Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [94]
‘We’re not going to Compiègne,’ Lymond said. ‘We’re going to spend the night at Saint-Cloud. The house is empty, but we have royal permission to stay there. If you don’t like it, you can stay on and follow me later.’
‘And how,’ demanded Archie, ‘do you propose to get to Saint-Cloud? Sir?’
One of the servants, grinning where it wouldn’t show, left the room with his burden. Lymond said, ‘Stop making matters worse. There’s a wagon leaving for Paris which will drop us there. If you would help carry down the baggage I should have rather less explaining to do. Or maybe you aren’t feeling quite up to it.’
‘I’m not. And ye havena taken a civil farewell of Master Nostradamus,’ said Archie.
‘And I’m not going to,’ said Lymond.
There was a pregnant silence. Then Archie raised his voice. ‘Chops me!’ he said bitterly. ‘But ye’re a thrawn, bloody, rackle-tongued limmer. I’ll come with ye to Saint-Cloud. I’ll cut your meat at Compiègne. But there’s a limit. I tell you now, there’s a limit to what I’ll do for you.’
Chapter 5
Dans cité entrer exercit desniée
Duc entrera par persuasion.
It was, perhaps, a mark of Francis Crawford’s singular authority that he returned to Compiègne after five days’ absence to find his forces well quartered, in good heart and active in harassing the enemy. Nothing untoward indeed had happened, save that Jerott Blyth, returning from a brief Paris leave, had ordered the sommelier to give him the keys of the wine cellars, and had not left his room since he used them.
Danny Hislop, irritated and envious, had made a few attempts through the keyhole to bring him to his senses, aided latterly by Adam Blacklock, newly returned from his duties in Lyon. Neither of them was present when Lymond kicked the door down, although the roar of the preceding musket shot brought them to their feet. What happened after that was mainly inaudible but Archie, questioned afterwards, conjectured that Mr Blyth had lifted his hand to his lordship, and Mr Crawford had knocked him down and kept on knocking him down until Mr Blyth was so beside himself with rage that he was nearly sober. Then Mr Crawford had thrown a bucket of water over him and told him to sit down while he told him a few things the Order forgot to mention.
It was hard to believe that Archie had not actually been present at the interview, but had merely cleaned the room up afterwards, to save Mr Blyth from shaming his valet. In the event Jerott appeared at the supper table, rather shaky and yellow as a Portuguese Indian, and listened while Adam described the dying throes of the German threat to Lyon.
Rumour, which at first, naturally, had assumed Jerott’s wife to be faithless, had now produced a tale which, if you knew Jerott, had all the melancholy aura of accuracy. He had returned to Paris to find the Hôtel de Séjour filled, not with lovers but with poets, painters, sculptors and musicians and in their midst, impatient with the Philistine intrusion, his beautiful and intellectual wife Marthe.
She had not been interested in Jerott, and Jerott, one could tell, had been far from tolerant of the poets and the musicians and indeed, had probably tried to boot them over the threshold.
The person to leave, of course, had finally been none other than Jerott, who after fulfilling with joyless violence an expensive number of commercial transactions throughout the night had ridden straight back to Compiègne, with understandable consequences.
Among his colleagues Adam Blacklock, himself an artist, an aesthete and a bachelor, had not been over sympathetic. Danny, who had one or two small arrangements satisfactorily current himself, was reasonably tolerant. Lymond, whose own erratic history was all too well known, was not tolerant at all; partly perhaps because the lady concerned was his step-sister, and partly because, with fourteen thousand Swiss and German troops distributed between Compiègne and Verbene, he had little time to