Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
He had no idea—why should he?—that the comte de Sevigny was Richard Crawford’s younger brother. It was left to Alec Ross to interrupt, pallid with distress. ‘I have to tell you, my lord, that it was a terrible shock to us all. The Lyon and all the Commission would want me to tell you. Two shiploads drowned, and they can’t even name all the dead.’
The deferential circle in the courtyard moved closer. Under the watching windows Lymond said, ‘How many men did they rescue?’
‘None, my lord count,’ said the herald. ‘Aside from the two earls and the Bishop of Orkney. Your lordship realizes that none of the households could swim. It was a fishing boat coming by later that found the three, supporting the lady.’
The vice of pride serves its purpose at times. So, after two heartbeats, Lymond said, ‘The news which reached Paris was incomplete. Was the Dowager Lady Culter among the survivors?’
‘Why. I beg your … My lord … You didn’t know?’ said Alec Ross. ‘My lord count, yes. She’s not strong; she’s resting, but she’s in the house there now. I thought you knew!’ said Ross Herald, horror in his worthy face.
‘No. But perhaps then, I might be allowed to visit her,’ said the comte de Sevigny. ‘I am, as you may know, Francis Crawford.’
A scattered cheer rose from the courtyard, as the most ornamental of the victors of Calais walked into the house of Jean Ango. For once he did not respond, although he heard it.
What forces he might still possess he must harbour for another purpose. Of the three children Sybilla had reared, he was the only one living. This time, whatever one’s instincts might be, one did not turn on one’s heel and walk past her.
*
Put him, blindfold, into a closed room anywhere in the world, and he could tell if Sybilla was with him. It had to do, perhaps, with her scent. To him, it was more: a breath from the sweetness and peace of his childhood; a sense of light; of understanding; of loving amusement; an air from the flower-filled walls of pairidza.
Nothing, even now, took from him that first moment as he stood on her threshold. Until the second moment came, and with it his years and his memory. He closed the door, and then turned calmly and looked for her.
He had thought to find her shrouded in shawls, in a chair or in bed, and fortified by companions and serving women. Instead she was alone, playing idly with cards against the grey wintry light from the windows. A charcoal brazier glowed on the polished wood of the floor, and candles bloomed by the warm woollen hangings and the wainscoting, lighting the studs on the coffers and chairs, the toolings of books, the spotless stiffened veil on Sybilla’s snow-fair hair, and her fine skin, and the rings on the small hands touching the cards. Then she looked up, and waited.
Which was unfair. In the last five years they had met only once, and then not to speak to one another. And so little had changed: the delicate face, the gentian blue eyes were as he remembered them. Her gaze on him held nothing but repose. But then, he had asked to be received. She had known for a few moments that he was coming, and from her window had perhaps even seen him arrive. His skin and hair were damp from the swift grooming he had contrived for himself, but he could do nothing about the marks of sleeplessness. Yet she showed no surprise.
Then he saw the mourning-clothes and remembered, stricken, what the sight of her, after so very long, had thrust from his mind. He said, without kneeling, without approaching; discarding every preliminary, ‘I have heard what happened. I am extremely sorry. If you tell me how I may help in Richard’s place, I shall do what I can.’
At the sound of his voice, her hand moved; but otherwise there was no change in her composure. He had said to Philippa that he did not foresee any unpleasantness, and of course this was true.
The candles shimmered. Sybilla laid down her cards and said, ‘You look cold. There is a chair by the brazier, if you have time to sit.’ And when he had done so, she said, ‘You can’t have wanted to come. I am grateful that you did. You have heard then.… Do you know how many died?’
Her voice was quieter than he had expected, but quite even. And, like his, eschewing all that was personal. She had not even addressed him by name. He said, ‘I know only that Richard was drowned. And the servants who could not swim.’
Sybilla said, ‘We lost twenty-five men and women from Midculter. I think you knew them all. They were buried at Boulogne. I brought back such relics as were washed ashore, to give to their families. You could help with that, if you mean what you say.’
‘I mean what I say,’ he said steadily. She had taken the cards again, and was shuffling them with great deliberation. He released his breath and added, ‘Then you have written to Midculter?’
‘Yes,’ said Sybilla. The candlelight, flaring, caught a sudden spark in her eyes which were bright, he now saw, with unreleased tears. She said, in the same low, even voice, ‘Is there anything I should add?’
He rose abruptly and walked to a sturdy hutch-table by the wall, with her eternal sewing ranged neatly upon it, with her spectacles. Beside it, also familiar, was a copper kettle he recalled from Midculter. He turned, his hand on the wood, and said, ‘I think you know I have no wish to come back to Scotland. I must stay, in any case, until after the royal wedding: the Legate is to dissolve my own marriage. After that, I am free. What I want you to tell me … honestly … is this: am I needed at Midculter?’
‘Honestly?’ she repeated; and though her tears did not fall, her soft lips twisted a little in derision, or perhaps in self-derision. Then seeing, no doubt, the look on his face she said quietly, ‘That is a question Richard’s wife could answer better than I can.’
Their words moved from difficulty to difficulty, as if clearing thorns in an overgrown garden. He kept, among everything else, ludicrously forgetting to breathe. He said, ‘Then I shall ask Mariotta. I owe the Culter family a debt.’
And that was too near the bone: he saw her hands, lightly clasped now, whiten to bloodlessness on the table. Then she said, ‘You must know that if you do, Mariotta will summon you for my sake, as well as her own. How then will you reach a decision?’
Behind the careful words lay the question to which he must, for his own sake, find an answer. He also required, but did not intend, to sit down again. The pause which developed was therefore extended by a number of factors and ended by Lymond himself saying, ‘It will depend, I suppose, on the condition in which I find both Midculter and Scotland. I had hoped to go back to Russia.’
Upon which, unexpectedly, Sybilla said, ‘Perhaps I deserve no candid answers, but I should like to have one. Would you still go back to Russia if Kiaya Khátún were not there?’
The elegant, desiccated body of a gazelle hound for some reason came into his mind. He had forgotten, even, that she would know of Güzel’s existence. ‘Yes. I should still go back,’ he said.
There were no tears in her eyes now but he could see, his own eyes grown used to the light, the fine seams of age beneath her lashes and on her brow and by the soft corners of her mouth. She had always been a woman of ravishing prettiness. ‘And,’ she said, ‘if I were not there, would you go back to Midculter?’
The room became a mosaic; then a dazzlement of grained light and shade, like water-run taffeta. He bore down hard on the hutch table. It was a perfectly logical question. After a considerable time he said, ‘It would make no difference.’
‘You still would not come back?’ Sybilla said. Her voice was no longer quite so low. ‘Can you tell me why? If Mariotta needed you, you would return. But not if I were dead or exiled?’
She was the only person … almost the only person who could manipulate him like this. He said, ‘You can’t imagine I … wish for your death. Or your exile. Midculter is your home. Not mine.’
Sybilla said, ‘I didn’t ask for an emotive answer. You can’t imagine, either, that I shall live for ever. What then could keep you away? There can be no personal reasons, except vanity. Or does Russia mean more to you?’
‘No,’ he said.
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He hesitated; then obeyed her. It was closer than he had yet approached her. And it brought the grey daylight full on his own face. The wind drove against the thick panes. On the other side of the room, the door-latch snapped suddenly open.
Sybilla said, ‘Midculter is mine. But Scotland is yours, and you are needed there. I am prepared to go into exile if you will come back. Whether Mariotta sends for you or not.’
Once, at Midculter, a kitchen-girl had stolen some salt; and walking out when questions were asked, had picked up the cropping shears and plunged the point from one side of her neck to the other. He looked down at the cards on the table and in time, they became clear, and he could see the game she had been playing. It had not, he saw, been a very coherent one.
To leave Midculter, for her, meant leaving grandchildren and friends, servants, dependants; her home and possessions upon which she had lavished such care; the interlocking circles, social, political, scholarly, in which she had passed all her life; the soil of Scotland itself, from which she drew all her worldly and spiritual nourishment.
He said, his voice sounding very strange, ‘It would be a sacrifice to no purpose. No one in your circle would let you go, or fail to resent me if I came in your place.’
A line had come between her thin brows; of pain, or of severity. ‘If I choose to live in France,’ Sybilla said, ‘I wonder who could prevent me? As for the rest, you have made your way against worse opposition than a few friends of the Culter family.’ She, too, could place her darts.
He shook his head, very slightly because it was painful, and also because he wished to say and do nothing vehement. ‘There are other reasons. I meant what I said. Your presence or absence makes little difference. You must believe that—except for Mariotta and Midculter—I do not mean to come back.’
Little difference. Not no difference. He saw her note the change of words, the thin, elegant bones sharpening a little. But her eyes searched his, and this time did not let them go. She said, ‘If that is so, can you bring yourself to tell me your reasons? Your other reasons? If I were not there, what could still stand between you and Scotland?’
She had offered him the remaining years of her life. In return he owed her nothing but, perhaps, an act of generosity. A glimpse, if nothing more, of the other, private motives behind his refusal. She read his face, who knew him better than anyone and rose, a little colour tingeing her cheeks; and he looked across the table, and drew breath to answer her.
A man’s voice, coldly deliberate, said from the door, ‘My sword and my right arm will keep him from Scotland. And both, if need be, will preserve you from leaving it. What ill luck, brother. If I hadn’t left table early, you would have had Midculter, wouldn’t you?’
The cards showered from the table. ‘God in heaven … Richard!’ said Sybilla Crawford; and stood there, blanched, in her mourning weeds.
For the man in the doorway was indeed the image, older, a little heavier, a little greyer than one had last seen him, of the son she had lost; of the older brother who had drowned at Boulogne. But still with the pleasant grey eyes and broad, big-boned face, little lined; and the fine brown hair, straight and thick and easily displaced, as now, when something had moved him.
It was Richard, alive. The guiding hand at one’s pony; the voice at one’s porridge bowl; the splendid athlete one watched from one’s books in the cold tower window, while outside in the sunshine he rode at the ring, threw his spears, matched his sword with the master-at-arms. The brother who had cared for him, a grown man in illness, and defended him against calumny, and who at length, heartbroken at his defection, had turned his back on him a year ago in Scotland.
Richard, alive. Francis Crawford drew a long, long breath and then stopped it, as the oddity of Sybilla’s cry came to him.
‘God in heaven … Richard,’ she had said. Not in gladness, or amazement. But in anger.
He turned.
If she had been white before, now she was the colour of ashes. He cried out, ‘Oh, can you not stop? Can you not stop even now?’ He halted. And then, his voice still not his own, he said, ‘You let me think he was dead.’
Behind him, Richard said, ‘You found out she was alone. That was clever. And still infirm, after the shipwreck.’
His voice was closer. Neither Lymond nor Sybilla looked at him. Lymond said, ‘You knew Richard would never let you leave Scotland. You did all that, in order to learn …’
‘I am paying my price now, don’t you think?’ Sybilla said very quietly.
He had even forgotten Richard, until at that moment a hand gripped his arm and he was jerked painfully back from the table. ‘Will you persecute her yet, in front of me?’ his brother said. ‘Stand there. I have something to say to you.’
Then Sybilla turned to him at last and said, her voice very tired, ‘He thought you were drowned. He came to offer his help.’
‘He lost no time,’ Richard said. ‘The King’s representatives, I was told, would not arrive until Sunday. He lost no time in making sure of Midculter and even, I hear, of Mariotta.’
‘You misheard,’ Sybilla said. ‘Francis merely undertook to return to Scotland should Mariotta require him.’
Now, when delicacy was no longer profitable, she could use his name. The pain beating in his brows was beyond belief. He wanted only to go while he was still master of himself; before this primitive desire to devastate them both should overpower him. He took a breath.
‘It has all been a misunderstanding. You will allow me to take my leave. I shall see you on Sunday,’ he said. He had ridden through the night, without rest and without sleep, for this. It ought, surely, to give someone a moment of wry amusement. He understood—but then he had always understood—how Richard had felt at Philorth.
Richard said, ‘But you will be back, before Sunday. It took you how long … ten minutes? to persuade Sybilla to hand you Midculter and leave Scotland. What will you not achieve next time? You should be relieved. A lifetime of desertion, and you are still her favourite son.’
‘Be quiet, both of you,’ Sybilla said. It was the tone with which she had quelled them, squabbling, over the years and which even now could make Richard hesitate, and look at her, and fall silent. She said, ‘The fault is mine. I allowed Francis to continue to think you were dead. And I offered to leave Scotland, if he would come home again. If your eavesdropping allowed it, you must have heard him refuse me.’
Neither son had ever blasphemed in her presence before. But Lymond did so now, and caused her to break off abruptly as Richard said, ‘I don’t believe you. You knew I was alive. Why should you suggest exiling yourself?’
‘To see what I would say,’ Lymond said and smiling, destroyed all his own controls as they looked at him. ‘She had no intention of going. But if you hadn’t come in, who knows what she would have learned? Who knows what I should have learned? There is no end, is there,’ he said to Sybilla, ‘to the dues you demand from your children?’
‘You have all the weapons,’ Sybilla said. Her voice, even yet, was quite steady. But then, she had been prepared for this also.
‘You don’t know what weapons I have,’ he said teasingly. ‘What other news is there, that might give you a moment’s amusement? Renée Jourda is dead; killed, I fear, because I went to see her. Philippa has paid a call at la Guiche and found it profitable, although she is not as practised as I am in guesswork. Turning to Isabelle Roset——’
He was interrupted by Richard, not by Sybilla. ‘You’ve kept Philippa here! She wrote Kate that she was leaving. What in hell are you doing? You’ve held that child for four years to this marriage!’
‘Then congratulate me,’ Lymond said. ‘I haven’t consummated it yet
‘And that is bombast,’ said Sybilla sharply. ‘Richard, pay no attention. She will be free after April. Then she can marry young Austin Grey.’
‘Do you think,’ said Lymond, ‘the youthful Mr Grey can consummate it? Or will her new passion for me perhaps flummox him? How nice to be married with … how many children, Richard? You don’t have quite this problem. You don’t have any problems really, do you, sitting there in your lordship pontificating? It seems to be beyond you even to get yourself decently drowned. What did it cost to get Alec Ross to indicate your demise? Or no: that was Sybilla’s doing.’
‘Her new passion!’ Sybilla said with great suddenness. ‘Be quiet and tell me. Has Philippa become in some way attached to you?’
He raised his eyebrows at her. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Naturally, I am doing my best to discourage her.’ He had not meant to go so far. Kate, as well as Sybilla, would carry the scar of this news. He held her eyes and said clearly, ‘You have a great deal to be responsible for.’
‘She gave you birth,’ Richard said. ‘That was her first mistake. The next was to spoil you. So that everything you want, you must have immediately.’
‘I’m glad you noticed that,’ Lymond said. Tears, unexpectedly, sprang to Sybilla’s eyes but that, he thought, was shock. She had never ceased to command with her attitude.
She said sharply, ‘You are grown men, and have commanded men. Childish rivalry does you no credit. Francis is resentful because I chose a painful method of discovering his intentions. I wished to know them for his own good. If he found this intolerable, I can only apologize.’
It sounded well. It sounded rational, even, if you were not Francis Crawford. Put him, blindfold, in a closed room anywhere in the world …