Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [128]
To Marthe she said, ‘Do you know, I think I might stay in France for a week or two. After all, I want my annulment as well. And I want to prepare Kate for the Schiatti cousins.’
Chapter 9
Siege en cité, et de nuict assaillie
Peu eschapés, non loing de mer conflict.
The news Adam brought was the last to reach court before the vast army of France, coalescing, rolled against the two-hundred-year-old frontier which enclosed all that England still cherished of her years of dominion.
Silence fell. The Court moved to Paris for the State Entry of the Cardinal Legate and in order that the King might make a public appeal for more money. Adam, bearing what funds the Treasury could supply, had long since returned to his headquarters. The restlessness that presages noble events hung in the air, harassing the attention. In Paris, everyone had seen the workshops working day and night; the covered wagons endlessly blocking the portals; the groups of engineers who would knock up the cook-shops at midnight. The Maréchale de St André, back from the coast, reported that a hundred and twenty ships had left, sailing west and laden with ordnance, and another forty, they said, had arrived at Ambleteuse with corn and wine and bacon and hurdles and ladders and cannon-shot. Then someone asked her the nature of her journey and she became belatedly vague. Her daughter, smiling, turned the conversation.
Philippa helped. Attending functions with her own regal mistress she made a point of seeking out Catherine d’Albon. It needed forethought. The Maréchale had found it amusing that the comte de Sevigny’s wife should interest herself in her husband’s next marriage. Her daughter was more reserved. But because she was more perceptive, in time she saw more than the Maréchale.
Madame de Sevigny’s interest was not crude or childish but simply friendly. Married only in name, she had no quarrel to pick with her husband. She did not even refer to him. She was merely there when one most needed kindness. When the great military confrontation that rumour talked about suddenly took to itself a designation. When through all the alleys of Paris the thickening whispers turned and clicked like the wheels of the watermills. Calais … Calais … They go to throw the English from Calais.
If Calais fell, she was to have Francis Crawford—if he asked for her. One did not speak of it. In this campaign, the Duke de Guise was supreme commander. On that the King and court staunchly insisted. But the cognoscenti in Paris knew differently. Among these, one heard only two names: those of Strozzi and Sevigny.
It was during this time that Philippa, watching the Queen’s lady of honour, learned her stature and learned also, with pity, her secret.
So, rashly, Catherine had given her heart before she was asked for it. The daughter of a noble house, trained to court, skilled in all the liberal arts, she was a fitting wife for Lymond and Sevigny. She might enjoy a better fortune than that. She might prove to be one of the most private and exclusive circle of persons to whom Francis Crawford gave, without mocking, his friendship.
If Calais fell. If the Duke of Savoy, less experienced than anyone thought, did not take a piece of suspect information at its face value and prepare for the Duke de Guise’s splendid army a reception they would never survive. If, whatever happened, the spearhead of that army lived to see it happen.
Philippa talked to Catherine d’Albon, and played music with her, and read aloud and was read to, and did some fine and useless embroidery and attended all the sacerdotal celebrations graced by the Cardinal Legate, at which the King of France’s smile, also, was a little less than spontaneous, and the Cardinal of Lorraine was seen to be thoughtful.
The last of these, with the feeblest of timing, was a Sunday wedding on a cold day in January between the second daughter of the Duchess of Bouillon and the second son of the Duke