Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [238]
He had little news to give her, beyond that he was being well cared for at a prescribed level, Philippa gathered, which fell tidily half-way between the generous and the patronizing. It was a relief that Lymond was absent. Before that, the house had been filled with secretaries and couriers and advisers. And since the reception, the number of fellow countrymen calling had trebled, even though de Sevigny had seen very few of them. He asked, hesitatingly, ‘Was the evening very … flamboyantly Scottish?’
‘No. He avoided that,’ Philippa said. ‘But he has a popular reputation, and I expect people like Orkney and Erskine have sounded him out and vouchsafed some sort of general cachet of approval. Being sought after is no novelty.’
‘No. I suppose not,’ Austin said. He glanced at his hands and added, ‘The marriage with Mistress d’Albon is then to go on?’
‘She hasn’t changed her mind,’ Philippa said. ‘And neither, of course, has he.’
‘Philippa,’ said Austin Grey. ‘If something were to go wrong and you have need of a friend … only a friend, will you think of coming to me?’
He knew nothing. He merely loved her, and intuition told him she was in trouble.
Her eyes bright with tears, Philippa Crawford walked forward and touching the empty sleeve at his side, kissed him on the cheek. Then she left quickly.
*
Waiting for her in the Château was Gino Schiatti with a packet. Inside, heavily sealed, was the pair of folded documents which Leonard Bailey had deposited at his banker’s shop on the day that she had visited him.
Master Schiatti, who had just to his surprise received a very warm kiss, showed her, a little flushed, how to slit the seal with the minimum of disturbance and left, on the reassurance that the packet—or one very like it—would be returned to him within twenty-four hours, or even earlier. He received another kiss which led him to wonder, hopefully, if the English bastard at the Hôtel d’Hercule was dying.
Alone in her room, Philippa unfolded the papers. And then, laying them down, to the detriment of her paint, her powder, her dress and her hair, she wept aloud, with wet, incoherent sobs like an imbecile. For the papers had nothing written upon them at all.
With native cunning, Leonard Bailey had not confided Sybilla’s affirmations to his banker in Paris, but had simply made of the bureau a decoy. These were blank. The true papers had been hidden elsewhere.
And although, in due course, she sat up and blew her nose, and rinsed her face and restored, so far as possible, all the vista of equanimity laced with severity required by her present duties, she knew that the reverse she had just suffered was a major one.
Someone in authority must hold Bailey’s documents, but to find him now at short notice was virtually impossible. There remained only one gleam of hope. Perhaps Bailey had lied. Perhaps no second copy existed. Perhaps it was the original which had gone, not to a Paris bank but to England.
She would know, when she received Henry Sidney’s reply.
And meantime, time was running out.
‘Collect all the money you have,’ Leonard Bailey had said. ‘And I shall tell you the price. If there is one.’
Chapter 4
Mort conspirée viendra en plein effet
Charge donnée et voyage de mort
Eleu, crée, receu, par siens deffait,
Sang d’innocence devant soy par remort.
Painted, portly, bellicose as puffins in ungainly flight from their feeding-ground, the Court rose from Paris and settled, pecking, in a fresh set of burrows at Fontainebleau.
Built to rival the gilded palace of Nero, the blue-roofed château of Gilles le Breton lay in its park like a scarab, encircling harmonious courtyards fit for the muster of armies, and enclosed all about by the noble forest teeming with game which had first determined