Le capitaine conduira la grande proye
Sur la montagne des ennemis plus proche.
The next morning the pots of war boiled, and the merchants of Lyon discovered, as Danny Hislop remarked, what they were paying for.
At dawn the first messengers began to come in: from Berne and Metz; Marseille, Mâcon and Turin. A little later, the chief officers of the Consulat arrived to report and confer, followed by the members of the new safety committee and the captain of the guard. Danny Hislop left shortly with a book of orders, to accompany them. Adam stayed behind with Lymond’s secretariat, correlating the reports as they came in and transmitting the resulting instructions as the comte de Sevigny issued them.
He had been up at dawn, Adam knew. Depressed and faintly liverish, he resented Lymond’s unclouded acumen; his competence; his unflagging versatility. He had heard, last night, the door of Madame la Maréchale’s room open. He had heard it open again, some time later, and another door quietly close.
They said that whatever Lymond might elect to do in a woman’s bedchamber, he never slept there. Irritated, Adam lifted the list he had just been given and began stabbing pins into maps. Lymond had been quite right. He should have stayed with the Muscovy Company.
Marguerite de Lustrac, Maréchale de St André, came downstairs a little late; superbly corseted; a little ponderous; her aura heady as peaches, sun-ripened and perfumed in a silversmith’s workshop. She brought them spiced wine and almonds with her own hands and Adam, sharp-set by then, was glad of them. But she was charmingly dismissed after ten minutes: she had hardly withdrawn, smiling, before Lymond had the table cleared for the next item on his agenda.
It was an appallingly hard morning’s work.
Outside, the sun blazed, close to its zenith. At eleven, the travails in the Hôtel de Gouvernement came to a brief halt for dinner. Just before twelve, the small, broken-nosed man called Archie Abernethy left the Hôtel Schiatti where he served and looked after his young mistress Philippa, and proceeded to walk downhill through the town to the river.
The last street to cross his path was the Grand’Rue, and on the opposite side of that was the cobbled square round which the Petit Palais and the Hôtel de Gouvernement were built. It was cool where he stood, under the arch spanning the rue de Garillan. Archie Abernethy folded his arms, and disposed himself inconspicuously in a corner, and waited.
A monk came out of a side door in the square, wearing the habit of the noble order of the Chapter of St John, which demanded of its chanoine comtes a minimum of sixteen quarterings on the escutcheon. The man called Archie Abernethy, detaching himself silently from the shadowy neck of the rue de Garillan, moved out into the busy Grand’Rue and, mingling with the passers-by, followed him.
As might be expected, the monk turned to his left and walked south, towards the Cathedral. Almost immediately, however, he changed direction and took the right-hand road into the rue Berthet, and then turned left and right again up the steep slope of the rue Tirecul to reach the highest lateral street on the hillside, the Montée St Barthélemy.
This he followed, climbing up to the left until he came to one of the small ports in the town wall. Passing through a good deal behind his quarry, Archie Abernethy found himself among green trees, on the heights of the Fourvière hill. Noiseless on the deep grass the little man climbed the hill until, just below the chapel, the monk found an outcrop of rock by a clearing and turning, halted to enjoy the view. His pursuer stopped also.
Below them, the mottled, dun-coloured roofs of the city descended the hill to the water. Across the river the Presqu’île lay in sunshine, the painted ships crowding its quays and fringing the window-brocaded frontage, and the vista of roofs and tall chimneys above it. Behind that stretched the Rhône, and the rolling country beyond its one bridge. And furthest of all, glimmering in the sun-hazy sky, the Alpine snows of the gateway to Italy.
The hubbub of the city lapped them, low and muted as sea-surf, rising and falling; bearing a cry, or the sound of a bell on its wrack. On the hill, there was birdsong and silence and the smell of warm herbage and myrrh from the chapel.
There was a shrine tangled with ivy overlooking the outcrop and beside it a spring, and a small statue, decently carved. The monk, turning, dipped both his hands in the water and then, shaking free of the stifling hood, cupped his face in its sweet, mossy coolness. His hair, burnished gold in the sunshine, was innocent of any tonsure. And the supple fingers, laced over his eyelids, identified him to Archie Abernethy as clearly as the rich fabric glimpsed under the habit.
With a crack, a rotten bough broke in the wood and fell from branch to branch with a hiccoughing swish. The little man with the broken nose turned, startled, to watch it.
He removed his gaze from the monk for only a moment, but it was enough.
He heard no one moving. Only a hand gripped his thigh and another his arm and grunting, he found himself jerked from his niche and forced hurtling through the air, somersaulting to the edge of the outcrop. His knife was wrenched from its sheath. He hit the ground with his shoulders and roared as his feet plunged and stamped into vacancy. He began to fall just as Lymond’s voice said ‘Archie!’ and Lymond’s hands, still wet from the spring, gripped him with all their sinewy strength and drew him back up to safety.
Archie Abernethy lay on his back gasping, and his mistress’s domineering spouse stood over him, eyeing him coldly.
‘And what the bloody hell,’ said Francis Crawford, ‘do you think you are doing? Trying to prove to somebody that I can’t protect myself?’
The small, sun-tanned man with the grey beard sat up and rubbed himself where it hurt most. ‘Ye didna ken it was me,’ he retorted.
‘No. I thought it was that pot-bellied oaf from Midculter who was watching the house all this morning. Why?’
‘I wanted a word wi’ ye,’ said Archie placatingly. ‘I would have nudged ye in the street, but I fell to wondering if anyone else was following ye. I couldna approve of the heid of an army wandering about the like o’ yon with all the work still to do. What do I call ye … milord Count?’
‘Mr Crawford will do,’ said Lymond tersely. They had known each other, if fitfully, for seven years. He returned to the spring, rinsed the dust from his hands and picking up Archie’s knife, threw it to him. ‘With all the work still to do, as you say, I have to go down soon. You don’t seem to have lost any of your native effrontery.’
‘I do well enough,’ said Archie. ‘I stayed in Scotland while ye were blowing your tucket in Russia. When Mistress Philippa came to tell us she was going to France, your leddy mother teilt me to go with her.’ His black eyes, sharp in the seamed face, scanned every change in the other man’s countenance.
‘Philippa called at Midculter?’ said Lymond. He had drawn out a handkerchief and was drying his fingers one by one on it, slowly. ‘And how is the third baron Crawford of Culter?’
‘Your brother is well,’ said Archie shortly. ‘And all the bairns, and his wife. They consider your place is in Scotland.’
‘So I hear,’ said Lymond agreeably. ‘Unfortunately for almost everyone, I have no intention of going there. Do I gather Mistress Philippa is in France to fetch me?’
‘You ken better than that,’ said Archie tartly. ‘If we’d known ye were in Lyon, she’d never have come here. She was going to Blois to track down some bluidy papers, but Mistress Marthe answered her letter first, and told her to come here to begin with.’ His black eyes rested on Lymond’s downcast blue ones. ‘She means you and Mistress Philippa to meet in her house.’
‘By shifty means and crooked ways. I have realized that,’ said Lymond. ‘Ah, and who is he apart, marked out with sprays of olive and offering sacrifice? Perhaps she is anxious to have nieces and nephews.’
‘She also says,’ pursued Archie, who was used to this, ‘that she suggested the ultimatum that kept ye from Russia. If that makes mair sense to you nor it sounds like.’
Lymond lifted his eyes. ‘So you’ve seen her?’ he said. ‘Yes, it makes sense. Someone told Piero Strozzi on his way north to Court that this divorce was proving troublesome, and that the way to keep me was to defer it. I was informed Mr Blyth was responsible.’
‘No,’ said Archie. ‘He wants you to go back to Russia.’
‘And take Marthe with me, I suspect,’ said Lymond. He studied Archie. ‘You know what these papers are, that Philippa is looking for?’
‘I guessed,’ said Archie. Under the tanned hide, his neck had reddened.
‘You needn’t let it disturb you,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘I am not the only man whose wife has diligently attempted to prove him a bastard. The novelty lies in the fact that my lady mother apparently allowed her to come here and do it. And, of course, Mistress Marthe, whose share in the family tree no one can deny, even if no one can begin to explain it.… You came here, therefore, to warn me about Marthe?’
‘Yes,’ said Archie. ‘And Mistress Philippa says, can you talk with her privately before this afternoon’s meeting?’
‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘I have no intention of meeting Mistress Philippa privately, either before or after this afternoon’s meeting. What she does is of no possible interest to me: my reputation doesn’t rest on my parentage. The quicker she finds what she is looking for, the sooner presumably she will get out of France and cease troubling us.’
‘I’ll tell her,’ said Archie grimly. His neck was still red. He said suddenly, ‘Why did you come to the hill?’
Lymond looked at him, and for a moment perhaps, might have answered. Then he said crisply, ‘To look at the view. You have seen Marthe. You have seen me. You are staying with Philippa. You can only be loyal to one of us.’
There was a little silence. ‘Do you say?’ said Archie Abernethy. ‘Then I suppose I must be Mistress Philippa’s man.’
He bowed neatly and, refraining from limping, stepped off the ledge and moved downhill through the undergrowth.
Francis Crawford, standing still, watched him vanish. Faint upon the air, the treble voices of boys floated behind him in plainsong: a recorder, uncertainly played, picked up a counterpoint and accompanied them. Birdsong veiled it in notes of dazzling sound as he moved downhill, his habit drifting through ferny shadow. Above his head, corridors of luminous green rose up to the sunlight, leaded like a rose window with wrought twigs and delicate filaments. Cascades of green light fell on his path and damasked all the tall tree trunks descending below him; arresting him with blinding dazzlements.
Between the bright particular leaves he looked down for the last time on the city: the misty tesserae, grey and beige and brown of the tall, garden-hung buildings; the four square towers, ochre and grey of the abbatiale; the copper-verdigris patina of the smooth river; the pure, cold snows like a lamp in the distance which, as he watched, dimmed over with mists, leaving nothingness.
Then, walking briskly, he stepped from the hillside.
*
Returned presently to his cabinet in the Hôtel de Gouvernement, M. de Sevigny isolated with clinical exactitude all the errors of execution which had occurred during the past hour and corrected them, with an acid ruthlessness which reduced one man to tears and Adam to silent, blind fury.
At the end of the afternoon, having worked for a further five hours, the Captain-General dismissed his staff and left to call on his wife at the Hôtel Schiatti. He took four men at arms with him.
He arrived exactly as planned at five-thirty and Adam Blacklock, had he been there and not thankfully slumbering, would have noted that by this time he looked tired, and with reason. Philippa, on the other hand, was charged with bountiful vigour, even if her greeting had in it still something guarded. Three of the Schiatti cousins, well-built young men with padded breeches and earrings, surrounded her longingly.
With the skill born of long experience, Lymond lent himself to all the introductions, circumnavigated the subsequent questions with steely courtesy, and mounting his bride on the little chestnut they brought out for her, rode beside her down the precipitous slopes of the rue de Garillan, past the Round House, and up to the approaches of the bridge, his escort docilely following.
Philippa began talking immediately. ‘Your hostess Madame de St André called on me this morning. She thinks, as a maiden lady, I should wear my hair down. Bow. To your right. Someone is bowing to you.’
Lymond said repressively, ‘As a maiden lady, you would wear anyone down, including Madame la Maréchale de St André, particularly if you were looking like that.’ He bowed to his right. ‘Were you?’
Philippa gazed down consideringly. Her pointed bodice, outrageously stiffened, was latticed with large pearls in goldfoil, and her pearled girdle had a tassel of bullion that would have felled an ox at twelve paces. Her hair, indubitably clean, was braided under a high-crowned velvet hat with a number of trembling jewels arranged under the brim, and an ostrich feather. ‘I can’t remember,’ said Philippa. ‘I think I may have put on something more elaborate.’
The contemplative brown eyes inspected him. ‘What about you? I don’t notice you going about in crewel garters and wadmoll mittens, that I can recall.’
His profile remained undisturbed. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I wear them at night. Whereby presumption and arrogancy shall be withstanded, malice and contention expelled and carnal liberty refrained and tempered. The Tsar used to get very fussed.’ He returned the salutes of another group of gratified merchants and obtained, with a glassy stare, Philippa’s approval.
Philippa said, ‘Madame only wanted to satisfy herself that it was really family papers that brought me here. She thinks I’m following you about because I have a youthful passion for you.’
‘But you were able to reassure her?’ said Lymond. A market wagon, driven too fast, jolted past them on to the bridge and he let his horse feel the bit, leaning gracefully away from her.
Philippa said tartly, ‘I am extremely tempted to say “no” and make you fall off your horse. I said you were a friend of my mother’s and I was a friend of your mother’s.’
‘I should think that about sums it up,’ Lymond said. His voice was a trifle unsteady. ‘It doesn’t do my self-esteem much good though, does it?’
‘Your self-esteem has had a lifetime of steady attention,’ said Philippa abstractedly. She studied him a little, soberly. ‘Archie reported that I could look for these records? You have no really deep objection?’
He did not answer at once. But when they had descended the other side of the bridge and, crossing the square of the Lannerie, were preparing to turn right into the long, shadowy canyon of the rue Mercière, he said, ‘Lest of an evil chick comes an evil bird? The time is long past, Philippa, when it mattered to me. I have a campaign to conduct. I should like, candidly, to see you out of Lyon. That is why I am making this visit. I have also, I hope, shortened your investigation in other ways. I have studied the papers held by the house of Schiatti, and they contain nothing of interest.’
He paused, to let his horse pick its way past some unloading carts in the sharp shadows of the busy street. The clatter of six sets of hooves, reverberating between the almost unbroken line of tall, crooked houses, stitched its way through the general heat and the stinks and the clamour, and even the blue and silver pennant and the livery meant little, it was plain, to a street full of Lyonnais intent on making a profit.
The rue Mercière, running across the crowded Presqu’île like the crossbar of a gate, was the main trading thoroughfare between the Saône and the Rhône; which was why the horologist and dealer and usurer who had called himself Marthe’s uncle had chosen to tenant it.
The name Gaultier still appeared, freshly repainted, among the signboards ticketing the long block of buildings ahead on their right. It seemed typical of Marthe that the house she shared with her husband should not bear his name or her own, but that of the defunct and unpleasant man whose business she still continued.
Trotting behind, Philippa found that her eminent escort was making better speed than she was; opened her mouth; closed it, and touched up her horse as soon as she could, to jog alongside him. She said peevishly, ‘Do you consider I’m old enough to stop calling you Mr Crawford?’
‘No,’ said Mr Crawford shortly. ‘What alternatives would you suggest? Master? Uncle?’
‘That would certainly unsettle the Maréchale, for one,’ said Philippa more cheerfully. ‘I shall call you “mon compère”, as the King does the Constable. You haven’t enough artillery, have you?’
‘Against you or the Germans?’ said Lymond. He had relaxed again.
‘If M. Polvilliers’s troops are well armed and have cannon, you are going to be in a little difficulty until the Piedmont troops arrive, or M. de Guise from Italy, aren’t you? That’s why you want me out of Lyon,’ said Philippa. ‘Among other reasons.’
‘Among other reasons,’ Lymond agreed. That she had a nose for illicit information was known to him. He added, ‘You must surely miss the court at London?’
‘They wouldn’t have me back after I sent you to France,’ said Philippa briefly. She thought, and remarked, ‘I miss Austin Grey.’
‘Tristram Trusty?’ The opening of the rue Tupin appeared sunlit ahead on their left. On their right, the sign of the Hôtel Gaultier swung from the second of its five irregular storeys. Below, an ornate door with a wrought-iron fanlight gave on to a spiral staircase which went down as well as up. Next to it was a stone arch with a clock and a crowned turban sculptured in stone set above it. Lymond drew his horse to a halt and dismounted, taking the bridle. ‘You heard he came to meet me at Douai?’
‘Everyone was very anxious to tell me,’ said Philippa. ‘You know what I think about this obsession with Russia. But you were right to trust him, and I’m glad he escaped. Kate always said he was too sensitive for a Somerville, but I think I could do something with him. Don’t you?’
At a glance from Lymond, one of the men at arms came to help her dismount. There was a general vacating of saddles, attended by a number of grooms who emerged from the Gaultier archway. The archway door, opened wide, revealed a cobbled tunnel lit by indifferent wall torches. Leaving the horses, Lymond raised his eyebrows at Philippa and walked towards it. He said, ‘Everyone is too sensitive for the Somervilles: I shouldn’t let that deter you. He’s as nice as a nun’s hen, but you’re right, I think. There is good stuff there. And he’s a chivalrous child.’
‘That’s the trouble,’ said Philippa doubtfully. ‘Do you think my friends will corrupt him?’
‘I don’t know about your friends,’ said Lymond, ‘but you can rest assured that your husband’s behaviour will be impeccable. If you’re going to marry the youth, I shan’t touch him.’
‘But you will be nasty to him,’ said Philippa gloomily. ‘You know you can’t help it.’
‘I shall probably be nasty to him,’ Lymond agreed firmly. ‘But I shan’t touch him.… You were here four years ago, when the Dame de Doubtance was alive?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa dimly. She remembered then, as now, this dark vault with the cressets flickering, and the grotesques peering down at them from the arched caissons over their heads. She said, ‘You were here too, with Jerott. When she prophesied that your father’s two sons would never meet in this world again.’
‘A depressing encounter,’ Lymond assented. ‘Do you suppose that Marthe too has discovered that revelation is a participation of the Eternal Divinity? I take it that marriage to Jerott has made her a Christian. What it has made Jerott, of course, is another matter entirely.’
He had met his brother again: Philippa knew that. Passing through Scotland on his way home from Russia Lymond had had an encounter with Richard, third baron Crawford of Culter, which had ended in blows because, again, Francis Crawford would have nothing to do with his own bastard son, or his family. Summoning her considerable moral fibre from the wilting reed-beds of apprehension, Philippa Somerville forbore either to twitch or to apply to Lymond’s arm for reassurance. Lymond did not like to be touched: she had found that out a good while ago.
He was, however, reasonably prescient in other directions. He stopped and looked at her, just at that moment. ‘Wrestling with ghosts, after the manner of the Antabatae? It’s a merchant’s house now, not a temple of high Gothic fantasy. All that is going to be required of you, I fancy, is a great deal of social ingenuity for which, as everyone knows, you have a certificate.’
Philippa looked at him, her qualms replaced by another kind of misgiving. ‘If you are going to be malicious, I shall walk out. Jerott and Marthe once saved your wits for you.’
‘Lethaeo perfusa papavera somno. Now you mention it,’ said Lymond, ‘I seem to remember. Nevertheless, I have a feeling that someone is going to be malicious, and we may as well set them a standard. Shall we go in, lewd and rude, and provoke them?’
It was, Philippa supposed with a groan, her punishment for involving him in her private obsessions. She refrained, with no difficulty, from grasping his sleek, grogram arm and marched forward instead, out of the tunnel and into the Gaultier courtyard.
*
So Jerott Blyth, waiting for Lymond, saw a young woman emerge just ahead of him, preceded by a puff of chypre and an aura of extreme self-possession. He priced her gown automatically and then shifted his attention to the tinted face under the ostrich feather. The brown eyes, the decided nose, the curled lips belonged to no one whose parents he knew.
She was smiling at him, and he answered the smile because, indeed, she was exquisite, while at the same time he was aware, his anger rising, of Francis Crawford standing behind her, sardonically watching. He had invited Lymond alone to his home, out of bitter pride, for one purpose. If Lymond then chose to bring with him some empty-headed young nobleman’s daughter, it was quite deliberate, and in tune with his conduct outside the Hôtel de Ville the previous morning.
Lymond had stopped by the orange trees at the entrance. Jerott made no attempt to walk forward. But the girl came straight towards him and, taking his hand, leaned up and kissed his cheek, smiling. Behind him, his wife Marthe’s voice said, ‘Don’t you recognize her? It’s Philippa Somerville.’
And of course, if you looked into those enlarged, reassuring dark eyes, it was the undersized bride of sixteen you had last seen dispatched home from Volos. So how in God’s name did the girl come to be in Lyon?
Marthe knew. The edge on her voice told him that, and her lack of surprise. And there was more to it than that. Marthe knew, and had invited Philippa to come at the same time as Lymond.
Jerott’s right hand jerked and then remained still, trapped under Philippa’s tranquil fingers. She leaned up and kissed him on the other cheek. ‘We’ve been working on this for days. Did we succeed in surprising you?’
‘You’ve certainly frightenened him silly,’ said Lymond. ‘If you open your fingers, he’ll drop like an egg to the paving.’ He came forward, and as Philippa retreated, took Jerott lightly by the shoulders. ‘You will have to surfer the same from me,’ he said. ‘It is a forfeit we exact from all bridegrooms.’
It had never happened before. Jerott received the swift, insubstantial embrace and then found that Lymond, stepping back, was looking at him with amiable satisfaction. Marthe said, ‘If you will all do it again, the servants will give you a round of applause. The practice is to kiss the bride, Francis. You may come, if you wish, and shake hands with the bridegroom.’
Lymond turned to the woman he now called his step-sister and Philippa, her skin chilled to goose-flesh, watched them together.
They were so alike: pretty as jonquils with their white skin and blue eyes and pale perfumed heads, gilding the gloom of the courtyard. From the archaic stone lips of a wall-fountain a ceaseless jet fell to its basin. The trill of water braided the silence. Then Lymond, his eyes on the other identical eyes, turned out the palms of his hands, yielding and empty. ‘I have no more than you have,’ he said to his sister.
Marthe said, ‘My dear, you have all the Dame de Doubtance’s fortune,’ and Jerott turned on her sharply.
‘He offered you it all, and you refused it.’
Marthe laughed, and Philippa’s hands curled inside their elaborate gloves. Whatever Lymond and his sibling were talking about, it was not money. Perhaps Marthe had saved him once from the degradation of his own addiction, but there was something different in her eyes now: contempt; defensiveness. And what Lymond had just divined: a subtle envy. Philippa said, looking round her, ‘The house hasn’t changed.’
It was bigger, indeed, than she remembered it. Gabled buildings with strange angled roofs totally enclosed the courtyard in which they were standing. Above Marthe rose four tiers of open arched galleries upheld on red columns with writhing forms, half beast and half human, carved on the capitals, and there were more figures on the painted beams roofing each gallery. Across the courtyard, a tower enclosed a second spiralling staircase and a roofed bridge, held on wrought brackets, joined one wall to its neighbour above it.
Two of the wide arches giving on to the yard led to stables and their horses had already been led there. On the side opposing the entrance, there stood yet another dark archway, still more handsome, with a spire and some sort of entablature. Jerott, who had been watching her, said, ‘It leads to the quay. You know about the traboules?’
The Schiatti had told her about the traboules. With rare intersections, the houses of Lyon ran in unbroken ranks parallel, as a rule, to the river. To give access from one street to the other, public passageways or traboules passed through the tall houses. Since the habit began, gardens and yards had been filled with more buildings and now such a tunnel might lead you through three or more different homes and across as many courtyards before you emerged in the road at the end of it.
‘Anyone who has visited Edinburgh knows about traboules. Don’t be parochial, Jerott,’ said Lymond. ‘So you trade from the quayside block? Puissant, proud, mighty, cruel and bloody; the natural savour, taste and quality corrupted by th’ infection of the pomp and other filthiness of your ships? What merchandise do you handle?’
‘Sad irons,’ said Marthe, before Jerott could answer. ‘Ribbons, fringes, and little drums for bairns. He will show you them, I am sure, presently. My rooms are here.’
‘And what do you trade in, Marthe?’ Lymond asked, as she turned to lead them up the wide turning stairs. They had neither embraced nor touched hands, Philippa was aware.
‘Bodily and ghostly comfort. And objects of antiquity,’ Marthe said. And added, before he could speak, ‘You appear to have profited by the first two. And of course, I have been well rewarded. Shall we see now what service we can perform for your wife? There are papers below she will wish to investigate. And after that, you may search the Dame de Doubtance’s chambers.’
‘Philippa can do both,’ Lymond said. ‘It is her self-appointed vocation.’
‘Have you remembered nothing of the terms of your inheritance? None of these papers was to be read without your consent and your presence. And the first to enter her rooms after her death on pain of cursing had to be Francis Crawford.’
They had resumed climbing again. On the first gallery, looking down between the pillars at the heads of Philippa and Jerott, ascending below: ‘You invoked all this research?’ Lymond said. ‘It doesn’t trouble you?’
‘I have nothing to lose,’ Marthe said. ‘So nothing can harm me.’
Below, Philippa had asked a question and Jerott had paused to detail an answer. Lymond said, ‘Why did you want me to stay in France? You know that Prince Vishnevetsky has taken my place in Vorobievo?’
With slow charm, Marthe gave him a smile. ‘And I have Jerott,’ she said. ‘How cheaply you rate me. You will not go to Russia because your fate is here. Or do you not know it?’
*
In the event, Philippa plodded alone through the papers, which were in the vaulted basement room once employed by the man Gaultier as his store room and workshop, which had once contained a horological spinet of some small notoriety. Lymond, having fulfilled his obligations to the extent of entering the room and wincing at the dust and the dampness, had retreated upstairs again to the modified conviviality of Marthe’s chamber.
Panelled in handsome oak and clad in paintings and fine pieces of plate and stonework and statuary it bore, as did all Gaultier’s rooms they had seen, the lustreless chill of a complex house maintained by masterless servants. Each of the objects Philippa had asked to handle, exclaiming over its beauty, had left its trace of dust on her fingers. Even the Venetian goblets from which they drank were clouded, although the wine itself was clearly Jerott’s best: crimson, mellow and potent.
Predictably, Jerott himself had consumed most of it. Returning after the installation of Philippa, Lymond saw that the flask was empty, and that Marthe also had gone, after lighting the heavy candelabra on the long sideboard. Outside, the engulfing darkness had risen almost to the sun-red gables of the opposite houses: the rue Mercière had quietened as the day’s commerce came to its end and the pigeons under the wooden eaves shook their broad grey wings and planed down into the darkness to nod among the split meal and horse-dung. Jerott Blyth, his dark head against the paned window said, ‘You still don’t drink.’
‘My excesses are other,’ Lymond said. He picked up his half-full glass. ‘But I don’t refuse wine like this. You have heard what the merchants’ loan to the King is to be? Six hundred thousand crowns, a hundred thousand of it without interest. On touche toujours sur le cheval qui tire. Or, whom God loves, his bitch brings forth pigs. Your reports were invaluable.’
‘Is Polvilliers coming?’ Jerott asked. Against the window, his face was hard to read, although the candlelight glimmered on the figured silk which clothed his finely built body; and on the powerful legs, and the rings on the strong, swordsman’s hands.
Lymond said, ‘Hell, Jerott: you gave me half the information yourself. It’s true enough. The prospects are as fair as they can be. The cantons have promised to help us raise eight thousand Ku’milchers, and I’m clearing the ground round them and putting two thousand Germans into that fortress as soon as I can. Mâcon will have three thousand Switzers. I have someone working on one of Polvilliers’s captains as well. He might desert. He was well treated once as a prisoner. You know the sort of thing that has to be looked after. It all requires money.’
‘I wondered what you were doing, that was all,’ Jerott said. He left the window, looked vaguely round for the wine and finding none, rang a bell and waited. ‘It’s hard to get well-trained servants. Marthe has to travel a good deal to buy stock. She’s as well known as Gaultier was. You can see. She makes more money than I do.’ The door opened, and he turned his head. ‘God’s bones, you took your time coming.… Oh.’
It was Marthe, with another flask of wine in her hands. She said, ‘We find it a little hard to keep servants. They don’t always work on the same time-adjustment as Jerott. I should have had a second flask ready: I’m sorry.’ She met Jerott’s dark eyes and said to Lymond, ‘I think you might sit down, even if no one has asked you. Have you been questioned yet on your triumphs in Russia? Jerott is longing to ask you.’
‘He has been talking about you, and your successes,’ Lymond said. ‘And thank you, but I have enough wine. How is Philippa progressing?’
The lint-blue gaze lingered on him, caressingly. Marthe placed the flask at Jerott’s side and subsided in a sigh of wide, harebell skirts on a foot-stool. ‘Forgive! and never will I aft trespass. She is half-way through: the acme of speed and efficiency. Why don’t you settle for marriage with her, my Francis? A little house well filled, a little land well tilled, a little wife well willed …?’
‘After Russia?’ he said with amusement.
The schooled face accepted everything, smiling. ‘Don’t you think Philippa worthy of you? Or is she finding you a little too experienced for her? What effected the transformation?’
‘She was trained at the English court,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘Mary Tudor on top of the ministrations of Güzel would alter anyone’s habits.’
‘I had forgotten,’ said Marthe. Whimsically, the disarming blue gaze scanned her step-brother. ‘Of course, she was taught by Güzel. Then you must certainly forget your divorce and do your duty by her, my gallant Francis. Think of the continuity!’
For a moment no one spoke. Then Lymond got to his feet. ‘I have a better idea. You marry her,’ he suggested.
Neither the words nor the sense had filtered to Jerott, who was staring from sister to brother, his black hair faintly dishevelled. He said, ‘You don’t mean it. You can’t mean it, either of you. Philippa went into this marriage, assured that it was only a paper one. I was there. I remember how it happened. My God, Francis … She’s Kate Somerville’s daughter, an innocent hardly more than a schoolgirl. If she’s turned out a prize, it still gives you no damned right to talk about bedding her.’
‘That was Marthe’s share in the discussion,’ Lymond said. ‘I merely sat displaying passive resistance. If I may put it so crudely: should I wish satisfaction, I hardly need to resort to my wife.’
‘Then why are you still here?’ demanded Jerott. He sat, his face blurred with claret, peering at Francis Crawford in the dusk. ‘Devil take it, you were overlord of a country. You had the Tsar and his minions running pecking like poultry, so Adam says. Why don’t you go back? Or are you waiting to force that girl back with you?’
Wildly, Lymond stared at him. Then he turned, and in an explosion of breath slapped his hands on the sideboard and rested his weight over them. Crusts of wax, jarred from the candles, lay about him. He said softly, unlocking each separate syllable, ‘I am trying to go back. I thought, believe it or not, that nothing could stop me from going back. I was wrong. Marthe has stopped me. She suggested to the French that my divorce should be withheld unless I fight for them.’
He looked at Marthe as did her husband, his mouth a little open. ‘Mother of God,’ said Jerott Blyth stormily.
‘I beg your pardon,’ said a firm voice from the doorway. A wash of light brought clarity suddenly into the darkening room and bestowed a robust chestnut gloss on the bare head of Philippa Somerville entering with another candlestick in one hand. She advanced, aiming the flame at her husband and said, ‘I’m sorry, but I couldn’t help overhearing. Do I gather you stayed in France because of a bargain?’
Lymond turned round and laid his hands on the edge of the sideboard. Then he looked at his step-sister.
‘Yes,’ said Marthe and stayed precisely where she was, sitting on the low stool, staring with curling lip at her husband. ‘I suggested it to Piero Strozzi. They say the Tsar is power-mad. By the end of a year, there will be no controlling him, or the Russian army. There is little chance of it now. That is why Adam and his other captains have been trying so hard to prevent Francis from leading them to disaster. And why his wife has conspired to keep him in West Europe also. Is it not allowed,’ said Marthe dulcetly, ‘for a sister to protect her brother?’
Philippa set down the candlestick with a thump. ‘Is that true? You’re here only because they won’t give you a divorce otherwise?’
‘I’m sorry. Are you insulted?’ said Lymond.
‘Why do you want a divorce?’ said Philippa bluntly.
Stricken silent, three by no means inarticulate people looked at her. Then Lymond, speaking carefully, said, ‘Because, I assume, you would prefer to be free.’
Philippa’s clear brow wrinkled, and then smoothed again. ‘I suppose I should,’ she said. ‘But on the other hand, the Pope is old and I’m in no particular hurry. Was that the only reason?’
‘No,’ said Lymond. The double candlelight underlit his hair and his eyes and his cheekbones, all of them untrustworthy evidence. Philippa, from long experience, watched his hands, long-fingered and resilient, pressed hard on the walnut frieze of the sideboard. He removed them. He said, ‘In this far from seemly conversation, I suppose I had better bring in the name of Güzel.’
‘Yes. Well, we all know about Güzel,’ Philippa said. ‘But you told me once you didn’t intend her to have any children. So why after all this time feel bound to marry her? Wouldn’t she have you without it?’
‘Yes. Do tell us,’ said Marthe with interest. ‘Wouldn’t she have you without it?’
There was a brief silence. Francis Crawford said to his wife, ‘I am not sure if I follow you. Am I to assume that you are willing to dispense with a divorce if I wish to escape from France and find my way after all to Russia? I am, of course, delighted. Only the change of policy is, may I say, a little tardy?’
Philippa Somerville stood with her hands clasped and viewed, a little pale, the spectacle of Lymond losing his temper. She said, ‘Don’t be silly, it would be stupid to go back there now, unless you had to. That’s what I wondered. I wondered whether it might suit you instead to stay in Europe and marry someone important. Or whether it would do if you simply went on sleeping with people like Madame la Maréchale.’
‘Where the spirite is, there it is always sommer,’ said Francis Crawford semi-automatically. He was gazing at her. ‘Go on. There must be other options. Sum fra the bordell wald nocht byde Quhill that thai gatt the Spanyie Pockis?’
Philippa said patiently, ‘All I am trying to point out is that you may please yourself. With or without a divorce, I am quite capable of making my own arrangements.’
‘What? Who with?’ Jerott had jumped to his feet. ‘Damn you, Francis,’ he said.
Lymond paid no attention. He relinquished the edge of the table and moved gently forward until he stood over Philippa, his hands clasping one another behind his straight back. He said, ‘I hit you once, on the jaw. Do you remember?’
‘Yes,’ said Philippa. She added, ‘You hit me another time, on the arm.’
‘Oh? I had forgotten that,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Why?’
‘It happens all the time,’ Philippa said courteously. ‘I was where someone didn’t want me. If they place the sun in my right hand and the moon in my left and ask me to give up my mission, I will not give it up until the truth prevails or I myself perish in the attempt. Are you going to strike me?’
‘I am considering it,’ said Lymond. ‘Jerott is now convinced I am corrupting you. Fortunately I know, if Jerott does not, when you are speaking from conviction and when you are being deliberately and spitefully obstreperous. You have never made any arrangements outside marriage and you have no intention of making any, even if I felt constrained to break my agreement and start back to Moscow tomorrow.’ He lifted his eyes to Jerott. ‘The Somervilles,’ he said tartly, ‘are adept at sheer, bloody, domineering interference.’
Jerott sat down. He said, ‘I don’t understand’; and then, after a moment, ‘Christ, Francis. Have you got into the Maréchale’s bedroom already?’
Lymond began to laugh. Slightly weak with relief, Philippa looked at Marthe and found Lymond’s sister already staring at her with an odd look, not entirely friendly, which she failed to interpret. Jerott, receiving no answer, seized the flask of wine, tipped some into all the glasses and pushing Lymond’s across the table said, irritably, ‘Well, come and sit down and tell us. Have you——?’
‘I heard you,’ said Lymond. He dropped into a chair, elbows on knees and tented his hands over his eyes, still laughing silently. After a while, he looked up and said, ‘You know how it is. Au travail, on fait ce qu’on peut, mais à table, on se force. If time allowed, I should be delighted to discuss my private life in every choice particular with all of you, but it really isn’t relevant.
‘As soon as I’m released from my obligations, I’m going back to Russia, whether there is a place there for me, or whether I have to make it. I should break my pledge and go now, if I didn’t know very well the kind of revenge this monarchy would take. Also, if I might make the point, I myself wish to be freed.’
‘To marry Güzel?’ Marthe said. ‘Or take a bed-fellow to Russia with you?’
Lymond smiled, and leaning back in his chair, placed his ringed hands together, master of himself, unpleasantly, once more. ‘There was a suggestion,’ he said, ‘that the Tsar could find a better, younger, wealthier match which would be worthy of me, Güzel would be sent to a nunnery.’
‘You said she was with Prince Vishnevetsky,’ said Marthe. She was not smiling.
He opened his fingers expressively. ‘So the Tsar’s suggestion may prove very timely. Would it trouble you if I excused myself from the inquisition and asked Philippa what she found in the documents?’
‘Nothing,’ said Philippa shortly. She sat down and stared at the soiled parquetry floor, her hair falling forward. ‘I recited the names of the three witnesses to the only servants still left who belonged to the Dame de Doubtance. Nobody knew the two women. The third witness, the man, was a priest. They remembered him. He died ten years ago in a fire in his house, leaving no records and no relatives.’
‘Witnesses to what?’ Jerott said; and Philippa looked at Lymond, who glanced at the elaborate German clock on its bracket and got up. ‘You aren’t old enough to be told yet,’ he said. ‘Philippa, have you finished?’
Philippa gazed up at him. ‘I haven’t finished,’ she said. ‘And you haven’t started yet. We have the rest of the house to search: remember? The harvest is great, but the labourers are few.’
‘Oh, confound you. In the dark?’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Faint, faltering and fearful? Importuned?’
‘Unless you would prefer to come back another day?’ said Philippa with forgivable acidity; and lifting the torchière, waited politely for Marthe to lead them to where the Dame de Doubtance’s inheritance lay, locked and waiting for its reluctant beneficiary.