Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [109]
She was there still; her sightless eyes looking straight at him. Through it all, behind the crazy torrent of movement, he had been conscious of this. Aware that in this shuttered room a blind woman was sitting, assaulted with questions, shaken by trampling vibrations; unseeing, suffering listener to the explosion of gunfire, the clash of steel, the shouting of men in stress and in anger. And last of all, exposed to a choking alchemy by which the very air became bane in her nostrils.
He looked at her, speaking her name: his voice steady over the private, high-spinning turmoil of extreme exertion.
But she did not answer, although she sat erect and calmly, with the long hair … grey, not black … straggling over her shoulders; and her eyes open and creamy like milk-glass; and not yellow with straw.
‘She is dead. I speak,’ said Captain Alferez Carasco from the window, a milk-pail in both blackened hands, ‘to el conde Criafordo? There are three men at the door and one at each window: soon there will be thirty.
‘Milord, you are surpassed. You will be pleased to surrender.’
Chapter 7
Par grans dangiers le captif echapé
Peu de temps grand la fortune changée.
The red and white chequered fortress of Ham was only five miles to the north-west of Flavy and, powerful as a walled city, had for three hundred years commanded the village, the church and the River Somme whose moat encircled it.
Lymond saw nothing of his arrival there. He came to his senses during the night in a hurriedly prepared chamber in the tower; and in the morning was brought to the low-ceilinged room with its seven-foot window embrasures where the Duke de Nevers, for France, had so recently given up tenure to the Duke of Savoy, for Spain and England.
Savoy was not there. Behind the massive, dark desk sat a man taller and older whose groomed, silvery beard still rested on the bosom of his richly sewn doublet in the fashion of ten years ago, when he was England’s general, commanding the wars against Scotland.
‘Ah, M. de Sevigny,’ said Lord Grey of Wilton. ‘Pray sit down. I am sorry that Captain Carasco had to use force. He was ordered to avoid it. The odds being one to thirty I feel you could, with honour, have surrendered your sword.’
‘I was angry,’ said Lymond. He remained standing.
‘Just so,’ said Lord Grey. He rose and stalked slowly round his desk, having reconsidered a tart comment about overplaying one’s hand in pretty Spanish masquerades. This might look like the insolent opponent, half his age, of Hume; of Heriot; of Hexham but it was not; as one knew already from the man’s record. Lord Grey said, ‘I must make plain my regret for the death of Madame Jourda. There was some impression that she, and not your friends, had warned you of your danger. The Captain lost his head.’
It was not all that he had lost. He was in the care of the barber-surgeon at that moment, having had six inches of Mr Crawford’s sword passed through his chest wall. Lymond said, ‘If you will be kind enough to make out a report of the matter for his grace of Savoy, I shall be glad to countersign it.’
Which meant he wanted Carasco broken. It was probable that he would be. The Duke’s orders were to let this man have anything, within reason, that he wanted. Lord Grey said, ‘It shall be done. Of course. An army is only as good as its officers,’ and having got the man seated at last, clapped his hands for wine, served it, and took a chair this time on the same side of the desk as his prisoner. ‘I am glad to see,’ said Lord Grey, ‘that we have managed to find clothes for you more befitting your rank. I admire your hardihood. Had we not known who you were, you and your friends might have been killed on sight as common soldiers. One hopes they bear you no resentment. They saved their skins, I am told, with remarkable alacrity.’
‘It would interest you to know who they were,’ said Lymond. ‘It would interest me to know