Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [141]
‘I didn’t know,’ said Austin Grey.
‘And Lord Grey will belong to Piero Strozzi. So that, until your ransom is paid, you can court Mistress Philippa in comfort. I had hoped to find her back in England, but they tell me she is still at Court in Paris.’
A talent for organization. Toutes serez, êtes ou futes/De fait ou de volonté, putes. He had forgotten, for a moment, the words Crawford had used to him, on the unfinished journey from Ham. ‘You want rid of your whore. So you are content,’ said Austin, ‘that an English poltroon should have her?’
A moment passed. Then Lymond said, ‘My words at Ham. I apologize. I had a purpose, as I remember, in baiting you. If I thought you required any assurance whatever about her character or her person, you would be dropped from the leet of fiancés. Your uncle may or may not have told you. I owe a long-standing debt to her family.’
‘Her mother is rearing your son. But Philippa,’ said Austin Grey, ‘will be greater than Kate.’
‘I am glad you think so. It is for you then,’ said Lymond, ‘to provide her with her setting. She has wealth. You have position. Between you, you might make of Allendale one of the great political centres of England. You have only to win her.’
‘I thought,’ said Austin, ‘you were doing that for me.’
‘Only the groundwork,’ said Francis Crawford with affability. ‘Does he need me who daily walkest and is conversant among women, seest their beauties set forth to the eye, hearest their nice and wanton words, smellest their balm, civet and musk? Therein is fruit, and palms hanging sheathed in clusters, and the grain with its husk and its fragrance—which of these bounties of your Lord will you reject?’
‘None that come from the Lord,’ said Austin Grey evenly. ‘From the comte de Sevigny, I have no mind to accept either guidance or favours.’
*
That evening, released by a magnanimous enemy, the men of Guînes marched from the citadel. They left bearing their weapons and armour, and every man had a crown in his purse. But they marched in tingling silence, without tuck of drum or music of trumpet, and without the brave dance of their colours, for their flags, like their leaders, had been left captive in French hands behind them.
For the French, it was the end of a campaign which would take its place in history. ‘The loss of Calais,’ said the Pope, ‘is the only dowry the Queen of England will receive for her marriage to King Philip the Second. Such a conquest is preferable to half the kingdom of England.’
Silent in their tents, Grey of Wilton, the three cousins and all their captains heard through the night the tumult of the French camp’s celebrations. In the small hours, the sconces were snuffed in the Duke de Guise’s gold and purple pavilion. But the lights under the blazons of Strozzi and of Sevigny continued rather longer than that; and so did the outbursts of music and laughter, of talk and singing and the constant coming and going of men, gay and drunken under the chill ruined hulk of the fortress.
Archie Abernethy watched it all, reclined cracking a bone by the wine barrel. He saw them all come to the warmth: d’Estrée and Senarpont and Roche-sur-Yon, lingering, who had known Francis Crawford six years before. Tavannes and de Thermes. The Sieur d’Andelot, whose wife the comtesse de Laval had cause to thank Mr Crawford, and who took him aside and talked to him, holding him close, until he became too drunk to enunciate, and laughing, sprawled and drank some more instead. Piero Strozzi who, his arm round Lymond’s shoulders, refought every battle from Sainte-Agathe to Guînes and kissed him, several times, and offered him a choice from his selection of available women, invitingly detailed which, solemnly, Lymond found it politic to refuse.
That night Lymond, too, broke free from the prison he had made for himself. He drank of intent, until one by one the barriers crumbled and let run loose all those qualities he possessed, like Alkibaides, of a tarnished and insolent profusion, to set alight in his