the sound, the hammer or the anvil? Which feels the concussion?

Through her had come the hurt she had feared for him; a stroke neither blunt nor diffuse but direct and most cruelly personal. Lying on her high bed in the heat, with her women quietly moving about her, she had a long afternoon and evening to ponder it: to realize what she had done, and wonder in what way she could remedy it.

For this time, he did not come to her. She knew, only because she had questioned a maidservant, that he was back in the château and that he had asked for news of her as soon as he entered, and hourly afterwards.

But he did not come nor send any message; for this time, for him, there must be no track left he could follow. Until today, his mind and body, without demands, had existed only to serve her. If even this she could no longer tolerate, then they were both indeed adrift in the wilderness he had spoken of.

Night fell, and her servants left. The sickness was over. Until the next time, when she might deal another man a blow such as that.