Free Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett

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 But she was charmingly dismissed after ten minutes: she had hardly withdrawn, smiling, before Lymond had the table cleared for the next item on his agenda.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