Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [202]
She sent a page to invite the Schiatti cousins to supper.
In twenty-four hours she had the name of Leonard Bailey’s bankers in Paris and London and the information, extracted she understood by alcohol rather than violence, that a package, with instructions and password, had been confided by Mr Bailey to their Paris house recently. She also had, drawn upon her own funds in France, the sum of ten thousand pounds in Venetian ducats.
She had a day and night watch set upon the Hôtel des Sphères, operated by a number of cheerful gentlemen of questionable reputation, found for her by some good friends in the stables. This served a number of purposes. If, for example, she could stop Bailey sending out instructions, she could postpone if not prevent any little hitch occurring, such as Bailey deciding to sell the papers to Lady Lennox. Or Mr Crawford receiving a similar offer, and half or wholly killing Master Bailey so that the whole mechanism of publication was set in motion.
She attended a long, polite discussion on procedure between the Cardinal of Lorraine, the Queen, the King’s sister and his mistress, and then arranged for the Schiatti cousins to attend a contest of jeu de paume. During the ensuing tête-à-tête she related a highly credible tissue of falsehoods which brought her, to her momentary shame, instant promises of manly succour.
Gino Schiatti, the older and wealthier, was going to borrow the Paris documents for her. Marco Schiatti, the better scribe, was going to write a persuasive letter to someone in London, which she proposed to enclose in a still more persuasive letter of her own to Sir Henry Sidney. In this, she did not intend to mention Lymond’s name or to lie; but merely to say that the loan of the papers was a matter of life and death to a friend of Diccon Chancellor’s.
An excellent method of transmitting both letters to London occurred to her.
The Commissioners arrived in Paris, and she saw Archie.
In the interests of Master Bailey’s health she absented herself from an excruciating reception for the King and Queen of Navarre, newly arrived for the royal wedding, at which the comte de Sevigny was expected to be in attendance.
She paid a visit to the Hôtel de La Rochefoucauld, and at last obtained permission to see Lord Grey of Wilton, the captured English commander.
*
To the thirteenth baron Grey of Wilton had fallen none of the galling luxury daily enjoyed by his nephew Austin, under the régime of the Hôtel d’Hercule.
Not that he lacked either food or common necessities. For a nobleman of his rank, on parole to a brother-in-law of the Prince of Condé, such treatment would be unthinkable. Besides, since the Queen of England had displayed such a loving concern for him, he was worth a thumping good sum of money.
His health was therefore well looked after, even to the healing of the unfortunate cut in one foot. Only the comte de La Rochefoucauld, with recent memories of a stringent six months’ captivity in Genap, was a little less accommodating in his hospitality than he might have been.
Philippa, having passed the scrutiny of a porter, a captain of arms, a maître d’hôtel and finally, surprisingly, a quartet of the King’s own bodyguard, still required to pass through two locked doors and satisfy the double guard at the threshold of another before a key was inserted and turned and she was ushered at last into the presence of Austin Grey’s uncle.
‘My goodness,’ said Philippa Somerville appreciatively. ‘They are frightened of you. You’ve got more pikemen than they took Calais with.’
His lordship of Wilton, rising abruptly, gazed at the vision before him and said, with caution, ‘It is Philippa Somerville?’
‘It was,’ the vision said, removing with aplomb a mesmerizing cloak of ermine and Anatolian green velvet and handing it to a servant, who left the room, locking the door carefully behind him. She sat down, her extremely costly dress spread about