Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett
‘After we left?’ Sybilla said quickly. ‘What?’
‘There are two versions,’ Danny said. He was enjoying himself. ‘One, from the servants, says that the young English prisoner went berserk in the middle of the night and having discovered the comte de Sevigny in bed with both his present and future wives at once, hauled him from between the sheets and attempted to throw him down the staircase. The two ladies ran away screaming and the Marquis of Allendale, having come off worst in the subsequent battle, is now in his priest’s hands, having been given up by his doctors.’
‘Mr Hislop?’ said Sybilla patiently. The attention of both women, he was pleased to note, was rigidly upon him, whatever they might choose to say.
‘The other version,’ he said regretfully, ‘belongs to Adam and Archie, who say that Philippa was in Lymond’s room for an hour, talking, a fact which did not escape his fiancée, with whom he had an assignation. Catherine, so it seems, had the good sense to retreat to her own room and has not been heard to refer to the incident subsequently. Austin, who also witnessed the whole thing, ill-advisedly tried to attack Francis and got, of course, what he asked for.
‘However that may be, Francis certainly didn’t appear until after the d’Albons had both left for home the next day, and Austin Grey is in bed with a badly broken arm. I rather think,’ Danny said, ‘that you should cease concerning yourselves too much with Mr Crawford’s marital problems. If he is going to take an active hand in them himself, then no gentle feminine influence is going to make itself felt in the general conflagration.’
‘What were they talking about?’ Marthe said.
It was so far from what he expected that he did not understand. ‘What?’ said Danny fluently.
‘What were Francis and Philippa talking about?’ she said again, abruptly. ‘Adam must have seen Philippa. Why was she there so late at night?’
‘I don’t know,’ Danny said. He hesitated, and then said, ‘She had been crying for a long time. Adam said her face was all swollen, but she said it was her own fault and nothing to do with Francis. And after that, she didn’t even seem to hear what he said, which was perhaps understandable after a drunken session with Francis on his way to someone else’s bedroom.’
There was a little silence. Then, ‘Did he go?’ said Sybilla softly.
‘Adam says no,’ said Danny, his confidence steadily dwindling. Sybilla did not look at him while he answered but at Marthe, who sat, her golden head high, sustaining the long, clear regard.
‘I see,’ Sybilla said. She rose, her gaze still on Marthe, who rose also, her eyes masked for the first time by their lids. Sybilla said, ‘It has been enough. I am going. When you have no one else to turn to, come to me.’
The lids lifted at that, to reveal blazing eyes. ‘To you?’ Marthe said. ‘I would sooner …’
‘Yes? What would you sooner do?’ Sybilla asked.
And as Marthe did not reply, Danny spoke, with less assurance than at any point in the preceding discussion. ‘And Jerott?’ he said.
Sybilla had begun to walk to the door. She stopped and turned; and when she spoke, it was to Marthe. ‘I shall tell Jerott,’ said the Dowager, ‘that it is better if you do not come together. He will find solace in war.’
‘And I?’ Marthe said.
‘It is for you to begin your studies afresh, although I am not sure of your present choice of tutor. Do you know, Mr Hislop, the expression, A pen is walking in the chimney behind the cloth?’
He had already observed the badly-hung hung tapestry, but without Sybilla’s quick intuition behind the observation. ‘This?’ said Danny Hislop; and striding forward, ripped the cloth aside.
Behind the arras was a door, and beyond that a small antechamber, in which stood a single chair. Master Michel Nostradamus, his expression entirely undisturbed, was sitting in it.
‘Ah,’ said Sybilla. ‘Behind the prophet, the analogist. And behind the analogist, the eavesdropper. We have not met before, I am glad to say. Which of you thought of this first?’
‘I asked Master Nostradamus to listen,’ Marthe said.
‘And I did so, believe me, with no evil intention,’ the astrologer said. He rose and, moving through the door, stood before the Dowager Lady Culter. ‘I wished to see the chosen vessel and learn why it was chosen. Now I know. The truth of the matters you speak of is already known to me. You may rely on my discretion. Indeed, Mistress Philippa has already been to see me.’
Danny waited, and then as the vital question remained for some reason unasked, put it himself. ‘What about?’ he said.
The astrologer smiled at him. ‘She required me to tell her how Mr Crawford spent his last evening in Lyon,’ he said.
Danny Hislop’s pink freckled skin turned slowly the deep scarlet of pure anger. ‘And you did?’ he said sharply. ‘You told …’
‘Do you, too, enjoy your monopoly?’ Nostradamus said. ‘As I said before, you may rely on my discretion. I am concerned, as you are, with her future, and with the curing of my patients.’
‘And Mistress Marthe is a patient of yours?’ said Sybilla. ‘As you were a disciple of her grandmother’s?’
‘We have an understanding,’ Nostradamus said. ‘Francis Crawford will come to no harm through me; nor will your son Richard.’
‘Is that a prediction, or merely a pious intention, I wonder?’ Sybilla said. ‘I am not sure that I care to have either of my sons’ affairs in your hands, and if Marthe were a daughter of mine, I should remove her.’
‘If I were a daughter of yours,’ Marthe said curtly, ‘I should probably go. If it makes any difference, I am willing to accept what you have told me.’
‘That is wise,’ Nostradamus said.
‘But it didn’t occur to you to explain to her,’ said Sybilla. From the formidable, her expression had changed to one of reprimand.
‘Yes it did,’ said Nostradamus mildly. ‘But I realized that it would come better from you, provided you had the ingenuity to discover and talk to her. I had not then had the experience of meeting you.’
‘You must,’ said Sybilla cooly, ‘come and overhear me again. It might endow you with sufficient of the same to sit and listen to me in the open another time.’ She made a slight, perfect curtsey to both her host and her hostess and rising, turned to the door. ‘Mr Hislop!’
‘Yes,’ said Danny, and bowing, hurried after.
Making their way in procession back through the network of streets to the river: ‘I feel,’ said Danny casually, ‘that irritating though the lady may be, she is worth helping.’
‘That is why you traced her, isn’t it? Of course she is worth helping,’ Sybilla said. ‘Perhaps Nostradamus will do it as well as anyone.’ Her voice was absent.
‘Or Philippa?’ Danny said. ‘She’s good sense incarnate.’
‘She is also,’ Sybilla said, ‘in love with Francis.’ The adverb dangled, ambiguously, in the air. ‘No. Philippa cannot help,’ her mother-in-law continued soberly. ‘Philippa herself is engaged in a battle that nothing must stop her winning.’
*
At the time she was speaking, the battle which Philippa must win had continued through two nights without sleep and a day of such stupefying abstraction that her royal employers, impatient of the sudden failure of the strongest horse in the wedding team, gave her a day’s leave from her duties.
It saved her physical health if nothing else, for the struggle was with herself; and her chief necessity was peace in which to concentrate.
Do you think that I care?
‘No. But you must excuse the hunchback, who does.’
With the emotional extravagance of a clerk of the Court of Session notifying a transumpt, Francis Crawford had placed briefly on record, for her sake, the one factor in their relationship of which she was ignorant. Then the door had been closed; and she was alone in the dark with her shock.
Restraint is the remedy. So little … Nothing had been put into words. Of course he had been confident of the scale o
And so he had tried to escape. And she had prevented him.
And thence had come the strains which she, as well as his friends, had so officiously set about assuaging. And the blindness which Archie knew about, and Nostradamus, and herself.
She had offered herself as his cure, and he had refused her. To overcome that refusal demanded more than a convincing protestation of life-long devotion. It demanded that she should recognize the steadfast integrity which lay behind the refusal; and destroy it.
And that she could not do. Without a tremor, Francis would bring his spoiled heritage to Catherine, the daughter of two people who in their time had indulged in every form of costly licence. But to herself, a girl of twenty, reared by Kate with wisdom and wit and endless, clear-sighted love, there was no path that pride, regard, convention, self-respect and even, she suspected, an odd, well-disguised quality of self-distrust did not block for him.
She could not be his wife. She must shut the door, as he asked her, on all the crowding memories: the words and actions each now apparent, like shot-silk, in a different colour. Her task, for which she needed all her strength and her common sense, was to protect him.
Adam came to tell her what had happened at the Hôtel d’Hercule after she had left. Believing the battle won, she went to find Catherine d’Albon.
She was alone in her chamber. Philippa sat beside her quietly and said, ‘I want you to know that Piero Strozzi brought me to the Hôtel d’Hercule the other night with a false message from M. de Sevigny. And that I went to his room, without warning him, because I was upset about some rudeness he had shown to his mother. Austin lost his head.’
‘I know,’ Catherine said. The lustrous grey eyes within the coiling black hair remained bent on her needlework. ‘He apologized, I believe, the following morning. No harm has been done.’
‘Except to Austin,’ said Philippa lightly. Her own eyes, concerned, were watching the bent head. After a moment she said, ‘Catherine?’
The needle flashed once, twice, and then was pushed firmly home. Catherine took her sewing and rose, and lifted from the wall a small looking-glass. Then, reversing it between her long fingers, she held it so that Philippa saw, reflected there, her own perplexed face.
‘I know,’ Catherine said, ‘that the encounter happened by accident, and that you did not intend to be thoughtless. But since it happened, have you watched the change in your eyes?’
Philippa flushed. She felt the blood rise in her skin, and lifting both hands, took the mirror from Catherine’s hold and laid it, face down on the cushion. ‘I didn’t know,’ she said.
‘You don’t hear, either, when we speak to you; and the children think you have a fever. The rest of us believe it is an affair of the heart.’
‘How embarrassing,’ Philippa said. Her eyes and her voice were both steady.
‘But you have not called on Austin Grey,’ Catherine said. She paused, and then said, ‘It is Francis, isn’t it?’
She had made this girl her friend. And Lymond, knowing all that he did, had asked her to be his wife and still meant to make her so. Philippa smiled, wryly, and said, ‘Yes. I’m glad you didn’t notice before. He wants his divorce, and the marriage with you. It won’t matter. I shall be in England, with Austin probably.’
‘I noticed,’ said Catherine slowly. ‘He has always encouraged the friendship between Lord Allendale and yourself.’
‘I told Austin a long time ago,’ Philippa said, ‘that I loved Francis Crawford, but that there was never any question of our marriage being completed, or of his being interested in anything but ending it as quickly as possible. If, after Easter, Austin, still wants to marry me, I have said I will listen to him.’
‘I see,’ Catherine said. She picked the glass from the cushion and resting it on her knee, looked at herself consideringly in it. Then, laying her arms on top, she gazed, smiling a little, at Philippa. ‘And one word with your husband and you revive like a garden of flowers. Why … I wish I knew why he does not want to keep you?’
‘Look in your mirror again,’ Philippa said. And felt sick, while she said it. And wondered, then, how often Francis must have felt this same deadly loathing.
You told yourself that it was a convention: a marriage between two worldly people whose amorous inclinations could without harm lead in opposite directions. But the truth was that this girl loved Francis Crawford with something which might approach, for all he knew, the passion he talked of. What makes an unsuitable marriage?
This, she thought as she left Catherine’s chamber. One-sided love, where each side hurts and is hurt, like Jerott and Marthe … Gavin and Sybilla.
As her love was not. This love which, it had been decided for her, was to die as the child killed by the mutes at Topkapi had died, for the sake of the greater good.
To make that other decision in Turkey he had sacrificed everything: the integrity of his body and the sanctity of his spoken vow; and had been strong enough, in sort, to recover.
Now he demanded an equal sacrifice of her, as well as of himself.
But no. Her thoughts better schooled, she reminded herself. The smothering of an adolescent attachment was all he believed he was asking of her. The self-control which for eleven months had kept his own desires in perfect concealment also made nonsense of her fears for Catherine.
He was not Jerott or Gavin. Catherine would not be allowed to suffer. And in the calm of such a marriage he might find the relief he had himself suggested: a cure which, storm-ridden with remorse and self-loathing, no union with herself could ever offer.
He was right. He had already trodden this path and found it barred: he knew the landscape and was already, in his pain, accustomed to it. It was she, blinded by the brightness of the flame, who could not yet believe that there was no way of dwelling in it.
*
She returned to find the court already packing to travel to Fontainebleau, the ancient hunting box to the south-east of Paris, which the King’s father had emerged from his Spanish prison thirty years before to recreate with all the glories of Italy.
The object of the visit was to enable the Tourelles, the Hôtel de Guise, the Louvre and the Palais de Justice to be adequately cleaned, aired and renovated before the royal wedding. The Parliament of Paris had already been requested to sit at the Augustins for that reason.
Fending off agitated jewellers, dressmakers and goldsmiths whose one mule had gone sick, Philippa rallied her flock under the confused Madame de Brêne, and prepared them as well as human agency could for their exodus.
When Danny Hislop called to see her he found her newly released from a lengthy conference between Charles de Guise, the bride, the Bishop of Paris and the King’s consort, sister and mistress. It was clear that the discussion had not been harmonious. Philippa was undeniably jaded; and the dark skin under her eyes told of sleeplessness which owed nothing to this interminable process of bringing the next King of France to the altar.
He said, ‘You look, if I may say so, just like Sardanapalus, that beastly epicure, the morning after his orgy. You know he has left Paris?’
Philippa nodded.
‘He’s taken Jerott and Archie with him,’ Danny said. ‘And they say that Strozzi has joined him. Wherever they’re going, I’m glad I’m not there: it’ll be a Franco-Italian blood-bath. And talking of Jerott …’
‘You’ve taken Lady Culter to see Marthe. What, then?’ Philippa said. And listened while, succinctly, the elements of the encounter were laid before her by Danny.
So Sybilla now knew that Leonard Bailey was in France, and that she, Philippa, had the key to the Hôtel des Sphères. And Sybilla’s first reaction, being a valiant lady, would be to trace Leona
At least, with Danny’s willing co-operation, the inevitable meeting between Sybilla and Marthe had taken place under supervision. Philippa said, ‘The Commissioners are departing, aren’t they, for Fontainebleau also? Or Moret. At least, they will leave Paris shortly?’
‘We all are,’ Danny said. ‘They want to wipe the fingermarks off everything before the wedding. You still want Lady Culter stopped if she shows any signs of wanting to go to the Arsenal area?’
It had been the recurrent nightmare, the arrival of Sybilla alone at the Hôtel des Sphères, and of Leonard Bailey opening the door to her. ‘Yes. Has she tried?’ Philippa said.
‘No. She hasn’t had a chance, and Lord Culter is generally with her anyway. She wouldn’t send a servant?’ said Danny wistfully. No one would tell him why Lymond’s mother should not be allowed to visit the Arsenal area.
‘She wouldn’t send anyone, nor would she take anyone with her. She organizes witches’ Sabbaths every full moon,’ explained Philippa tartly.
Danny said, clearing his throat to cover an unaccustomed awkwardness, ‘Nostradamus told us you had been to see him.’ Then he blushed.
Philippa looked at him. ‘How did you know?’ And then, as she read his face. ‘Is Marthe with Nostradamus?’
‘He couldn’t get a raven,’ Danny said. He cleared his throat again. ‘I gather he was indiscreet about Mr Crawford’s … accident at Lyon. Don’t let it trouble you. While his mother and brother are here, he’s not going to do anything daft: even Archie is satisfied.’
‘He doesn’t look very satisfied,’ Philippa said. ‘And after his mother and brother go home?’
‘Well: he’ll have his divorce,’ Danny said. The pink, putty face steadied on her. ‘If he leaves for Russia, will you try to stop him?’