Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [82]
The angelic Marthe, of course, the viper-tongued glorious step-sister, didn’t want M. le comte to remarry. Neither did the little man with the broken nose, Archie Abernethy.
Danny Hislop was not entirely at ease about Archie. Danny remembered a dark night at Lyon, and Archie arriving at the Hôtel de Gouvernement in the small hours of the morning with the printer Macé Bonhomme. They had brought Lymond home, impossibly drunk, and with a clean contusion at the back of his head in which no one appeared to be interested. Mr Crawford, said Archie, had now and then lost his footing.
The type of man who could fool an elephant was unlikely to have the same triumph with Daniel Hislop. It seemed odd to Danny that a menagerie trainer should also dabble in soldiering. Seven years ago, they said, Archie had attached himself to Lymond in Rouen, and had divided his time ever since between the Somerville girl and his lordship.
Jerott, when applied to for enlightenment, merely said irritably that he supposed Archie had required a new owner. Adam, when asked the same question in Lyon, had seemed to view the little man as an ancient retainer. It would be interesting to see what skill, if any, he had in the battlefield.
After Russia, campaigning in France, would be like conducting a war in a chicken-dish. Danny looked forward to demonstrating to the moody Mr Blyth what he had missed by his absence from Russia. He regretted that Adam, anchored at Lyon awaiting the Duke de Guise’s arrival, could not be here, equally blessed, to support him. If, as they set off for camp, he noticed Archie Abernethy’s knowing black eyes upon him, Danny Hislop paid no attention.
The Duke de Nevers was in the château of Compiègne; the only senior field commander left when the boiling wrack of Saint-Quentin had seeped away, and with him was the veteran de Thermes from Piedmont, who had left Paris only a day or two ahead of M. de Sevigny, bearing with him the agreed plan of strategy.
To M. de Thermes, the plan was his brain-child, and to carry it out thus no hardship. The Duke de Nevers, after four weeks of complying with a stream of equally ingenious projects, was only too pleased to have Lymond in person to help him.
When angling for power in France, tact was necessary. Tact and unremitting success in battle, in bed and in throneroom; with no wake of disgruntled princes to pacify. So far, it seemed to Danny, Lymond’s grasp of these principles seemed exemplary.
There followed a week during which he was unable to feel patronizing any longer, or even to watch Archie Abernethy, for the simple reason that he was being run into the ground with hard labour. Eighteen thousand troops were then quartered between Compiègne and the old royal palace at Verbene, and ten thousand more arrivals were imminent.
There were quarters, and food, and weapons and even money waiting for them all, just as there were provisions and extra men, when they were needed, for all the hard-held towns and fortresses still in French hands around them. Bands of horses went out daily to Corbie and Péronne and Amiens and Abbeville, taking what was required and bringing back information. Other bands departed with special orders. They looked for and routed the foraging parties sent out by the Spaniards whose vast army hovered so near on the frontiers. They harried and hindered the Spanish forces attempting to rebuild and fortify the fortress towns which marked the watershed of the Spanish advance into Picardy: Saint-Quentin, Noyon, Le Catelet, and even Ham itself, where King Philip sat, closeted with his secretaries, his interpreters and his commanders in the citadel.
The object, as Lymond had made it properly clear before ever he arrived in Compiègne, was not to lure the Spanish army out to fight. It was to stand solidly across its path and harass it through the worsening weather of autumn until fretful, unpaid, disease-ridden and weary, the Duke of Savoy’s quarrelling army of Germans and