Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [160]
Then they began to pass lighted cottages, and laden wains emerging from farmyards, and cattle, plodding in to their milking. The sky paled. Over Calais; over Boulogne the new day came spreading: by the time they were in the waterlogged fault of the Bray valley, it was quite light. They had been riding at gallop or at canter, for six continuous hours.
To Francis Crawford the rest of the journey was never quite clear in his memory. The wet snow had stopped, leaving a landscape dense and spidery with thin rails of leafless trees, their spars floating and weaving in the cascading grey air. A flock of short, stocky birds rose once, wheeling, blackening, wheeling, and caused his horse, racing flat out, to curvet. He crossed what seemed to be endless undulating chalk fields with the same grey web of trees smudged with mist on the skyline.
Then his horse stumbled again, and very soon after that, they saw the hooded thatch of the next posting station, and there was a brief interval of noise and warmth and the reek of horse-sweat and steaming clothes and hot tallow and of fish, from the wicker carts with their two powerful horses on their way to take herring to Paris.
He left the crowded room abruptly when he had only been there for five minutes, and waited for the fresh horses in the squelching cold of the bustling yard. Archie said, when he came out, ‘These will take us to Dieppe. But there’s no sense in killing them.’
It was the only mention of restraint that he had made, from beginning to end. Jerott had tried to stop him, but not the others. The others remembered another shipwreck, only fifteen months ago in Scotland, when Richard his brother had ridden like this to come to him, but not so far, and in the knowledge, of course, that he was living.
He and Richard had met on the strand at Philorth and like the sand under their feet, all the muddled solicitude which had prompted that journey had in five minutes dispersed through their fingers. Richard, believing him to have come home at last to his responsibilities, had been outraged and wounded to discover that his plans were to leave Scotland for ever. And he had been as careful as he knew how to be, but it had not been enough because he too had been hurt, by a loss he could afford less than Richard. In the wreck had died Diccon Chancellor the English navigator, who had been more than half-way towards becoming the friend he had never quite managed to find and keep, in terms of equality, except sometimes, in passing, with women.
He had thought sometimes to recognize the same affinity with Richard, but circumstances and, he supposed, his own nature were always against it. And of the women, two had died and he had cut himself off from the other.
‘This is the Chalk Hill,’ said Archie. ‘And there’s the gate of Dieppe. What do you want to do?’
Below them, running through its cold swamps, was the River Arques with the walled and moated town of Dieppe on its left bank. On the chalky cliffs to the west of the town the blue-capped towers of the castle and citadel stood clear against the grey sky and grey sea beyond: the sea which washed the shores of both England and France, and had become a moat and a graveyard for both.
Lymond said, ‘The captain of the gate will know where the Commissioners are. I shall go there first, and then join you up at the Castle.’
He had not realized until he turned then and looked at him, how tired Archie was. The lines in his dark cheeks were deep as knifed clay, and his black eyes were reddened and sunk under the close leather helmet he wore like a turban.
Lymond said, ‘A brother, whether I have one or not, could not have done more.’
Then, before Archie could try to answer, he touched spurs to his worn, steaming horse and plunged downhill to the Porte de la Barre drawbridge.
*
The captain of the ward knew him, and was flustered by his lack of retinue and the forewarning which was expected on the arrival of a great lord, a King’s officer and a Chevalier of the Order to the King’s loyal town of