Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [3]
‘Soyez hardis, en joye mis,
Chascun s’asaisonne,
La fleur de lys,
Fleur de hault pris
Y est en personne.
Suivez Francoys …’
He broke off, grinning, to a chorus of drunken hissing and catcalls.
Follow Francis. Austin Grey stared at the Italian cocker and the cocker, grinning, addressed him in perfect English. ‘Go and hear the singers, Lord Allendale. That is where you will find him.’
*
He went and heard the singers: four young men in breech hose and buff jerkins led by solid Hunno, the bass: Andreas, the lank, pale-headed Saxon tenor, Oswald of Basle, baritone, brown, energetic and cheerful; and auburn-haired Hilary from the eastern cantons whose ragged moustache and bleeding cheek told of the violent and continuing battle to defend his virility. From behind the moustache emerged the delicious head-voice of a eunuch, while the three others chanted, with the force and precision of wire-weavers:
La plus belle de la ville, c’est moy
La plus belle de la ville, c’est moy
Non est
Sy est
Non est
Sy est
Non est, non est, je vous jure ma foy
Non est, non est, je vous jure ma foy …
Then someone shouted a pleasantry and the next moment Hilary had leaped straight into the thick of the crowd, followed protesting by his three colleagues striving to restrain him. Deafened and buffeted, Austin was standing, searching in vain for his quarry, when Francis Crawford made himself known, as a quick, amused voice in the mêlée. ‘Faith has a fair name, but falsheid faris bettir. In your room, after the cockfight.’
But when Grey twisted round, there was no one behind him that he recognized.
*
He would have gone to his room then and there, but the Piedmontese cocker waylaid him. ‘You heard him? Till then, you’re to stay in the courtyard.’
‘Who are you?’ said Austin Grey.
He had wound a filthy scarf round the torn mouth, but you could tell the dark face was grinning. ‘A friend. Did you not see who he was?’
‘He spoke from behind. No,’ said Austin.
‘The counter-tenor. There he is, at the cock platform. Go and watch. But do not speak to him,’ said the cocker; and grinning, made off through the crowd.
Austin gazed at his back. Then he forced his way with extreme firmness to the mat-covered platform of trestles.
Les Amis de Rabelais were there, vociferously proclaiming their bets from the opposite side of the platform. And there, visibly battered, his fists full of livres and sols and deniers, was Hilary of the tousled red hair, bouncing with glee like a clown on a clock spring.
It couldn’t be. This half-fledged, ebullient Graindor could never be the man who controlled armies in Russia; whose skill in war was so celebrated that Lord Grey was prepared to take any risk to help him leave France; and even to keep him out of the hands of his allies.
And yet … Take away the moustache, and the hair, and you had a man nearer thirty than twenty; whose eyes had seen more than the frets of a lute and the inside of a medical college, and who had learned lessons other than his praxis and chirugia and theoria.
It was Francis Crawford of Lymond. He drummed his fists on the ledge, and talked and quarrelled and shrieked with his friends, casting no single glance in Austin’s direction. But Austin, all through the fight, watched him silently.
It was not, he thought, acting. Most men of war delighted in cock fighting. Socrates had drawn from it an example of valour; the sons of the Emperor Severus had been brought to watch it daily before being sent to reduce England. And Themistocles had braced his army to vanquish the Persians with the same analogy: Behold: these do not fight for their household gods, for the monuments of their ancestors, for glory, for liberty or the safety of their children; but only because the one will not give way to the other. In Christian lands, to give one’s cocks strength, one fed them filched bread from the altar-table.
Austin continued to watch. The docked birds dashed to each other and remained beak to beak,