Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [83]
For a week, Danny was out every night, sometimes with a company of Germans; sometimes with Swiss. Jerott was allotted longer expeditions: at one point he worked out of Amiens with de Lansac for almost two days, and got back to Compiègne with a graze from a hackbut ball that killed his horse under him. He was thankful to find that Lymond was off with a party of German pioneers, doing something inexplicable with a couple of carts spread with tarpaulins.
Jerott had his scratch dressed, slept for six hours, woke, ate and discovered that Lymond had returned and left again for Péronne in the interval, leaving fresh instructions for himself and Danny. A quarrel about precedence had broken out among the German officers and he marched in and settled it, meeting Danny on his way out to collect a new gelding. He had not lost the knack of command, he was pleased to discover.
Danny, who looked hollow-eyed, said, ‘Have you heard? He’s made the wells of Le Catelet undrinkable. Originality at any price. The Swiss, in their Swiss way, say he knows how to take Dame Fortune by the hair. The Germans, in their German way, say if he wants to lead them again, he will have to bloody well increase their stipend. You know he had all the grain fields laid waste but kept the vines standing to gripe all the Spaniards? The rotten bastard. If I were St Michael I’d disown him.’
Jerott, who was saddling his horse, did not bother to look up at the limpid eyes and teased sandy hair, waning from the baby-pink brow. He was beginning to get the measure of Danny. He said, ‘Where are you going?’
‘To take some culverin this side of Noyon, and then fall into bed for a lengthy four-minute sleep. I wish I’d stayed in Lyon. I wager Archie wishes he’d stayed in Lyon.’
Jerott mounted. ‘We all get out of condition at times,’ he said; and moved off at a brisk gait to where his troop of soldiers was waiting. Danny, gazing after him critically, was aware of a twinge of approval. He hoped that nothing about him revealed it.
At the end of the week, a courier from St Germain brought the daily mail from the King, and among it, a handwritten letter from Henri. In it, he commanded the comte de Sevigny, in mock severe terms, to leave disporting himself in the field and return to his master at Poissy, where on Wednesday, September 29th, his Majesty would give the annual banquet for the chevaliers of the Order of St Michael. M. de Thermes, if his business were done, was to return with him.
‘Not us?’ said Danny hopefully, when summoned for instruction.
‘Not you,’ said Lymond. ‘Or Jerott or Archie. You would drink your soup with your gloves on.’ The cracking pace of the week, with its sharp fighting and hard riding and bold exercise of authority suited him, if no one else, as the crisis in Paris had also done. But he was wrong in one respect: Archie did not stay in Compiègne but appeared at his side, without comment, on the far side of Creil. Challenged, he merely opened his black eyes and said that if Mr Crawford was going to play at being a knight, then Mr Crawford would need a squire to hold his petticoats up for him.
If he counted on the presence of thirty men at arms around him to preserve him from immediate castigation, he was, as it turned out, correct. He was still with the newest chevalier of the Order of St Michael when, dressed in white with the one-armed silver cloak and the heavy golden collar of shells, he worshipped with his brethren by the broken marble baptismal font of St Louis in the church of Notre Dame de Poissy, and then walked in procession the short distance to the royal monastery behind the Usher, the Herald, the Clerk, the Master of Ceremonies and the Chancellor of the Order, there to feast under the handsome beams of the Dominicans in the presence of the King, glimmering in pearls and velvet and satin. The next morning, instead of the quick departure he had counted on, the comte de Sevigny, with Archie still in attendance, accompanied the King of France on the four-mile ride from Poissy