Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [55]
After that, it would have been foolish to stay. One of the five men began to stroll forward, and was overtaken by another. In a moment, all five were running headlong for the parapet, where the smoky light of a torch flared on the jewelled points and rich doublet of M. le comte de Sevigny, encasing a very dead body already dangling half over the handrail. Boots and laces and buttons were already torn off in ten grasping handfuls before the first of the five men realized that the body was not that of M. de Sevigny. And when, whirling round, they thought to dash back the way they had come, the two people they sought were already running, softly and fast for the bridgend.
Because Lymond was steering his wife by the arm, they both saw the obstacle in their path just before they cannoned into it. It was large and lukewarm and soft. Fending herself off, Philippa’s hand pressed against buckles and leather and then, stumbling, she recognized something else—the unyielding steel of plate armour.
A horse and rider, both dead. With others, she suspected, lying beyond them. Lymond’s voice said, ‘Run to the end of the bridge, turn right, and hide yourself in the porch of the Customars’ house.’
As a madman obeys a madman, and a drunkard a drunkard. Asking no questions, she did as he told her.
So their escort had been waylaid after all. No quartet of men at arms had arrived back at the Hôtel Schiatti or at Lymond’s lodging: no one even knew that she and Lymond had left Jerott and Marthe. Instead, their attackers were more numerous and better organized than anyone had expected. They could cordon off the bridge on the chance that the Captain-General had escaped from the quayside. It was equally possible that the roads to Lymond’s destination and her own on this side of the river were watched.
Hence her instructions. Instead of running on she turned right, along the rue de la Pescherie as far as the church of St Eloi. Then facing uphill and away from the river, she turned round the back of the church and into the tall, jutting porch of the Custom-house. Inside, the studded door with its wrought iron hinges was firmly locked, and the windows were dark.
Lymond had not told her to knock. And indeed, the noise would bring their assailants sooner, in all likelihood, than the customars. She waited therefore, breathing hard, with sweat drops, erratic as mice, straying over her neck and her temples, and listened for the footsteps which meant Lymond was coming.
She never did hear them. Instead there struck on her eardrums a sonorous sound, hardly deadened by fog, of another calibre altogether. The alarm bell on the bridge had been set swinging.
For perhaps eight strokes it rang deeply and loudly. Then, shaking lightly, it came to a halt, revealing a ground-bass of excited men shouting.
Lymond, in his shirt-sleeves, shot into her hiding-place breathlessly. ‘They’ve cut him down. Hell.’ He listened. ‘I was afraid they’d seen us. The fog is going. This way. Traboules, my knife-grinding Philippa. With your invention and mine, it will really go hard if we can’t lose them.… Wake up, you bastards!’
She could hear running feet now, as he had done. But even so, he stopped in his stride and scooping up first one stone and then another, hurled them with a vicious crash straight through the Customars’ windows. Then, catching up, he caught Philippa under the arm and plunged through and under the first of the rows of tall houses which climbed the steep hillside in front of them.
Fear had gone. He had touched her. He had admitted her to the sexless friendship she had asked of him. She had been treated at last as a partner and adult. She was free, as he had said, to join her invention to his; to expect and give co-operation without fear