Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [180]
Lord James, folding his tall body, sat suddenly down. The gorgeous creature by the window did not move, nor was there a notable change in his plumage. But by some means it was made clear that against the latticed panes of the casement stood a man trained for war, and with skills of a sort which had protected Lyons; had saved Paris; had recovered Calais for an alien monarch. Lymond said, ‘To avoid precisely the type of discourtesy to which I now appear to be committed. I am sorry, Master Erskine. I talk to no one behind a locked door.’
John Erskine walked quietly to the door, unlocked it, and returning, took his place, standing, on the other side of the embrasure from Lymond. He did not look at James who had been within an ace, he was aware, of preventing him. He said, ‘Our motive in locking it, if it matters, was to spare you the embarrassment of an interruption. Unless the comte de Sevigny of today is really so different from the Master of Culter of ten years ago?’
Perfectly at his ease, the decorative young man he was addressing leaned back on the shutters and studied him. ‘I hope so,’ Lymond said. ‘When you were twenty, Mr Erskine, you killed a priest in the belltower at Montrose. Would you do so again?’
It made him gasp, a ludicrous thing: he must be failing. He heard Lord James’s harsh voice cutting in: ‘You will refrain, Mr Crawford, from pointless—and actionable—accusations. Father Froster’s death was an accident.’
Lymond did not even look at him. ‘I am sure of it,’ he said directly to Erskine. ‘But would you have such an accident now? At twenty you looked back on Flodden, and on the deaths of father, grandfather, granduncle and uncle at the hands of the English. If Catholic Mary dies, and Protestant Elizabeth comes to the throne, will you feel the same about the English now?’
Erskine returned the blue stare with a look in which there was no atom of cynicism. He said, ‘If my cause requires it, I shall court them. From which you may draw two conclusions. I have shed the brashness of twenty, and I have learned to subjugate the lesser good to the greater. But I still serve my country.’
‘Mr Crawford also perhaps has learned to subjugate the lesser good to the greater,’ said Lord James abruptly. ‘I feel, John, your approach is too spiritual. The situation is plain enough to any practical man. While the Catholic powers have been at war with one another, Calvinism has flourished both in France and in Scotland, where the Queen Dowager has had to countenance it because she required the support of its adherents.
‘Now with the taking of Calais, the wars of France and Spain and the Papal States may all be drawn to a close: already the Cardinal of Lorraine is urging the King towards new and violent steps against heresy. In Scotland the Queen Regent is likely to receive orders from her brothers in France to take a stand against the new religion. Already there is unrest over the grasp France is exercising in Scotland: the principal officers of State, the main strongholds, are all French already. There is talk, since her nobles refuse to cross the Border to wage war on England, of still more French troops sailing to Leith under the Vidame de Chartres.’
He paused; the pale royal eyes raking the intransigent figure before him: of the man he had never before met, whose exploits at fourth or fifth hand he had half heard, half caught like echoes without ever finding a man, except perhaps his dead uncle Tom Erskine, who could attempt to assess their value. Then he said, ‘You are a Scotsman: a man of eminence in your own field, who once appeared to interest yourself in the affairs of your country. What you are about to do, and what you are about to leave undone will both affect us. You say you mean to go to Russia. My information is that you cannot survive there. I do not know you. I should expect you however at least to avoid obscure martyrdom.’
‘I am perhaps a little more optimistic than you are,’ Lymond said. ‘The Tsar is a hard man to cross, but then so am I.