La splendeur claire à pucelle joyeuse
Ne luira plus, longtemps sera sans sel
Avec marchands, ruffiens, loups odieuse
Tous pesle-mesle monstre universel.
When they left the Hôtel Gaultier it was after midnight, and there was heavy mist like a sleeve through the courtyard.
The fog altered their plans. Instead of returning as they had come, Lymond dismissed the four men at arms and, shrouded in hooded cloaks lent them by Marthe, he and Philippa set out on foot, the quiet way.
Jerott had been asleep. Marthe, half-heartedly, had suggested they stay until morning. Stupid with overstrain, Philippa had listened gratefully to Lymond pointing out with acerbity that some minor affairs might require his attention.
The war was his business and this, for him, had been an interlude. She admired his detachment, and also his hardihood. Untrained by the Russian steppes, she was lured by self-interest only out into that dank sticky blackness. She wanted her bed. And she could not face the prospect of the cold ashes, the wrinkled mattress, the wounding brilliance of any haven Marthe might offer her.
The appalling news of those last moments in the Dame de Doubtance’s room showed no signs of weighing on her companion. She wished she could feel the same, with all her plans cut from under her feet. How did one discover who Lymond was, if he was not Francis Crawford? Whom had Sybilla substituted for the dead son she had borne, whose father was not Gavin, her husband? An unknown infant, whose full sister happened to be Marthe? Or was the other tale one had heard partly true: had Gavin, in turn, fathered children on some woman in France, and had he compelled Sybilla to accept one of these, and pass him off as her own?
Grasping Lymond’s cloak, she negotiated the cobbles, still thinking. They were not to speak, he had told her.
He had also given her, handsomely cased in jewelled leather, his own poniard to strap at her girdle.
The fog was so thick that the darkness had curdled to lead-colour, smudged here and there by a whorl of vapour with a seed of shrunk light in its middle. But for that, and the emanations of fish and cooking, of oil and urine and horses, they might have been ranging an unsanded tiltyard instead of this long, narrow street of tall houses. There seemed to be no one about, but she knew, without being told, that Lymond’s right hand rested on the hilt of his sword, while his left kept it still in the scabbard. Their spurs removed, his soft boots made no more sound on the cobbles than her slippers, through which every dropped nail and wood-shard and rope-end forced its impression.
The mouth of the rue Chalamon appeared suddenly ahead on her left, defined by the three rows of lit windows which bridged it; and then faded in a freakish swirl of the fog. They were half-way to the bridge. Then they had to cross it, and climb up the network of streets to the Hôtel Schiatti. Philippa wished she had protested more vigorously against this odd idea that the horses should go back without them. Because Lymond was the Voevoda of all Russia and a friend of her mother’s, it did not mean that he had more common sense than a Somerville of Flaw Valleys.
She wondered, plodding along, how far she was right in trusting Marthe with the key as she had done. There were several likely locksmiths in Lyon. And if nothing came of that, she herself would follow the other faint trails: she would visit Sevigny, Lymond’s home in the Loire valley, and from there try the locks in the Dame de Doubtance’s other house in the district.
It was empty, Marthe said, with all the money transferred to the Schiatti, and all the treasures to her rooms here in Lyon.
That might well be so, but she wanted to see for herself. There was something else also she wished to do, of which she had said nothing to Marthe. Jerott had found for her, unsurprised by her interest, the name of the convent where Marthe had been reared. It was near Coulanges, and close to both Blois and Sevigny. And now that she knew Marthe’s age, she could ask to search through their records.
She still found it hard to believe Marthe’s true age with all those fine-skinned blonde looks to refute it. But then, the Schiatti had been disinclined, for other reasons, to accept what she had told them of Lymond. The Constable was sixty-four; Piero Strozzi fifty-seven; the Marshal de St André fifty-two. The leaders of nations did not appoint young men to have overlordship of their armies. It took many years to establish a famous squadron of mercenaries. It required a man of exceptional power and maturity to attain, as M. le comte had done, the principal post in all Muscovy.
But whatever else he was not, Lymond was the infant a few weeks old whom Sybilla had brought home to Scotland that winter of 1526. Powerful he certainly was and mature, heaven knew, he had shown himself over and over to be. But he was also, however much he might wish to disguise it, only thirty years old in reality.
Which was, however, old enough to compel instant obedience when he said, as he did now, in a murmur, ‘Stand there and keep quiet a moment.’
He had drawn her to the side of the road, and up the steep kerb to a doorway. She waited, eyeing her husband as he stepped back, fading into the atmosphere. It seemed, on the whole, a fatuous idea to remain there when she could guard his back, at least, with the dagger. Just before he vanished totally, Philippa stepped down from her doorway and followed him.
In fact, he walked back twenty yards and then halted. Philippa halted behind him. Months of esoteric training in the Sultan Suleiman’s virgin seraglio had taught her, if nothing else, how to move silently. She had used her skill in the Hôtel Gaultier, to insinuate herself after Lymond. In point of fact, it came to her, she had really spent a large proportion of her young life following Lymond. Madame la Maréchale might be forgiven for imagining it was with an ulterior motive.
Marthe had thought the same. It was tedious, and a little undignified. Standing there, just within sight of the blurred shape of her husband, Philippa thought crossly that the formal nature of their relationship ought really to be self-evident. Quite literally, Lymond never touched her. A few times, in the past, he had struck her. But his threat tonight, needless to say, had not been serious.
He had a temper, but it would hardly drive him to injure her. Now his response was merely to detach himself from personal contact. Looking back, she could not remember a conversation veering on the intimate from which he had not withdrawn immediately. He had had of course, in the past, more than enough of being devoured alive by the consuming interest of his admirers. A boy called Will Scott, back in Scotland. An Archer, they said, called Robin Stewart. Jerott, perhaps, long ago. Small wonder that Francis Crawford today took routine precautions to repel invaders.
And of course, that was it. Standing there, her eyes blank in the fog, Philippa saw plainly so much which had escaped her. The dismissals she had suffered; the exchanges he had broken off; the measures he took, when he remembered, to dampen the ardour of any impressionable fool who might dream of clinging to him.
Such as herself. She remembered the ringed, picturesque hands on which she had fixed her eyes, and their abrupt withdrawal. It was not only in the eyes of the world that her pursuit of Lymond was being put down to a blossoming schoolgirl devotion. Warily, Lymond himself had considered it time to start taking precautions.
Shame and anger ran tingling over her skin and sank into her stomach, twisting all her tired organs. Like beads on a rosary, small encounters turned and winked in her memory. Occasions where he had seemed grateful, or pleased, or approving and where the moment of rapport had vanished. Before, clearly, the underlings could become over-excited. Reasonably, he had had enough of torrid devotion. All he wanted now were experienced people to go to bed with, like Madame la Maréchale and Güzel and Oonagh O’Dwyer, who had borne his son and then perished.
She understood all that perfectly. The wounding thing was that he should not think her capable of simple goodwill with no overtones of childish infatuation. She remembered, chilled, his nervousness, and Marthe’s, when she had questioned his reasons for requiring a divorce in the first place. The possibility that she would hold him to this marriage must have haunted him since the day it was contracted. She needn’t fear, after all, that he would be nasty to Austin Grey, or to anyone else who came courting her. He was more likely, she thought sourly, to encourage them warmly to compromise her.
Transmitted by some freak of the fog, Lymond’s voice said, apparently in her ear, ‘If you call out, I shall kill you, my child. Did you imagine I should not know you another time?’
Where there had been one person, there were now two; and no longer in the dark but hazily lit in the swimming glow from the rue de Chalamon archway. And it was a child Lymond had caught: a muscular ten-year-old in bare feet and tunic who kicked and twisted and bit in the expert, impervious grasp as Lymond drew him into the tunnel, and darkness.
Following hurriedly, Philippa cannoned into them before she could stop herself. The child wrenched himself free. He was two paces away when Lymond’s hand, sweeping round, caught him a blow on the jaw that jarred him back to the wall again, staggering. He began to slide down, his tousled head lolling.
Before he reached sitting-position, Lymond had unbuckled his belt and turning him round, had lashed the boy’s arms hard together. Then he rose, the weight of his foot on his captive, and pulling a thin package from the child’s tunic, tossed it over to Philippa.
The fog lapped and coiled in the indirect light from the archway. She opened the package.
In it were some steel darts and a blow-pipe. ‘I recognized him in Marthe’s kitchen,’ he said. ‘He tried to kill me on the bridge yesterday. If you had attended to a simple request to stay in a doorway, I should not have needed to hit him.’
‘I thought,’ said Philippa curtly, ‘that you might need your poniard. Was this why you sent the horses first as a decoy? You knew that the boy would send word when you were leaving?’
‘It seemed likely,’ said Lymond. ‘Then I asked Jerott to lock the kitchen door so that the child couldn’t betray the change of plan to whoever is paying him. One hopes that it isn’t Jerott who is paying him. Or Marthe, of course.’
‘You don’t mean that,’ said Philippa.
‘You overrate me,’ said Lymond. ‘So does Danny Hislop. He thought I didn’t like manhandling children as a matter of conscience. You! What are you called, you?’ He had switched to French again.
The boy had recovered. He sat, his bound hands against the bridge wall, and blasphemed. Lymond picked up his sword from where he had laid it and poised it, with great care, across the tendons of the child’s ankle. ‘There is a lady here,’ he said. ‘Do you understand? We do not wish to know why Abaddon in the bottommost pit will be receiving you. We wish to know who paid you to try and kill us.’
‘You will find out,’ said the child. He was sitting very still under the blade. Even so, a hairline of blood showed on the bare flesh and then was concealed by the fog-wreaths, drifting pallidly into the darkness.
‘Do you think so?’ said Lymond. ‘My horsemen were expecting an attack. Perhaps your friends are all dead. Who will pay you then?’
‘The same,’ said the boy hardily. But he was watching the sword. ‘But there will be more for me, then,’
‘You say?’ said Lymond. ‘But these men know what they ask of you. To kill a royal commissioner, and not only at night. In broad daylight, where you may be recognized and caught, as I have caught you. For the risks you run, the reward must be riches undreamed of. What is it worth, to go through life footless? What do they pay you?’
There was a short silence. Then, ‘My name is Paul. They pay me three écus,’ said the boy thinly.
‘I see,’ said Lymond. ‘And what would you do, if you were paid with such an object as this lady’s girdle?’
Tears, stinging Philippa’s eyes, obscured her sight as she scrabbled to unhook her girdle. She held it out by the light of the archway, so that the skeined pearls all dimly glimmered, and the bullion tassel swung like a pendulum. Lymond said, ‘What are their names?’
The boy Paul said, ‘They would kill me.’ His eyes, shifting back and forth, followed the swing of the bullion.
‘I shall kill you,’ said Lymond, very softly.
There was a silence. Then the boy turned his head and spat. ‘I will tell you.’
The names were those of merchants, three in number. From Lymond’s face, Philippa could not tell if the answer surprised him. He listened, thoughtfully, and when the boy had finished he neither removed the sword nor asked Philippa to hand over the girdle. Instead he said, ‘What you say may be true. Now I require proof of it.’
The boy Paul started up, and then shrank back under the cut of the sword. He cried, ‘You said——’
‘I made a bargain,’ said Lymond coolly. ‘It remains to be seen whether you have kept your share of it. You will come back now to the Hôtel de Gouvernement, and you will remain there until my men have taken these merchants and searched them. So soon as your story is proved, you will be set free, along with the girdle. Until then, you are my prisoner … footless or dead, as you will.’
It was common sense: the simplest of precautions. Philippa, slowly reclasping her girdle, made no comment as Lymond withdrew the sword; as the boy crying and protesting was dragged to his feet and then, propelled in front, was made to stumble before them, along the rue Mercière towards the bridgehead. Only she said, gripping his cloak as they set off, ‘Who freed the boy? If the kitchen was locked, then who freed him? Jerott was sleeping.’
‘Marthe, of course,’ Lymond said. ‘The servants’ door is thick, but they would make quite a noise with their banging. By then, it was too late for the boy to find and warn his friends that we weren’t with our escort. He was bound to try and follow us, and probably try to kill us himself, if he could. After all, he had three écus to gain by it.’ He shook the boy. ‘Was that so?’
The boy Paul agreed. He had become very much quieter. Hazily, Philippa wondered, again, why Lymond had not admitted Marthe to his confidence. Why risk death for them both, when surely all he had to do was interview the boy there, in the kitchen? Unless, of course, he didn’t wish to embroil Marthe or Jerott. Or unless he didn’t trust them, which she didn’t want to believe. Or unless …
She had only got so far when Lymond’s cloak, with a tearing wrench, was ripped from her hand. The boy, she saw, had flung himself on the ground, breaking the grip on his collar. Then he sprang to his feet and set off, panting, into the darkness.
It was a slim hope, with Francis Crawford behind him. Lymond did not use his sword. But he used, without hesitation, all the other skills which permit an armed man to bring down an unarmed boy, flying; and then having knocked him to the ground, stood over and partly on him, another precaution undoubtedly wise. Philippa said, ‘He was lying?’
‘I don’t think so,’ said Lymond. ‘I think he just doesn’t want to cross the bridge with us.’
There was a small silence. The boy Paul breathed heavily, exposing gapped teeth. His nose was running. Lymond said, ‘You were not the only paid assassin in the Hôtel Gaultier?’
They stared at one another. Then Paul shook his head.
‘There was another boy? Someone who was not in the kitchen?’
‘Another man,’ said the boy sullenly. ‘The groom in the stables.’
‘I see. So the decoy party will have reached home quite unmolested, and the welcoming party will be looking out, not for them, but for this lady and myself on foot? What is the groom’s name, and who is he paid by?’
‘His name is Jérôme. He is paid by the same three. There are some of us in the employment of many merchants. The couple Blyth know nothing,’ the boy said. ‘Let me go. Let me go! They will kill me.’
‘I’m afraid they will,’ said Lymond thoughtfully. ‘How many of them are there?’
‘Many. Very many,’ the boy said. He was gasping.
‘Where?’
‘Hereabouts,’ said the boy Paul desperately. ‘Let me go! I don’t want the girdle.’
‘On the other hand,’ said Lymond, ‘you’re going to need it, my friend, to escape with.’ He lifted his sword, and laying the edge against the child’s bond, quickly severed it. Then, gripping Paul’s arm, he spoke in English. ‘Give him the pearls. He won’t want to share those with anyone.’
Philippa gave Paul the pearls. He snatched them, his eyes veering to Lymond’s hard hand on his shoulder. Lymond lifted it, and the child bolted.
‘A total vindication for Danny Hislop,’ Philippa said shakily.
‘Undoubtedly, if you expected me to kill him,’ said Lymond. ‘Are you as tired as you look?’
‘Don’t tell me,’ Philippa said, with a venom sluggish with weariness. ‘You want us to traboule through to the quayside and swim the Saône to the Côte de la Baleine, from which we clamber over the Petit Palais roof to your lodging.’
‘You’ve been listening to Jerott,’ said Lymond absently. Philippa followed his gaze into the smoky vapour at the neck of the street. Through it, black against the faint incandescence of invisible lamplight, appeared the spoked carcass of an overturned wagon. Within its pattern something moved, and sharpened in outline. Two men, advancing.
Philippa turned, her hood sweeping back. Fog swirled at the mouth of the rue de Chalamon, blemished with random shadows. The shadows turned from ashen to charcoal and then, moving and shouting, to black. She said, ‘There are two men behind us as well.’
The arched mouth of a traboule lay just beside them. Lymond looked at her then, his sword drawn, his eyes smiling, his hood also fallen back from his hair, since there was no longer any point in concealment. ‘Trust me,’ he said. ‘Do what I tell you. No one is going to harm you.’
With four men rushing upon them and another, no doubt, at the other end of the tunnel, the carefree voice might have seemed ludicrous. But Philippa’s heart, oddly, lifted; her tiredness vanished and she returned his smile, unshadowed and fleeting as his hand closed on her arm and he drew her, in a single, silent rush, into the arched passage under the building.
The fog streamed in with them: past closed doors and shuttered windows to the foot of a narrow staircase; a grille and a plangent statue of St Peter, his key-holding hand lit by an oil lamp. Behind that, another lightening of the darkness suggested a courtyard to one side with a lanthorn in it. And beyond that, unrelieved darkness again.
A little whistle from pursed lips sounded suddenly from the traboule arch they had just left behind them. And almost immediately an identical whistle answered, from the darkness at the other end of the tunnel.
‘Damn!’ said Lymond cheerfully, and released her. In one liquid series of movements, he removed and draped his cloak on the statue. In another, he rehung the lamp swiftly behind it, and retrieving his poniard placed it among the stony keys. Point outwards, it glimmered there dully.
‘I’m going to delay them,’ he said, ‘while you explore the courtyard.
‘The man in the moon drinks claret
The huntsmen whoop and hallowe
Ringwood, Royster, Bowman, Jowler,
All the chase now follow.’
Philippa said, ‘I used to be rather good with a peashooter. There’s Ringwood.’
A shadowy figure appeared at the mouth of the traboule. ‘And Royster,’ said Lymond. He had vanished into an alcove opposite the dim silhouette of St Peter. The fog swam round the hood of the statue and the knife in its châtelaine fingers. A second pursuer, less distinct than the first, gesticulated in the entrance. Philippa, withdrawn deep into the darkness, watched them as she unpacked the boy’s parcel and drew from it the sarbacane and a handful of blow-darts. One of the men at the traboule entrance repeated his whistle.
Lymond was whispering. His voice, agreeably eerie, echoed through the foggy stone vaulting.
‘O God breake thou theyr teeth at once
Within theyr mouth throughout
The tuskes that in their great chaw bones
Like Lions whelpes hang out.’
The two figures hesitated. Philippa fitted a dart to her blowpipe. Lymond’s voice, a little louder this time, said hollowly, ‘May Gibil devour you! May Gibil catch you! May Gibil kill you! May Gibil consume …!’
The words rose to a shout. The clash of steel on stone drowned it. The man nicknamed Ringwood had rushed into the traboule. With a roar and a sweep of his sword he slashed the hooded figure which loomed in the darkness. The head of St Peter, immovably benign, jumped from its shoulders. With equal precision Lymond stepped from the shadows and forced his sword through the hide, flesh and bone of Ringwood’s broad leather back.
Ringwood fell. The statue tottered. Lymond pulled out his sword. Philippa, vouchsafed at last a perfect view of Royster plunging in to the rescue, aimed her sarbacane, took a deep breath and spat.
Royster screamed. Two other shapes, rushing precipitately in from the roadway, hesitated, stopped, and remained suspended, like washed-out dye, in the entrance. Lymond kneeling said, ‘Christ.… My dear girl, you’ve killed him.’
‘I meant to,’ said Philippa irritably. ‘To devise is the work of the master: to execute, the act of the servant. There’s a courtyard there with a couple of workshops, a turnpike tower and a stable.’ She spat again, and a yell came from the mouth of the traboule. One of the shadows, clutching its shoulder, was cursing. She said, ‘You could try banging on a few doors, but they’ll be mad if they answer,’ and realized that she was talking to herself: Lymond had passed her like a wraith and was already in the courtyard banging on doors. The two men at the entrance of the traboule stayed where they were, debating. The man or men at the opposite end had made no further sign either. It seemed to argue that they were pretty certain there was no escape possible. She thought they were probably waiting for reinforcements.
Philippa put the pipe in her teeth like a flautist, and kicking off her shoes, began unhooking her bodice. The men in the entrance arch faded and vanished. She called, ‘They’ve gone! Mr Crawford!’ and hopped to her feet, kicking aside her discarded gown and petticoat as Lymond, reconstituted, became again visible.
He examined the traboule entrance and with equal interest the knee-length chemise of his companion. ‘At least we’ll let them think we think so,’ he said. ‘What in God’s name are you doing?’
‘Looking for a piece of string,’ said Philippa. ‘Since someone gave away my pearl cincture.’
Lymond pulled undone the knot of his shirt and tossed her the silk cord with its aiglets. ‘Kirtle your chemise up with that, and keep your cloak on. I’ve managed to break a few locks. There’s a horse, a knife-grinder’s and a shoemaker’s workshop. Hurry. They’re bound to try and come in from the quayside.’
She took St Peter’s lamp with her. He had the courtyard lanthorn already inside the stable. The cobbler’s workshop produced thirty left-footed shoes on a spar, a greasy felt helmet and a tunic apron, the last two of which covered her hair and her chemise respectively. She chose two identical shoes and jammed them on, hopping, prior to making one or two fast dispositions. A horse’s feet, trampling excitedly inside the stable, told that Lymond was occupied also. She returned from the traboule in time to see him race over the courtyard and up the first flight of a turnpike.
He came down again almost immediately. ‘There’s a group of men on the quay at our entrance. When I send the horse through the traboule, take that awl and run like hell after it. Jab it if it stops. Jab it when it gets to the entrance so that it turns left and makes off downriver. Then sprint across the quay to the Chalamon jetty. I’ll join you there.’ He listened. ‘They’re coming. Now!’ And he opened the doors of the stable.
‘I only accept it,’ said Philippa, ‘to avoid cavillation.’ A large, portly horse cantered out with, affixed to his back, the six-foot sweep of the shoemaker’s other spar, containing thirty right-footed shoes. Pinked by the awl he neighed, bucked, and pranced his way into the traboule’s low-ceilinged corridor. Then head down, he charged along its black length to the entrance.
On each side of him the spar, sweeping the walls, hissed and whipped and let fly smartly from time to time with a boot or a patten. Within six paces it had hooked a yelling man under the chin and carried him a fair way, his teeth sunk in his tongue, before dropping him. At the same moment it fired off the companion of Philippa’s footgear, which she had been hopefully watching. She caught it, galloping. A man somewhere ahead shouted, ducking, and then was sprawled on the ground by a chopine. The entrance burst upon her, a vaporous dazzle of yellow. She aimed for the horse’s right haunch and jabbed the awl in it.
With a squeal and a snort, the horse hurtled out through the entrance and turning left, thundered off up the quay, with the sound of running men’s steps dwindling after it. Two shadows on her right became a pair of men advancing on her brandishing axes. While she looked, they lay down; chiefly because someone had cut and let fall a fishing net on them. Philippa said ‘Ha!’ and set off, scampering, across the Chalamon quay to the riverside.
Below her was a short wooden jetty whose steps led to a cluster of rowing-boats. She stood on one leg, momentarily, to put on her new hard-won foot-gear and then slid down the steps and into one. The quay lamps showed her Francis Crawford, his sword in its scabbard, arrived on the jetty and laughing at her. ‘In Moab I will washe my feete, Over Edom throw my shoo … Meditate, O Bhikshu, and be not heedless. There aren’t any oars. Your place and mine is under the jetty. Your cloak, my child. Quickly!’
He took it, but didn’t follow her. Clambering out of the rocking shallop and along the rotted cradle of timbers that upheld the jetty, Philippa heard him shouting behind her. ‘To the boats! Quickly! Quickly!’ There was a thud; then another, and a splash as the boat she had just left was cast off. From her refuge under the planks she saw him thrust the tenantless boat until it was caught by the current. It swung a moment and then turned twisting into the flow of the river. There were two huddled sacks in it, one of them draped in her mantle. He was busy a moment longer and then, ducking, began making his way along the dark scaffold towards her. Then reaching her, he signalled for silence.
Armed with knives, their pursuers had not taken long to slash through the fishing nets. And with their whistles they had summoned all those who could move within earshot. The thud of footsteps sounded over Philippa’s head as she clung to the timbers, accompanied by a good deal of shouting and swearing and a series of dull thumping noises, followed by a splintering as if someone was forcing a doorway. There was, she remembered, a ferryman’s hut by the quayside. Bowman and Jowler were going to have oars therefore. Then followed a trampling, and voices, and the creak of laden boats settling, and the splash of loosed ropes, followed by the rattle and groan as the oars made their first sweep in the water. The sounds faded away, and silence descended.
The fog, it seemed to her, had become rather thinner. The lamplight, striking down through the joints in the planks, showed her Francis Crawford’s ruffled fair hair and open shirt and the filthy brocade of his pourpoint. He was doubled up, laughing. Philippa poked him. He unfolded, still laughing, and scrambling out from under the jetty, gave her his hand to emerge on the steps in the lamplight. There was no sign of the boats: only, quite far downriver, a faded outburst of hysterical shouting.
‘With Emeroides in the hinder parts
He stroke his enmies all
And put them then unto a shame
That was perpetuall …
‘I took the bungs out of the shallops,’ said Lymond.
*
He pulled himself together before she did, dropping her hand and running his fingers through his tangled hair, restoring it to something like normal orderliness. Then he surveyed her, seeing, one supposed, the dirty chemise and long cobbler’s apron, and the greasy felt cap, with the hair leaked from under its ear-flaps.
The familiar blandness returned to his face, smoothing out all the wild elation. ‘Well,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘Make my compliments to the boys of Flaw Valleys, or whoever trained you in the use of a peashooter. You did very well. I shall now return you to the Schiatti, Hathor’s temple; home of intoxication and place of enjoyment. They won’t know whether to lock up their sons or their daughters.’
Philippa Somerville shoved her hair under her cap, stuck her hands on her hips, and without budging a step, stood and glared at him. ‘Do I appear,’ she inquired, ‘crazed with lust?’
His eyes flicked wide open, Lymond considered her. Then he bent his head, and she could not tell if he was smiling. ‘Very seldom,’ he said.
‘Or artless? Or addled? Or excitable?’ She was getting angrier. ‘Is that why you keep recoiling as if I was a line of armed cavalry?’
He was not smiling. He looked up slowly and met her gaze, his own level. He said, ‘I beg your pardon. I didn’t know I was giving quite such an insufferable impression. I think I forget sometimes …’ He hesitated, choosing his language.
Philippa finished it for him. ‘… that I am aged twenty, and Kate Somerville’s daughter; and sensible? For Sybilla, I am willing to involve you in any kind of genealogical embarrassment. But you really needn’t have fears of the other kind.’
‘I don’t. I know that perfectly well,’ Lymond said. ‘I am trying, I believe, to avoid offering you the kind of attentions which would be expected by Madame la Maréchale.’
He did not cite Güzel, she noticed. Who had the same training she had. Touched with remorse, Philippa said soberly. ‘Since we’re being frank … Wasn’t that foolish? The Queen is going to offer you the Maréchale’s daughter in marriage. It might well be what you need.’
‘What I need?’ said Lymond. Then he said, ‘Oh, I see. But you haven’t seen Madame la Maréchale in her chemise.’
With commendable patience, Philippa made no rejoinder. By mutual consent, they had begun walking rather swiftly towards the gate to the bridge-head. After a moment he went on. ‘I knew Catherine d’Albon was being sent south to meet me. I don’t want her. That is why I did what I did with her mother.’ He hesitated again, and then said, ‘What I told Marthe tonight was not strictly true. I am already pledged, and not only to the nation of Russia.’
Behind the cobbler’s apron unpleasant changes took place in Philippa’s abdomen. She ignored them. ‘To Güzel?’ she said steadily.
He shook his head. She saw that, looking ahead in the fog, his profile contained a curious and suspended calm, the smiling mask of some state far from peaceful. ‘Not to Güzel,’ he said. ‘But for my lifetime.’ And walking still he offered her, smiling again, four lines of verse, lightly spoken.
‘Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera
Pour nulle vivante, tant soit elle bonne ou sage
Forte et puissante, riche de hault lignaige
Mon chois est fait, aultre ne se fera.’
‘I didn’t know,’ Philippa said. It was a half-truth. Subconsciously, she supposed she had always known, since she was a schoolgirl. She said, ‘It’s my turn to beg your pardon. I only wanted to assure you that I have nothing to tender but friendship. But if you want it, there is a great deal of that, going cheaply.’
He slowed, with the intention perhaps of confronting her. But on second thoughts he said only, ‘Then the cost should not be beyond me. The pledge, without Latreia or Douleia, is simple friendship?’ He had begun once again to walk briskly.
Rousing herself: ‘The pledge,’ said Philippa, tartly, ‘is friendship. Simplicity is not, you will agree, one of your prominent attributes.’ They had passed through the gateway and turning left, mounted the rise of the long eight-arched bridge crossing the Saône. The fog was still thick on the bridge, concealing all but the first pair of flambeaux, but a current of air, winding through it, revealed the Fourvière heights for a moment, black against a starlit sky with the chapel lights bright on its summit, and the roofs of lamplit houses with their feet in the fog at its foot.
Dancing red in the haze, one of the bridge torches swayed in its socket. Gazing at it, Philippa was aware that she had been ungracious. She said, ‘But if you’ve no objection to fish scales, I’ll shake on it.’ And Lymond, to her gratification, accepted the hand that she offered him.
He did not shake it. He took it in a grinding and sinewy grip and dragged her sideways until she was running. Then he released her, spinning, to sprawl on the cobbles. His sword hissed from its scabbard. And gasping, she sat up and stared at him.
What she had seen was not the bridge flambeau swaying. It was a torch in the grip of a burly man with a fierce, swollen face and a patch of raw flesh two inches wide running down brow, cheek and jawbone. A man who strode out of the fog on the crown of the bridge, axe in hand and stood, holding the torch high and grinning. ‘Well met, M. de Sevigny: I might have been in the boat if your little bitch hadn’t blocked the traboule with Renaud’s knife-grinding wheel, and left it running. You may put up your sword. There is a line of men awaiting you at the other end of the bridge, and another line closing the bridgehead behind you. You would have met them if you had come out of the rue Mercière. As it is, you came by the quay gate, and this makes me very happy, and also my friend Octavien beside you. Only, where is the little bitch?’
He never did hear the answer, for Philippa stabbed him from behind with her husband’s poniard. She dragged it out as he fell and stabbed him again, gritting her teeth, in the area delineated in white paint by the black eunuch who instructed the princes’ class in the seraglio. A staccato hack of steel, interspersed with an outbreak of retching, told that the man Octavien had flung himself on Lymond. She caught up the fallen man’s torch and lifted it.
In a flare of yellow, the blade of an axe parted from the haft and whistled out of their sight in the darkness. The owner, the stock still in his hand, was in Lymond’s grip and Lymond’s hand was over his mouth, stifling his cries and forcing his head back with an expertise which Philippa saw was swift, impersonal and utterly final. As Lymond lowered the dead man to the ground she uttered neither comment nor commendation. It could hardly have been otherwise, man to man; or Octavien would have been fit to lead armies, and Lymond to be a third-rate paid assassin.
But from this point onwards it was not man to man, but Francis Crawford and herself against an unknown number of men at each end of this bridge. And although she had joked about swimming, there was no escape that way. Below the bridge was swift current and a tumble of rocks that would kill them. Lymond’s voice very quietly said, ‘Christ, Philippa: I won’t ask where you learned that. Now prop up the torch and come and give me a hand. Si leonina pellis non satis est, assuenda vulpina.’
‘Or, Si Dieu ne me veut ayder, le diable ne me peut manquer,’ said Philippa valiantly. ‘I am listening, mon compère. As a drunkard believes a drunkard, and a madman a madman.’
Very soon after that, the chain of five men at the Fourvière end of the bridge heard break out again, and closer, the clash of sword blades in the vapour. This time they could also hear voices, including the screams of a woman.
Their orders were to remain where they were. But it was galling to stand by and listen, when it was clear that the King’s emissary and his lady had been quite overthrown by the ambush. Presently, the girl’s screeching voice rose to a shriek: there was a shout, and a thud and a splash from the river bed. A moment later, the foreigner’s cries were cut off also. Then, speaking their own patois, an indignant voice, presumably Octavien’s, said, ‘Don’t be a fool! Get the rings at least before he goes over!’
After that, it would have been foolish to stay. One of the five men began to stroll forward, and was overtaken by another. In a moment, all five were running headlong for the parapet, where the smoky light of a torch flared on the jewelled points and rich doublet of M. le comte de Sevigny, encasing a very dead body already dangling half over the handrail. Boots and laces and buttons were already torn off in ten grasping handfuls before the first of the five men realized that the body was not that of M. de Sevigny. And when, whirling round, they thought to dash back the way they had come, the two people they sought were already running, softly and fast for the bridgend.
Because Lymond was steering his wife by the arm, they both saw the obstacle in their path just before they cannoned into it. It was large and lukewarm and soft. Fending herself off, Philippa’s hand pressed against buckles and leather and then, stumbling, she recognized something else—the unyielding steel of plate armour.
A horse and rider, both dead. With others, she suspected, lying beyond them. Lymond’s voice said, ‘Run to the end of the bridge, turn right, and hide yourself in the porch of the Customars’ house.’
As a madman obeys a madman, and a drunkard a drunkard. Asking no questions, she did as he told her.
So their escort had been waylaid after all. No quartet of men at arms had arrived back at the Hôtel Schiatti or at Lymond’s lodging: no one even knew that she and Lymond had left Jerott and Marthe. Instead, their attackers were more numerous and better organized than anyone had expected. They could cordon off the bridge on the chance that the Captain-General had escaped from the quayside. It was equally possible that the roads to Lymond’s destination and her own on this side of the river were watched.
Hence her instructions. Instead of running on she turned right, along the rue de la Pescherie as far as the church of St Eloi. Then facing uphill and away from the river, she turned round the back of the church and into the tall, jutting porch of the Custom-house. Inside, the studded door with its wrought iron hinges was firmly locked, and the windows were dark.
Lymond had not told her to knock. And indeed, the noise would bring their assailants sooner, in all likelihood, than the customars. She waited therefore, breathing hard, with sweat drops, erratic as mice, straying over her neck and her temples, and listened for the footsteps which meant Lymond was coming.
She never did hear them. Instead there struck on her eardrums a sonorous sound, hardly deadened by fog, of another calibre altogether. The alarm bell on the bridge had been set swinging.
For perhaps eight strokes it rang deeply and loudly. Then, shaking lightly, it came to a halt, revealing a ground-bass of excited men shouting.
Lymond, in his shirt-sleeves, shot into her hiding-place breathlessly. ‘They’ve cut him down. Hell.’ He listened. ‘I was afraid they’d seen us. The fog is going. This way. Traboules, my knife-grinding Philippa. With your invention and mine, it will really go hard if we can’t lose them.… Wake up, you bastards!’
She could hear running feet now, as he had done. But even so, he stopped in his stride and scooping up first one stone and then another, hurled them with a vicious crash straight through the Customars’ windows. Then, catching up, he caught Philippa under the arm and plunged through and under the first of the rows of tall houses which climbed the steep hillside in front of them.
Fear had gone. He had touched her. He had admitted her to the sexless friendship she had asked of him. She had been treated at last as a partner and adult. She was free, as he had said, to join her invention to his; to expect and give co-operation without fear or favour, as might be done by Adam or Jerott or Danny.
A heady experience, for an only child accustomed to single-thread happiness, and not to the moment of creation that occurs when the warp is interlocked with the weft. When the singer is matched with the sounding-board; the dream with the poet. When the sun and the fountain first meet one another.
Side by side they were evading, she and Francis Crawford, a pack of men who intended to kill them. To escape them would be a miracle. To try to escape them with wit and grace and all that civilization could add to an occasion essentially barbarous was her care, her delight, and her intention. And the outcome he had foreseen touched her in its terrible proximity not at all.
So they fled into the night-black traboules: up the steps, between the pillars, over the courtyards and again into the twisting broken-backed tunnels, with the thudding of feet always tracking the darkness behind them.
Since the flight from Greece when he had been sick with opium, she had never seen unleashed, for such a span of time, his strength, his gaiety and his physical charm.
Every circumstance conspired, like a merchant, to display them to her. Swooping like birds from space to space of the tall houses scaling the hillside, they used what fortune suggested to defend themselves with. Baulked by a locked door, they took to a high, sprawling staircase whose galleries overlooked a nest of different courtyards: as their pursuers swarmed after them he bombarded them blithely with geranium pots, chanting: ‘Ding ye the tane and I the uther’ as she helped him, so that children screamed and dogs barked and a man in his night shirt, opening shutters, discharged an arquebus into the night air and dislodged an entire family group of Jupiter, Ganymede and the eagle from a cornice. ‘A sangre! A fuego! A sacco!’ sang out Francis Crawford; and seizing her hand, set off running again.
He talked, indeed, all the time, breathlessly, with snatches of verse and of laughter and a flow of frequently ribald comment which only ceased, now and then, in the cause of evasion. To begin with, also, he guided her, until she showed him there was no need for it. Philippa Somerville had spent a childhood competing with schoolboys among the woods and streams of north Tyneside, and in her cap and apron and sensible shoes was as agile as he was and, she wished to prove, not without invention.
They clambered over the cold nested clay of the pantiled roofs and crossed a narrow street on a ladder, because Philippa insisted on it. They sprang from niche to balcony and swung between pillars. They arrived at ground level and freed a mastiff and unshackled the door of a pig sty: at first floor, and found looms and a great roll of silk which streamed and bounded, calendaring all their assailants; at second and third and fourth floors and found sacks of flour to upset, or a bucket of slops or a wallsconce to send flying downwards, first from her hands and then from his, watched by the winged lions and griphons on the ceiling bosses, the angels guarding the windows; the fanged faces grinning from corbels or spewing open-throated from gutters above them. Decoration Gothic and classical heaped its profusion around them: shell and pilaster, acanthus and ballflower, bas relief and statuary in niche and fountain and rooftop as they crossed the road on a plank and began again, in the next house above them.
It gave them, also, a profusion of openings. Hanging gardens contained jets of water which could be diverted and pools into which the unwary could be enticed in the darkness. Fruit hurtled down (Pesches de Corbeil! les pesches!) and Tyndale’s snake, in a glorious mélange of colour (Tussssssh! Ye shall not dye …) burst from the vats of a dyeshop.
Walls handsome with stone frieze and tracery were not hard to climb, any more than garden ramparts with vine and trellis and niche, whose cage or pot or plaque or classical amphora might suggest a ponderous helmeting. And there was alway something to use, a row of melting grey plates from a kiln shelf: a slither of fish; a bag of pepper, left by a spicer, which touched off a sneezing and barking that spiralled up all the wide turnpike and flew trouncing back from the roof vaults.
Philippa had carried the pepper. Francis Crawford had a flask of neat spirits, filched from an apothecary’s windowledge. He broke the neck at the top of the staircase and splashed it into the channelled stone handrail below him. Then he snatched down a sconce and set fire to it.
They fled hand in hand to the rooftops, and flung shut the hatch on the fire and the shouting. ‘It won’t spread,’ said Lymond swiftly. ‘It will hold them a little.’ And stood for a moment on the dizziest edge of the roof-peak, bright and breathless and smiling.
His eyes were on the south; his hands held two flaming brands which streamed in a soft flowing air that had melted the fog to scraves and streamers wreathing the chimney tops. Fed by flame and by moonlight his hands and hair and shirt contained their own glow, like the globe of a sorcerer.
But he was not a figment of daydream or of fantasy. He was the quick-witted man who had raced with her; the man whose strong wrists had pulled her from trouble; whose laughter recognized, more than his own, her buffoonery; whose voice had whispered, sung, exclaimed or cursed, with equal felicity, carefree as birdsong on top of their striving.
Whose essence, stripped by necessity was, it now seemed, warm and joyous and of great generosity.
He stood, his eyes on the plunging rue de la Orfeverie below him, and intoned, gravely and musically.
‘By the grace and ineffable Providence of God, the only Unoriginated, and Infinite, Invisible, Inexpressible, Terrible and Inaccessible, Abiding above the Heavens, Dwelling in Unapproachable Light, and with a Vigilant Eye inspecting the Earth at suitable intervals …
‘Adam Blacklock has got off his backside and done something about the bloody uproar eventually.’
Philippa dragged off her cap and pushing back her drenched hair, looked below them. He was right. At last the alarm had been raised; the troops mobilized. It seemed that all the streets from the river were flowing with pebbled silver, rising higher and higher and flooding now to the roots of their building as Lymond, shouting, caught their gaze with his voice and his fire-brands. Then he dropped them and spoke to the night air. ‘Well, it’s impressive, you know, but there’s a thing in’t, as the fellow said drinking the dish-clout. The bastards might dodge out the back way.’
‘The side way,’ said Philippa, peering. ‘They’re forcing open a door to the ruelle.’
‘Are they, dammit?’ he said. ‘Then let’s stop them!’
To stop them they had to arrive first at the head of the ruelle. There should be, said Lymond, a tavern there.
To reach it, Philippa fled with him round and round spiral stairs, across landings, along balconies, into arches and doorways and courtyards. There was a tavern there. They went through it like gimlets through butter and gained the top of the ruelle, up which all that was left of their enemies was painfully staggering.
The ruelle Punaise was less a street than a near-vertical drain between houses, roughly stepped and little more than the width of one person. Because they were tired, their former pursuers found speed beyond them. Because, below in the street, the first of the troops were arriving, the climbing men slipped and staggered and fell in their fear but kept running, for at the top of the ruelle lay the steep road to the wall, and the hill of Fourvière, and freedom.
Until the last moment, indeed, they hoped to reach it. They saw the mouth of the ruelle above them, open, empty of people. If they discerned, through the sweat, a certain unevenness on the horizon, it seemed no more, very likely, than a profile of the stone and pebble and mud of the vennel. They were not to know that the outline was that of eight four-gallon blackjacks, arrived there by a neat piece of leverage.
By dint of the same leverage, they released themselves, one by one, as the group of men neared the top of the ruelle. Eight full barrels, naturally, would have occasioned a profound maceration. Eight empty barrels were not very pleasant: they knocked every man off his feet and then kicked him belabouring down all the stairs and into the arms of the soldiers.
Lymond watched them judicially, calling out strikes and setting off each barrel at the required angle. Towards the end he found some boules and bounced them down as well: they hailed upon barrels and footpads and trilled, with ringing reproach, on the rising helmets of the pikemen beyond them.
‘As Snailes do wast within the shel
And unto slime do run
As one before his tyme that fel
And never saw the sunne …
‘Whoops! That was Adam,’ said Francis Crawford, watching open-eyed the progress of his latest invention. ‘Serve him bloody well right. Syne Sweirness, at the secound bidding, Came lyk a sow out of a midding. Am I running about; are you running about so that the fat officers of the Christian Crown of France can lie in the Hôtel de Gouvernement, taking advantage of the wife of the Maréchal? Mind you,’ and he chose a spot at the top of the steps and sat down, surveying the scene with continuing interest, ‘no one could say that we hadn’t brought ourselves now to the attention of this majestic metropolis.’
Philippa sat down as well rather weakly, and watched. The barrels, trundling down, had done their worst with the miscreants and were now cutting swathes through the rescue team. The boules, flashing in the new torchlight, ricocheted still from step to wall to other less fortunate targets. She saw Adam, getting up, fend off another just before it capsized him and Danny Hislop, behind, caper hurriedly. She further realized that what she was seeing was not the effect of miscalculation.
Perched beside her, a clutch of gaming balls in his lap, Francis Crawford was making his own strictures felt with all the artistry of a practising juggler. Danny, sweetly struck on a fine point of balance, disappeared as she made her discovery and the sergeant, a man of some presence, flung his arms up and tumbled back, shouting. Restored at a stroke, Philippa cheered and jumped to her feet, seizing a boule as she did so. She aimed, and shied.
Melodiously, Lymond supported her: ‘And eek the buttokes of hem faren as it were the hyndre part of a she-ape in the full of the moone.’ His voice was husky with laughter. ‘Go on. The one with the beard. He’s an Anglophobe if ever I saw one.’
The one with the beard disappeared. Behind him, in slow succession disappeared also the Prévôt des Marchands and the column of officials and magistrates who had been mounting the ruelle behind him.
Whooping, Lymond sprang to his feet and in his face was child and man; Kuzúm and Francis Crawford; triumph and mischief and a ridiculous, thoughtless delight that made her seize his hands and fling them apart and say, ‘Francis! Francis, you fool. This is what you should be!’
A cock crew, far away, disturbed by the uproar.
And as in that grotesque shrouded room, the air deadened. The noise below her sank into dumbness; the colours faded; the brightness dwindled and perished in ashes.
‘What a very uncomfortable remark,’ Lymond said. His face, from wholly blank, became blankly benignant. He said, ‘Perhaps I should. I’m afraid I am more like Abraham. A godly man, you remember, but the denial of his wife … was such a fact as no godly man ought to imitate.’
He stopped. His fingers, courteous prisoners, remained suspended inside her grasp, clearly desiring freedom but unwilling to impose it.
Philippa opened her hands and released him; and as if she had once more restored him his tongue he went on, with gentle apology. ‘But I am no godly man. I’m only a commander of some experience, who knows how to ask a tired army to throw its heart into a citadel and follow it. Forgive me.’
He straightened. ‘Here is Archie. And, good God, the Schiatti cousins, a bouquet in one hand and a bell in the other. They will see you safely home.’ He smiled at her. ‘Clever child. Even for a Somerville, my dear, it was an irresistible performance.’
He smiled again, turning to leave her. Assured, experienced, equal to any minor contretemps, however embarrassing, he had saved her from blundering further. Sitting motionless on the steps she watched him stroll down to address Adam and Danny and give them their orders; to dispose of the men they had caught; to seek out the injured; to visit and arrest the three merchants whose names the boy Paul had given them. His voice carried to her, propounding, instructing; replying. Despite his rough hair and clothes his authority, his command of himself and of others had never been more in evidence. She had been a fool, of the kind she and Kate had no patience with.
She had been artless, and addled, and excitable. She had demanded his friendship, and at his instance had lightly abjured what might follow: Latreia, the superior worship of adoration, and Douleia, the inferior worship of honour or reverence. He had given her friendship and hoped perhaps against hope to receive in return nothing more.
But the wine had been too strong for her, as it had for the others; and like the others she had stepped from the safe shores of friendship. She stood now in another country, whose sun burned and whose air was too rare for her breathing. And she stood there alone, with the words of a warning for company:
Long as I live, my heart will never vary
For no one else, however fair or good
Brave, resolute or rich, of gentle blood.
My choice is made, and I will have no other.
*
Four hours after that, at six o’clock in the morning of Tuesday, August 17th, a royal courier swept with his train down the Gourguillon and hammered at the Hôtel de Gouvernement portals. He was admitted at once, and after a long delay, was brought to speak to the King’s chief envoy, M. de Sevigny.
At eight o’clock the Consulat were notified that their presence was required by M. Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny. By nine, the Crown officials were with him. By that time he had also seen the captain of the city guard, and had given orders to his own officers, his men at arms and his servants. And before anyone, had spoken to Madame la Maréchale de St André, going with measured pace about her dispositions, a little more erect, a little less superbly groomed than was usual.
At noon, in his first free five minutes that morning, Adam Blacklock dropped exhausted into a settle and heard tolling round him the bronze bells of Lyon, mourning the news which had laid low the city. The news of a defeat in the north such as no French army had suffered since Agincourt.
On St Lawrence’s Day, with twenty-four thousand men and the chivalry of his country behind him, the Constable of France had set out for Saint-Quentin, besieged by the troops of King Philip.
Old-fashioned and cross-grained and headstrong, the Constable had compounded, it seemed, blunder on blunder. He had tried to send a relief force through the marshes. The saga that followed was painful: a tale of sunk boats and labouring marches, of mistaken paths and faulty spy-work and a childish stubbornness beyond anyone’s crediting. The results, spreading outwards in shock through the nation, were such as to reduce men to silence.
Only four hundred and fifty men had managed to enter Saint-Quentin. The rest had been cut to pieces by Count Egmont, the lieutenant-general of the King of Spain’s cavalry.
They said twelve thousand had been killed, and in one day the manhood of the best houses in France either dead or wounded or prisoner. Among the missing were Guthrie and Hoddim, the two Scottish captains turned off by M. de Sevigny. Among the dead were the Counts of Villars and Enghien. Among the wounded and captured, the Constable himself and his son; the Dukes of Montpensier and Longueville, François de La Rochefoucauld and Jean d’Albon, Maréchal de St André, Governor of the King’s city of Lyon.
Two French leaders had escaped. The Duke of Nevers and the Prince of Condé remained near Saint-Quentin to reform and make fresh levies. But the thousand men in Saint-Quentin, under Admiral Coligny and his brother d’Andelot, must give way beneath the combined assault of the entire Spanish army. And when they did, the road was open to Paris.
What had to be done now was obvious, even if the King had not sent to command it. Until help came, Lyon must rely on its present small force under Adam himself backed by Hislop. And Lymond must go to Paris, where the court, fled from Compiègne, was to entrench itself.
For in the absence of captains and Constable, of de Guise and Strozzi in Italy, of de Thermes and Brissac in Piedmont, there was no one left to save France, if the King of Spain marched upon Paris.
Adam thought, his face sombre, of Fergie Hoddim and Alec Guthrie. And of the contrivance which had sent Lymond away from the King’s eye in the first place, and which now looked like bringing him the rôle of saviour of France which the Constable and the Duke de Guise had both coveted. To stand at the side of this monarch as he had stood by the Tsar. And to face, in the oddest upshot of all, an English army under Lord Grey of Wilton.
Five minutes’ rest was all Adam could afford, and he was already on his feet when yet another summons came from de Sevigny, brought this time by Danny, curtly efficient, with none of his usual ebullience. He did not know what Lymond wanted, or who was with him on this occasion. Adam shut the windows against the beat of the bells, and went off soberly.
In the event there was no one there at all but Lymond himself, seated as he had been all morning at his desk in front of the tall latticed windows, the motionless heart of the hurricane. Round him, the scattered benches and stools were now vacant. And against the wall, neatly stacked, were the leather bags, the boxes, the coffers ready strapped for the journey to Paris. His desk was empty, and the extra candles extinguished. Embedded, flinty and pure as a cameo against the dark boards of his chair-back Lymond said, ‘Shut the door. I have four questions to ask you.’
Three of them concerned recent orders and, thank God, he had excellent answers. The fourth stemmed from the impending visit of Catherine, heiress of the captured St André, who would require to return north with her mother.
Five minutes sufficed to dispose of it all. Adam rose. There was nothing more to be said. It was a moment of crisis, and war their métier. He was half-way to the door when Lymond spoke again. ‘By the way. Who brought me home early this morning?’
So there was something more to be said. His voice neutral: ‘Archie,’ he answered. ‘Helped by your friend Macé Bonhomme the printer. There were no spectators. Archie sent a message ahead and Danny and I opened the door to the three of you.’
‘Thank you. Where is Archie?’ said Lymond.
‘He called back ten minutes ago. Do you want to see him?’ asked Adam.
From the square below came all the clatter and cursing and stamping of a body of men saddling up for an expedition. The tolling bells, near and far, slipped through the hubbub. Two of Lymond’s household, tapping, were permitted to enter and began, without wasting time, to carry out all the baggage. Lymond looked at the hour glass. He said, ‘I can give him five minutes.’
Adam went out. By the time he found Archie Abernethy and pushed his way back through the turmoil, the last of Lymond’s luggage was out and Adam saw that the hour glass was empty. In civil warning: ‘Watch out,’ he observed to his colleague, and closing the door, left Archie to Lymond’s cold mercy.
Had he stayed, he would have heard Lymond say nothing.
Instead it was Archie who stood inside the door, lips tight and naked head glaring and said, ‘Ye senseless bluidy tup-heidit madman!’ with venom.
Seated still at his desk, his hands loose on the smooth oak before him, Francis Crawford did not answer; nor did he interrupt the long tirade that followed. Only when it was finished did he say, without lifting his eyes, ‘You make your point. Who else was at Macé Bonhomme’s?’
Archie Abernethy, without looking, sat down on the stool just beside him. ‘Of course. Ye were blind …’
‘Of course. You know how much I drank better than I do. Who else was at Macé Bonhomme’s?’
‘A barber-surgeon,’ said Archie. ‘A short, brosy chiel’ with grey whiskers staying wi’ Macé. They cried him Michel. And Macé himself, that was all. Twa men of by-ordnar’ discretion. If ye expect to ride post to Paris, I expect to ride with ye.’
There was a very long pause. ‘Hence the cuirass and spurs,’ remarked Lymond. ‘I wondered. And what about Mistress Philippa?’
‘I thought you knew,’ said Archie Abernethy. ‘She left Lyon early this morning. To go to Sevigny, I rather fancy. She didna need me, so the Schiatti sent her off with a nice puckle of pikemen, and twa of their weel-pitten-on nephews.’
In the shadow, the Captain-General’s eyes were inimical. He said, ‘You told me you were her man.’
‘I am,’ said Archie Abernethy shortly and got up. He walked to the desk. ‘There’s your riding jacket. And there, if you have some water, is a physic I got for the headache. And that’—and removing a crumpled paper from his pouch, he tossed it between Francis Crawford’s unoccupied hands—‘is what you had in your fist when we found you. I took it away. It’s not what you want every burgher to gab about.’
He did not need to read it again but he did, stretching the blood-stiffened folds, until the writing of thirty years since was quite legible.
The record of death of a human being called Francis Crawford.