Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [142]
Jerott, released by wine and dizzy with unstopped emotion, argued with him and sang, forgetful of Lyon and Marthe: Danny Hislop, intoxicated wholly by words, plunged in delirium from lascivious songs to long, explicit, unanswered dissertations; Adam Blacklock, barely tipsy at all, looked at Lymond’s vivid face and carefree movements and open, brilliant eyes and recognized, as Archie had done, that the shadow had lifted.
If you thought about it, there was no magic in it. War had given Francis his respite, and success had brought him his final reward: the freedom he wished from his marriage. The licence, if he desired it, to go back to Russia. The knowledge, one supposed, that, severed from Philippa, he could allow the past to lie in peace, and cease troubling him.
So, in the end, Adam watched them all leave and himself departed, smiling through the tent doorway at Archie, as he exchanged hazy farewells with his master.
Francis Crawford let him go and then, walking slowly inside, put his hand on the tent pole and surveyed, in his turn, the small mahout.
‘Archie?’ said Lymond. ‘It is half past four o’clock in the morning, and I am exceedingly drunk. Do you suppose these two statements have anything to do with each other?’
‘No,’ said Archie tolerantly. ‘And neither will you, come the morning.’
*
Some time after that, the last lights in Guînes were extinguished; the last random shot fired; the last catcall uttered; and only the feet of the sentries could be heard, treading round the encampment.
In an open tent with a Florentine banner Lord Grey of Wilton kept his private vigil, gazing out upon the indigo sky and the fresh-dug graves and the marshes which for over two hundred years had been England’s care, and for nearly thirty years, off and on, in his keeping.
And in another tent at the same moment Archie Abernethy began a well-earned night’s rest in good conscience, for Francis Crawford was sleeping already beyond him, his guard relaxed, his breathing quiet, his scarred wrists lying free in the blankets.
He was sleeping still when far to the north, dawn arrived in an east Scottish estuary; and with it, a fleet of small ships, come to bear her noble Commissioners to Queen Mary’s wedding in Paris.
Part III
Soubs le terroir du rond globe lunaire
Lors que sera dominateur Mercure
L’isle d’Escosse fera un luminaire
Qui les Anglais mettra à décomfiture.
Chapter 1
Proye à Barbares trop tost seront hastifs.
Cupide de voir plaindre au vent la plume.
On an elevating cloud of Eleatica the French Army for four weeks continued its triumphs and indeed consolidated them, although for the whole of that period none of its officers was perfectly sober.
The fortresses of Guînes and of Hâmes were razed to the ground, thereby releasing three hundred cannon of brass alloy, three hundred of iron and a prodigious quantity of munitions, much to everyone’s retrospective alarm. The fortified châteaux of d’Herbemont, Jamoigne, Chigny, Rossignol and Villemont were attacked and captured. The king of France, in company with the Dauphin, the Cardinals of Lorraine and de Guise and all the non-combatant nobility of the French Court, made a Triumphal Entry into his new town of Calais and handed out money, preferment and property to all his brave generals. The Duke de Guise was given the great house of the Staple in Calais. Marshal Strozzi received the gift of Lord Grey, a tract of crown lands worth fifteen thousand crowns’ rental, a favourable marriage for an unremarkable daughter, and an appointment to the Privy Council, which was worth all the rest put together.
The comte de Sevigny was also given land, notably a stretch adjoining the property of the Marshal de St André outside Lyon. There accompanied it an undertaking by the Cardinal Legate that the bill of divorce already placed before the Pontiff should be approved and ready for its final ratification by my lord count and his wife on the day following the Queen of Scotland’s forthcoming marriage. To