Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [145]
‘And how is Mr Blacklock?’ said Philippa.
‘I don’t know, milady,’ said her bodyguard. ‘There’s a man in town pays us. Mr Blacklock’s in Artois. So they say.’
So she had to ask, after all, quite directly. ‘And M. de Sevigny?’
His face changed, like a cushion with a fat man sitting on it. ‘In Abbeville still, I expect. Did you hear what they did on the ice?’
‘No,’ said Philippa.
‘Put the cannon on sledges and hurdled over them. Eight broken legs and four arms that first day, and a culverin fell through and had to be drawn out by horses. Signor Strozzi won eight hundred écus.’
‘And M. de Sevigny? said Philippa with shaming monotony.
‘Oh. He put his cap on a weathervane and bet M. Strozzi he couldn’t knock it off with the cannon. He couldn’t either, so M. de Sevigny got his eight hundred écus back again. Then he took some of them that had been with him in Russia and showed them trick riding. Of course, they’re used to the snow.’
His face was shining. She had been a bad-tempered harridan. On an impulse, Philippa put an écu in his hand, smiled, and turning to her valet, continued on her original errand.
It hadn’t become any better: not a bit of it. Every day of the long separation had only sunk the well deeper: printed the long, detailed record of his looks and his words, like the dials of the oak, more inexorably into her being.
But to bear it, and in silence, was her privilege. She shared it with many others. Nor was she vain.
*
He came back on Wednesday, February 16th, and put up for the last time with his suite at the empty Hôtel St André, where he found a message from the Prévôt des Marchands awaiting him. It bade him, as one of the victors of Calais, present himself with his comtesse at four after midday on Thursday, to receive the accolade of the city upon the Duke de Guise’s great triumph.
With it was a note from the royal maître d’hôtel with the arrangements for the order of ceremony.
Underneath that, was a note from his current wife Philippa.
To Hercules from the Queen of the Amazons. The Cardinal decrees that Monsieur and Madame de Sevigny appear at the Hôtel de Ville banquet together tomorrow. I shall call on you at three of the clock after midday, smiling as doth the crocodile, which hath many rows of teeth but no tongue. I recommend to you Dathan and Abiram, whom the earth swallowed quick.
He laughed aloud when he read it, but sent no reply. On the other hand, when Philippa arrived at the Hôtel St André next day, he was waiting on the stroke of three in the Maréchale’s parlour to receive her. And behind him was Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale.
*
It was five months since she had seen Francis Crawford. And in spite of her resolution, it was at him only that she looked.
He met the look, which he had not done in September. All that she remembered was there and something else: a presence bright as a newly sheared diamond. He had about him the hard resilience and the longsighted vision she recalled from other men on hard-fought campaigns, although he was clean and scented and his hair was fresh-cut and shining. Only his hands, taking hers lightly to greet her, were hard across the palm with the grip of the rein and the sword-hilt, and the filbert nails cut closer than she had ever seen them in the salon. It would be some weeks before he could match Catherine d’Albon with the lute, in counterpoint or out of it.
He looked well. And as if somewhere, lately, he had tasted happiness.
‘Devoted obedience at the kissing of your holy feet,’ Lymond said, lifting a silver cup of Hippocras and handing it to her severely, ‘but what do I have to do to induce you to leave France? Stand and pray like St Kevin, until my two outstretched palms both have nests in them? You remember Lord Allendale.’
Philippa turned her gaze to Lord Allendale, on whose fine-skinned dark face was a clearly read turmoil of feeling. She said, ‘Poor Austin: you should never have let Mr Crawford buy you. The Vidame de Chartres will challenge you out of jealousy.… I am sorry, truly. But you’re well; you’re not wounded.