Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [102]
The crazy Scotsman had taken no food or wine with him, which meant he was not going far. His motives could not be treachery. They were almost certainly, in spite of his denials, to do with a woman. Which meant untidy watch-keeping. Which meant possible capture and confession, and the end of all their hopes of Calais, unless M. de Sevigny had the will power of Philippe Strozzi, which was unlikely.
Cursing, Piero Strozzi dressed, packed and left very soon after his companion, but unlike his companion, did not give a wide berth to Péronne. Instead, he recruited six men, including Danny Hislop, and set out to track down his imprudent late fellow-traveller.
Chapter 6
Dedans les puys seront trouvez les os,
Sera Vinceste commis par le maratre
L’estat changé, on guerra bruit et los,
Et aura Mars attendant pour son astre.
The journey upon which Francis Crawford was embarked had indeed to do with a woman, but was one which he made with no prospect of pleasure or profit, but solely for the sake of a promise. Because an extraordinary degree of self-control in public and in private through the years had become second nature to him, he made it without deviating and without weighing the consequences; or indeed anything but the obstacles which lay before him.
These were not few. Before he had been riding ten minutes, he had to dismount and hold his horse silently in a tangle of dew soaked undergrowth while a troop of mercenaries clattered by, the red cross plain in the lavender haze of the morning. For some reason, King Philip’s troops were moving early. After that, he crossed open fields only when it was necessary, taking shelter at the first sound of men’s voices, or the chime of bridle and spurs, or the vibration which meant hooves beating a way over mud-clods.
There were very few ploughed fields. Wagon trains had spent the autumn rolling through Picardy, and wheeled cannon, and ensigns of armed men on thick Flemish horses. At first, no doubt, they had paid for the apples they took from the orchards, and the hay from the barns, and the cabbages from the kailyard and the nets of onions hanging from the thatched eaves. They had even paid, perhaps, for the daughters and sisters they tumbled.
And then, of course, however skilled the command and however well-intentioned the discipline, they would cease to pay. The farms were deserted; even the bigger ones, built like a fortress, with walls and towers enclosing the pond and the barns and the farmhouse. Many were blackened with fire. Others, the stage for some bitter encounter, had been reduced by both Spaniards and French to a haphazard pattern of stone, picturesque as grey Mauresque fretwork against the red fire of rosehips and the ashen drift of seeding blossom from the shelves of marauding black creeper.
He moved from place to place down the swampy track of the River Somme, wary of the flights of small birds; crouched behind some garden wall close to the pale yellow of charlock, or a bed of forgotten pansies, gold and red and dark, bloomy grapecolour; or again, in the rushes beside one of the marshy ponds which glittered through all the flat country, with moorhen tracking its jade lichened surface. By then, he had freed and sent off his horse. With the country alive with movement such as this, he was better on foot.
It took him until midday, using all the more primitive skills he was master of, to get himself just north of Ham, the new-taken fortress occupied by King Philip, and the seat of his army in Picardy under the Duke of Savoy, his chief general. Except that the flag flying now from its square tower was not the personal standard of Philip, by the grace of God king of Spain, England, Sicily, Naples and Jerusalem. The distant trumpets, the frantic marching and counter-marching were