Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [46]
For ever be destroyde
Theyr name outblotted in the age
That after shall succede …’
They relaxed. ‘What is it?’ said Marthe impatiently.
‘A record of death,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘The death of an unbaptized male child in Lyon: parents unspecified; date of death November 20th, 1526. Signed by a physician with an unreadable signature. Witnessed by the same priest who attended my mother and who, as we know, is dead also.’
There was a pause. Then Philippa said, ‘Did the child have a name?’ He was smiling.
‘Yes,’ he said; and tossed the torn sheet in her lap. ‘Can’t you guess? It was called Francis Crawford.
‘I do not exist. What you have in your hand is my death certificate.’
Chapter 6
La splendeur claire à pucelle joyeuse
Ne luira plus, longtemps sera sans sel
Avec marchands, ruffiens, loups odieuse
Tous pesle-mesle monstre universel.
When they left the Hôtel Gaultier it was after midnight, and there was heavy mist like a sleeve through the courtyard.
The fog altered their plans. Instead of returning as they had come, Lymond dismissed the four men at arms and, shrouded in hooded cloaks lent them by Marthe, he and Philippa set out on foot, the quiet way.
Jerott had been asleep. Marthe, half-heartedly, had suggested they stay until morning. Stupid with overstrain, Philippa had listened gratefully to Lymond pointing out with acerbity that some minor affairs might require his attention.
The war was his business and this, for him, had been an interlude. She admired his detachment, and also his hardihood. Untrained by the Russian steppes, she was lured by self-interest only out into that dank sticky blackness. She wanted her bed. And she could not face the prospect of the cold ashes, the wrinkled mattress, the wounding brilliance of any haven Marthe might offer her.
The appalling news of those last moments in the Dame de Doubtance’s room showed no signs of weighing on her companion. She wished she could feel the same, with all her plans cut from under her feet. How did one discover who Lymond was, if he was not Francis Crawford? Whom had Sybilla substituted for the dead son she had borne, whose father was not Gavin, her husband? An unknown infant, whose full sister happened to be Marthe? Or was the other tale one had heard partly true: had Gavin, in turn, fathered children on some woman in France, and had he compelled Sybilla to accept one of these, and pass him off as her own?
Grasping Lymond’s cloak, she negotiated the cobbles, still thinking. They were not to speak, he had told her.
He had also given her, handsomely cased in jewelled leather, his own poniard to strap at her girdle.
The fog was so thick that the darkness had curdled to lead-colour, smudged here and there by a whorl of vapour with a seed of shrunk light in its middle. But for that, and the emanations of fish and cooking, of oil and urine and horses, they might have been ranging an unsanded tiltyard instead of this long, narrow street of tall houses. There seemed to be no one about, but she knew, without being told, that Lymond’s right hand rested on the hilt of his sword, while his left kept it still in the scabbard. Their spurs removed, his soft boots made no more sound on the cobbles than her slippers, through which every dropped nail and wood-shard and rope-end forced its impression.
The mouth of the rue Chalamon appeared suddenly ahead on her left, defined by the three rows of lit windows which bridged it; and then faded in a freakish swirl of the fog. They were half-way to the bridge. Then they had to cross it, and climb up the network of streets to the Hôtel Schiatti. Philippa wished she had protested more vigorously against this odd idea that the horses should go back without them. Because Lymond was the Voevoda of all Russia and a friend of her mother’s, it did not mean that he had more common sense than a Somerville of Flaw Valleys.
She wondered, plodding along, how far she was right in trusting Marthe with the key as she had done. There were several likely locksmiths in Lyon. And if nothing came of that,