Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [100]
‘How could I forget? It was you,’ said Lymond, ‘who mentioned expediency.’ Behind them, the crenellated tower of the fort cut the sky. The garrison had been surprised to receive a barrel of apples, but delighted with it. Rumour had been correct: food stocks were low. And behind the fort lay the long line of the beach and the sea, whose murmur came to them even here, in the busy port. As he spoke to Strozzi he was filing facts as he knew the other was doing: facts about the number and size of the boats in the harbour; the position of the fishing fleet, the notorious drop in the tide, the gun emplacements along the walls and at the Watergate entrance to the city; the flood gates which controlled the intake for the moat of the citadel.
To the right, reeds in plumed, pale banks moved like drowned horses’ manes in the marshes. There was water everywhere. Save for the sand dunes the land was an endless, sludge-coloured slade, and above it, the wide pale sky, as wide and as light as in Russia.
‘I stand on neither side. I fight with Lutherans and against them. I lead the Pope’s army, and kiss his hands, if he will give me soldiers to throw against Florence. I am a man with no God,’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘And you? You paid lip service at the altar. But I hear that those who would have you in Scotland have so far lit on no inducement.
‘Is it conscience which holds you? Yet I believe that the Queen-Regent allows those of the Reformed Faith to live within her daughter’s kingdom. Or is it a family quarrel? But your brother the Baron I recall as a charming, a moderate man, and nine years ago your mother the Dowager made me welcome and spoke of you as no man or woman, I can tell you, has ever spoken of me. And yet … my father was a true man. Tortured, he took his own life so that he would not dishonour himself. He wrote on the walls of his cell, “If I did not know how to live, I shall know how to die.” ’
The rowing boat was approaching over the sage-grey reflections of the walls of Calais, with behind the sturdy stalk of the Watch Tower and the square tower of the belfry among all the steep tiled roofs and spires. On the east walls the windmills buzzed, active as thread in the stiff breeze, which made fingerprints in the pale water and had silted up every crevice and gradient around them with a thick grouting of peach-coloured sand. Lymond said, ‘I too stand on neither side but … not, I think, without a God. If I went back, I should have to choose.’
‘And is that a bad thing?’ said Piero Strozzi. ‘It is difficult. It would be more gratifying, I can see, to rule all Muscovy than a nation smaller than Paris, with Mother France looking over your shoulder. Politics and religion are no longer fingers on the same hand, and your Queen-Regent’s tolerance may not last for ever. Your country may be governed well in the name of a religion you cannot agree with; or badly by those who worship as your conscience also instructs you. You may have to choose between your God and your country. Or you may have to choose differently from your family, who wish you to come back. Is this what you fear?’
‘Part of it,’ Lymond said. ‘It is all rather more complex than you imagine.’ He got to his feet.
Piero Strozzi rose likewise. ‘And your family? If the new religion brings trouble, and your brother were to die, who will they turn to?’
‘There is no doubt, of course, of the answer,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘But considering where we are at the moment, the question perhaps is academic. May I assist you, as my aged uncle, into the boat? I have a note from Senarpont which says that at the sign of the Trois Tetes is a very good inn. I suggest we now go and turn our apples into sour beer and naughty doings among citizens and mechanics and other lubberly loiterers.’
As it turned out, the beer at the Trois Têtes was excellent. Piero Strozzi, forced against nature to remain dumb, watched his companion rapidly and expertly become drunk, thereafter striking up a bosom friendship with a number of the aforesaid citizens and mechanics,