Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [291]
She had remembered, scanning his charts, what Chancellor had told her about map-making and the arts of navigation, and what she had learned since from Nicolas de Nicolay in Paris. Using his telescope, she learned her way again about the night sky and began to see work they might do together, for they had both travelled far, and had learning enough to apply what they had discovered. A friend of his, a mathematician visiting Blois, was invited with her consent to spend an afternoon with them. This, the opening of the first door upon the outside world was a milestone: as unlike as possible to the paralysis of those two untimely visits, from Strozzi and from Adam Blacklock, when the whole patient fabric of reason and recovery had been upheld by Francis alone, with the willpower which had carried them through these two months.
A willpower exerted now to such prodigal purpose that he could set aside, as an unwanted luxury, the sickness of headaches and blindness, both of which had gone as if they had never existed.
To riding, now that she was recovered, had been added tennis and jeu de paume and pall mall and other sports. Another friend came: a scholar from Strasbourg University; and she paid her first visits to Blois, and then, one day, to the Abbess at la Guiche. And to Willie Grey, who knew, inevitably, the gossip from Paris; who knew that she had flouted Austin and that there was now little hope of the Sevigny money coming to save him. But who had been kind, in the way of a general who makes the best of a failure, and who perhaps was even relieved, a little, for Austin’s sake.
So today, in his prison at the top of the keep he welcomed them both, and was prepared to be won from the tale of his grievances.
He knew, as Philippa had hoped, all about Thionville. Charles de La Rochefoucauld had been there, and the wounded were already returning.
‘Glory and fruits of their labour stolen by fortune-hunting princes. That’s what d’Estrée said, they tell me, and he had reason. Allowed the fortress to prepare all its defences and then wasted eleven days’ ammunition making a breach too exposed to benefit them. You said it and I said it and we were right. It was a pioneers’ job and bloody work too, in the shortest nights of the year, however many covering cannon they had. They dug trenches for over three thousand feet, I was told, before they got close enough to take the tower, and the Duke de Guise sent to tell de Vieilleville not to let the town surrender until he and his courtiers had a chance to get there and witness it. That doesn’t go down well. He should have slept in the trenches, like Strozzi and Montluc. If he’d let Strozzi get on with his work, he’d be there today.’
‘How?’ asked Philippa. It was cooler within the stone walls than outside, although she could see two of Grey’s men on the roof below, taking the air on the battlements. Harry Palmer’s wound, they said, had become serious.
‘Apparently he crossed the river to change his shirt in his tents, and de Guise insisted on his staying the night there instead of the trenches. He didn’t want to. Had a premonition, he said, that something was going to happen. He stayed, and was reconnoitring culverin sites the next morning when the hackbut shot took him above the heart from five hundred paces. So they say.’
Lymond said, ‘Why in God’s name …?’ and breaking off, shrugged.
‘Didn’t he wear a breastplate? He was just putting it on. But not in God’s name. That gentleman,’ Lord Grey said without especial rancour, ‘was a damned irreligious Italian, although he was reared for the Church. Forced de Vieilleville to retire with the colic, I’m told, the night before he was killed, by promoting a mischievous discussion on what he thought God did before the Creation. De Vieilleville swore he’d never meet him again, and the siege would make an end of him. Which it did, of course.’
‘Scusandosi, dicendo, io nol’ conosco. I don’t need to ask,’ Lymond said, ‘if he died recanting?’
‘You don’t,’ said Lord Grey grimly. ‘ “I renounce God; my hour is over,” he said. And when they