Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [112]
‘Why wait?’ said Francis Crawford. ‘You may have my answer now, if you wish.’
‘So hastily?’ said Lord Grey of Wilton.
‘Why,’ said the other man, and surveyed him from boots to crown with those derisive, chilly blue eyes. ‘I have my eye on a piece of ground called Aceldama. You have found the right coin. I accept it.’
*
He had been taken back to his chamber and they were locking him in when a man in half-armour arrived and came up the stairs running, the guards saluting his passage.
Arrived at Lymond’s threshold he took off and gave to a man at arms his gloves and his helmet, revealing fine dark hair flattened by sweat, and a steep-boned self-contained face shadowed, but not yet coarsened by war. Then he stepped inside and motioned to them to lock the door after him.
‘Mr Crawford,’ said Austin Grey. ‘I wish the favour of your attention.’
Lymond turned, smiling. ‘My lord of Allendale. Come then, South Wind, and perfect my garden.’
*
The King of France, riding in cavalcade to Compiègne with half the Court, was shown and approved the Duke de Guise’s magnificent plan for the recovery of Calais. He commanded that there should be no secret made among the soldiery of the great booty to be obtained there; and he took aside the Marshal Piero Strozzi and placed round his neck a collar worth eight hundred écus in recognition of the work of espial he had engaged in, at such cost and such risk to himself.
‘Nor, when he is returned to us, shall we show ourselves less generous towards M. de Sevigny,’ said his Majesty. ‘We grieve that France has lost, however temporarily, such a servant. A trumpet will be sent to inquire the terms of his ransom. We have even considered an attack on the fortress, but M. de Guise informs me that it would cost the lives of many brave men, with no assurance of rescue. We are happy at least to have Marshal Strozzi beside us.’
‘It was unfortunate,’ said Marshal Strozzi. ‘Whatever ransom is agreed, your grace will lose the Chevalier’s services until the war ends. If the Duke is willing to reconsider, I am prepared to mount an attack against Ham.’
‘And risk your life again? We should not allow it,’ said Henri. ‘In any case, our object at present is Calais. That taken, the war will not be long in ending. M. de Sevigny will return. You will see. And he will be welcome.’
*
In a room in another wing of the fortified château of Compiègne, four men sat round a table and discussed, from another viewpoint, the same subject.
‘Daddy Cloots says that Ham is impregnable,’ said Archie Abernethy. ‘But Daddy Cloots doesna want Mr Crawford back again. The Spanish got into Ham.’
‘Ham surrendered,’ said Jerott Blyth shortly. ‘And if you mean the Duke de Guise, I wish you’d say so. Mr Blacklock and I are waiting to hear what Mr Hislop has to say.’
Danny Hislop, newly back from his interrupted duty at Péronne, was aware that he had reached his moment of reckoning. He looked round the table. At the noble, high-coloured face of the merchant of Lyon, the former Knight of St John who had not gone to Russia: who had married Lymond’s step-sister and had had to be manhandled by Lymond himself into sobriety.
At Adam Blacklock, long-faced, sallow and gentle, with the scar on his face and the hesitation which appeared now and then in his speech because he was by profession first an artist and only a bad second, a soldier. Who had tried civilian life with the merchants in London, and had found, after all, that this band of men provided him with something he could not yet do without.
And at Archie Abernethy the menagerie keeper, who had played a part, they said, in Lymond’s career at its most frenetic: who had supplied him with opium; trained his wife; brought his bastard back home to Scotland.
Danny said, ‘Mr Blyth: do I by any chance face some sort of tribunal? We were eight men against thirty, and five miles away from Flavy before we even knew