Free Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett Page B

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, coldsnows 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