Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [118]
Three days later, they moved him under stiff guard from Ham to le Catelet, on his way north-east to safer detention at Brussels. Until Mr Crawford’s disclosures were shown to be genuine, my lord Grey was not fool enough to allow Mr Crawford to abscond to Russia or anywhere else.
Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale, captained the troop that took Lymond to le Catelet, past the reedy ponds and the sky-blue stitchery of the willows; the huddles of russet roofs round their spire, the apples shining like green coins in their flourish of green, the small birds swooping dark on the sky, their bodies glinting pale and short in the sun.
The prisoner ignored his surroundings. But Austin, his imagination already in the dark cell which Philippa’s husband must occupy, saw every faint detail of the journey: the verdigris grain on a dry, long-culled meadow; the stagnant pool, high and still, with lily stems twined in its cloudy green depths and the yellow petals of beech arriving and sinking, pensive leaded memorials, to their dissolution.
They rode in silence through it all: a small, swift unit of fifteen men in plate armour, bearing the red bands of England and inviting no attention from the French-held forts of Péronne and of Guise just over either horizon. The only unarmed man, engulfed in their midst, was their eminent prisoner, soberly dressed for better concealment, with his hands bound and the famous hair hidden.
Crawford had not wished to leave Ham. So much had been subtly apparent both to Austin Grey and his uncle with whom the prisoner had been called to a short, unsatisfactory interview the day before their departure. Lord Grey had pointed out briskly that there were some odd discrepancies between the garrison numbers Mr Crawford had given him and those reports which Lord Grey’s spies were delivering. Furthermore, Mr Crawford’s account of the plan for the taking of Calais appeared to be based on an odd misconception. The Ruisbank fort was not where Mr Crawford’s plan showed it.
M. de Sevigny had displayed anger when doubted. But he had not, although he spoke with great vigour, entirely cleared their minds of all suspicion. Lord Grey of Wilton had decided that the safest course was to send him to Brussels. They would look extremely foolish if the attack after all were to be directed against himself at Ham, and Crawford were to saunter out, sneering. It would be in character. Whereas at Brussels …
He had not told Austin, because the boy, he well knew, was a milksop. But in Brussels there were ways, denied to him as a gentleman, of checking whether an informant was lying. No doubt Mr Crawford, a man of the world, was aware of them. It would more than explain his present lack of enthusiasm for the journey.
It had not been a silent cavalcade on leaving Ham. Austin Grey, with his prisoner’s reins in his grasp, had dropped from his manner all but the meaningless requirements of courtesy. Lymond was bent, on the other hand, on provoking him.
‘Why let me have it all my own way? Talk, Tancred,’ he said lazily over the hoofbeats. ‘Or are you afraid your uncle’s men will accuse you of fraternizing? But surely they know you have a mind above bribes, even when your less weak-bellied uncle is sending me to have my bones pulled and my hands broken at Brussels? After all, I have only one thing you want, and you wouldn’t find it any harder to get than any other fool with his eye on a married woman. Toutes serez, êtes ou fûtes/De fait ou de volonté, putes.’
He laughed at the expression on Austin’s face and was going on when Austin called his lieutenant to him and transferring Lymond’s reins to his charge, rode off to the head of the troop.
They travelled without speech after that, and no marauding band of French traversed their path; no scout from Guise or Péronne saw them vanish and rode back to try, however tardily, to rouse his fellows.
Instead, as they crossed the broad plateau between the river Somme and the Escaut, fifty men rose out of the ground where for two days they had been waiting, strung across the only possible pathway