Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [139]
‘Apples!’ said Sir Harry involuntarily.
Lord Grey glanced up sharply. The comte de Sevigny, on the point of speaking, paused for a moment. Then turning his head, he met first the pale, closed face of Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale, and then the bearded one, tinged with fever and accusing astonishment, of the man he had last seen as Knight-Porter of Calais.
‘Apples,’ repeated Sir Henry Palmer; and took a step forward. ‘You were the man with the cart? Were you? In the Citadel? Then … Christ … No, I’m dreaming.’
‘What’s this?’ said Lord Grey sharply.
Lymond’s eyes met those of d’Estrée, and then removed themselves civilly. He said, ‘I spent some time in Calais in disguise just before you took me at Flavy. Piero Strozzi was with me.’
‘Piero Strozzi!’ said Palmer. ‘Bloody hell, I sent you to Ruisbank!’ He breathed hard for a moment, his hand clutching his aching shoulder. ‘Tommy told me about you. Something to do with a tarot game.’
The past history of the Palmer family had no interest for Lord Grey at that moment. He said, ‘So, Mr Crawford, you indeed knew where Ruisbank was. And your bargain at Ham, like your bargain at Douai, was a ruse. I congratulate you.’
‘Bargain?’ said d’Estrée.
Francis Crawford smiled slightly. ‘On the contrary. Both times, I told you the truth. I said the French meant to take Calais.’
Lord Grey turned from him. ‘Your Scottish colleague, M. d’Estrée, is a master in the art of deception. He gave us information, when we took him at Ham, which led us to think that the Calais attack was merely a feint for a march south to Luxemburg. I told my nephew that he should have given Mr Crawford his quietus at Douai. If he had, Calais would be English still.’
‘I rather fancy,’ said Lymond dryly, ‘that he would have had to assassinate the Spanish high command as well. We know very well, Lord Grey, that but for the Burgundians, we should not be standing here. I might make a guess at the number of times you asked King Philip to support you. Perhaps you should also know that there are no English troops waiting at Dover. Savoy sent ships to bring them over and found that Pembroke’s army had been recalled to London. The Queen may wish to retake Calais, but the Privy Council are unlikely to sustain her. When you go to talk to the Duke de Guise, you will find there is no choice. You must surrender, or give up your men’s lives for nothing.’
‘You speak convincingly for your employers,’ said Lord Grey of Wilton. It was time to go. He rose to his feet and faltered, and Austin, catching his arm held him while Lymond on his other side made a swift movement. ‘I am exceedingly sorry. You are wounded?’
No one answered. Then, ‘It is nothing,’ said Lord Grey curtly and moved, with Austin’s help to the doorway. His name and his dignity had suffered enough today and in the past at this man’s instigation, without revealing that his only wound at the battle of Guînes had come from a sword of his own side, by accident.
*
From pride of a different kind, he refused the first terms he was offered. For the sake of his soldiers he had made every painful concession but one: he could not, without the utter defacing of English credit, agree to surrender his flags to the enemy.
He called the men he had left, and addressed them. ‘We have begun as became us: we have yet held on as duty doth bind us; let us end then as honesty, duty and fame do will us. Neither is there any such extremity of despair but that we may yet dearly enough sell our skins ere we lose them. Let us then either march out under our own ensigns displayed, or else perish here under them.’
But it was Burgundians he was addressing, not Englishmen. Burgundians did not see, they said, why they should die for Lord Grey’s vainglory. He was to return,