Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [283]
The Commissioners for Scotland endeavoured to preserve a unified front behind which, from their various religious convictions, they viewed the passage of events with some little alarm. The presence of the English fleet in the Narrow Seas still compelled them, supposedly, to remain in Paris. The real reasons on both sides were a matter of opinion. If they stayed, they could bring home the terms of the peace or the outcome of the war. They could watch and judge further the honesty or dishonesty of France towards Scotland, as already betrayed by Queen Mary. And, there was no doubt that, by accepting the King’s pressing invitation to linger, they were denying the Queen Dowager of Scotland the company of some of her strongest Reformers.
Visiting Lords Seton and Allendale with some frequency, John Elder now knew very well which were the Calvinists and had heard, with admiration, of the fine reception given them by Lord Culter’s younger brother. In a comradely and even, one might say, a Christian sense, Lord Culter had been a disappointment, and so had his mother. The Secretary obtained, from Austin Grey, an introduction to Jerott’s wife Marthe.
The meeting was not a success. Marthe, faced with a gentle denigration of Lord Culter for not acknowledging the less fortunate sprigs of his line, remarked merely, with boredom, that she didn’t know there were any such. On being reminded, apologetically, of the family resemblance, she merely remarked, irritably, that perhaps then Lord Culter was the bastard. Which, since Lord Culter had been born fully attested many years before anyone else, and the correct number of months after an equally fully attested wedding, was clearly prevarication.
‘I beg your pardon,’ John Elder had added. ‘I felt sure I had heard that M. de Sevigny looked upon you as his step-sister. Could I be mistaken?’
‘I don’t know,’ Marthe had said. ‘I suppose it depends on heredity. What sort of mistakes did your parents make?’
He thought of a very good answer in bed that night as he pulled his cap on.
*
In the continuing absence of Madame Roset, the agent who concerned himself with the Hôtel des Sphères instructed the servants to place neatly within a campaign chest all the money, clothes and other effects of the late Master Bailey, and hand them to the authorities for transmission to England by the first person of that nationality to leave the country. Since the two nations were still officially at war and the traffic was not therefore dense, the chest remained in a bureau in Paris, with a label on it.
A recalcitrant cellar door, forced in the same house by a maidservant, proved to have stacked up behind it four locked boxes clearly containing money. The agent, applied to, took charge of them for his principal.
Sybilla sent for Adam Blacklock and said, ‘I’ve had a letter from Philippa’s mother. I can’t answer it.’
‘I know. So have I,’ Adam said. Then as Sybilla added nothing, he said, ‘They don’t want anyone. I wrote to Applegarth and I wrote to Archie, and they don’t answer. I could wring Archie’s neck.… Nothing happened, did it, about that demonstration?’
‘No,’ Sybilla said wearily. ‘It was not very wise of them to go. But no one seems to have noticed. Why should Archie make you think of that?’
There was no point in lying. ‘It was Archie who told me that Lord Culter was a Calvinist,’ Adam said. ‘Francis found out at Dieppe. You may not have noticed, but all the time you have been here, we have been keeping the Protestant Commissioners so far as possible out of trouble. Only the other night they escaped us. Without Francis at Court, we don’t have the warning we usually get.’
‘It seems hardly fair,’ Sybilla said, ‘that you should have had to assume the burden of caring for the Culter family.’ Then she said, as if quite against her will, ‘I am so afraid. They don’t speak, he said.’
‘You want me to go,’ Adam said. ‘But, you know, Francis has always been his