Checkmate: Book Six in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles - Softcover

Dunnett, Dorothy

 
9780679777489: Checkmate: Book Six in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0679777482 ISBN 13: 9780679777489
Verlag: Vintage, 1997

Inhaltsangabe

For the first time Dunnett's Lymond Chronicles are available in the United States in quality paperback editions.

Sixth in the legendary Lymond Chronicles, Checkmate takes place in 1557, where Francis Crawford of Lymond is once again in France, leading an army against England. But even as the Scots adventurer succeeds brilliantly on the battlefield, his haunted past becomes a subject of intense interest to forces on both sides.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Dorothy Dunnett was born in 1923 in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland. Her time at Gillespie's High School for Girls overlapped with that of the novelist Muriel Spark. From 1940-1955, she worked for the Civil Service as a press officer. In 1946, she married Alastair Dunnett, later editor of The Scotsman.

Dunnett started writing in the late 1950s. Her first novel, The Game of Kings, was published in the United States in 1961, and in the United Kingdom the year after. She published 22 books in total, including the six-part Lymond Chronicles and the eight-part Niccolo Series, and co-authored another volume with her husband. Also an accomplished professional portrait painter, Dunnett exhibited at the Royal Scottish Academy on many occasions and had portraits commissioned by a number of prominent public figures in Scotland.

She also led a busy life in public service, as a member of the Board of Trustees of the National Library of Scotland, a Trustee of the Scottish National War Memorial, and Director of the Edinburgh Book Festival. She served on numerous cultural committees, and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. In 1992 she was awarded the Office of the British Empire for services to literature. She died on November 9, 2001, at the age of 78.

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Part 1

Liepard laisse au ciel extend son oeil

Un aigle autour du soleil voyt s'esbatre.

Chapter 1

Quand ceux du pole arctiq unis ensemble

Et Orient grand effrayeur et crainte.

What the celebration at the castle had been, Austin Grey never discovered. He rode in to his tryst at the Tournai and found the inn ankle-deep in drunk burghers, thronging the common room and spilling out into the courtyard where inoffensive travellers like himself were attempting to sup their bread and mutton and chicory salad in the airless July dusk of Douai.

He avoided using his title. Money, and a steady, effective insistence, procured a room for him. There he removed the dust of his two days' journey through French-speaking Flanders from Calais.

He had meant to dine indoors, but the heat and the smells forced him down to the yard where he cut food as best he could, between the elbows of a wheezing book-pedlar and a talkative merchant from Antwerp, playfully intent on the bodice-strings of the serving-maids. A group of students somewhere under the gallery were hymning cuckoldry (co co co co dae) with an artistry worthy of a Magnificat; and a pair of fishmongers, locked in liquescent brotherhood, reeled up and sent his cup rolling. A black-eyed Piedmontese slid past, limping, with a dubbed duckwing cock churring under his elbow.

There was no sign so far of the man he had come to Flanders to rescue. Austin Grey sat, seemingly quite at his ease, expertly deflecting the attention aroused by his uncommon good looks and reviewed, without pleasure, the mission he owed to his uncle, of the English fortress at Guines, beside Calais.

'If Francis Crawford wishes to leave Western Europe,' irritably had said Lord Grey of Wilton, 'then it is England's duty to help him. Do you want him to lead the French armies into battle against us? Do you want him to go home to Scotland and encourage his countrymen to cross the Border and march into England? If he intends to go back to Russia, I for one will be happy to send him. You have his message. There is no doubt that it is authentic. Go to Douai and fetch him. You won't be in any danger. He's already thirty miles on the wrong side of the French frontier if he's got there. He'll be skulking, not you.'

And seeing the sleek, grey-bearded head turning to other business already-'You have considered,' had said Austin Grey gently, 'that this may be a French trap?'

And his uncle, an irascible but by no means unjust man, had laid down his pen. 'This I can tell you. If anyone else here were able to recognize Crawford of Lymond or be recognized by him, I should send him in your place. But I really cannot see any man laying an ambush for you at Douai, with Pembroke and the whole English army to one side of him and King Philip at Valenciennes on the other.

'We are invading France, Austin; and this man, if he stayed in France, could be a danger to us. It is enough to know that the French will not lightly release him, and that he has turned to us for help.

'You dislike him,' had said Lord Grey, folding his hands and raising the combed grey beard at his nephew. 'You cannot possibly dislike him as much as I have reason to do. But you will go to Douai. You will tell no one your mission; and you will take the most excellent care that no one discovers that Crawford has crossed into Flanders. For much as I esteem our lady Queen's husband, I should prefer King Philip of Spain to win this war and those after it with the distinguished commanders he has, and without the services of your much-sought-after gentleman at Douai.'

But the man best known briefly as Lymond had not come to Douai, and now the torches were fit and full night had fallen. Also, as the tavern trestles were cleared and pushed together to form a square-walled platform, the presence of the duckwing was abruptly accounted for.

The fatherless only son of a despot and the last of a long line of soldiers, Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale, had been compelled as a boy to witness altogether too many cockfights. He rose, intent on leaving the courtyard, and halted.

In front of him, blocking his way, stood the Italian he had already observed in the Piedmontese bonnet. In either hand this time the man held a linen bag within which something live struggled and grumbled. He smiled, displaying a swollen, broken-toothed mouth and reaching across, hooked both bags into place on the wall behind Austin's shoulders and stood back, arms akimbo, regarding him. 'You wish to lay a wager, monsieur?'

He was a travelling cock-master, and there would be others with him. Austin said, also in French, 'Later. Just now I wish to hear the singers.'

'Les Amis de Rabelais? We had them last year. They perform at the castle. Four students from Montpellier, monsieur.'

He knew that already, having been struck half-way through his meal by the quality of the singing, close as a toothcomb. All Calais spoke of them. The cocker said, 'But being English, monsieur, the words maybe escape you?'

His French was good but not good enough, apparently, to pass him off as native. They were singing Je fille quant Dieu with the Swiss countertenor, silk in the weave, in the girl's part. Austin said, 'Thank you. I know both meanings of quenouille,' and made smiling to pass.

The cocker stood aside. 'Saucy, yes? And the Battle of Marignon? Ah!' And raising a mellifluous tenor he warbled:

'Soyez hardis, en joye mis,

Chascun s'asaisonne,

La fleur de lys,

Fleur de hault pris

Y est en personne.

Suivez Francoys . . ."

He broke off, grinning, to a chorus of drunken hissing and catcalls.

Follow Francis. Austin Grey stared at the Italian cocker and the cocker, grinning, addressed him in perfect English. 'Go and hear the singers, Lord Allendale. That is where you will find him.'

He went and heard the singers: four young men in breech hose and buff jerkins led by solid Hunno, the bass: Andreas, the lank, pale-headed Saxon tenor, Oswald of Basle, baritone, brown, energetic and cheerful; and auburn-haired Hilary from the eastern cantons whose ragged moustache and bleeding cheek told of the violent and continuing battle to defend his virility. From behind the moustache emerged the delicious head-voice of a eunuch, while the three others chanted, with the force and precision of wire-weavers:

La plus belle de la ville, c'est moy

La plus belle de la ville, c'est moy

Non est

Sy est

Non est

Sy est

Non est, non est, je vous jure ma foy

Non est, non est, je vous jure ma foy . . .

Then someone shouted a pleasantry and the next moment Hilary had leaped straight into the thick of the crowd, followed protesting by his three colleagues striving to restrain him. Deafened and buffeted, Austin was standing, searching in vain for his quarry, when Francis Crawford made himself known, as a quick, amused voice in the m?l?e. 'Faith has a fair name, but falsheid faris bettir. In your room, after the cockfight.'

But when Grey twisted round, there was no one behind him that he recognized.

He would have gone to his room then and there, but the Piedmontese cocker waylaid him. 'You heard him? Till then, you're to stay in the courtyard.'

'Who are you?' said Austin Grey

He had wound a filthy scarf round the torn mouth, but you could tell the dark face was grinning. 'A friend. Did you not see who he was?'

'He spoke from behind. No,' said Austin.

'The counter-tenor. There he is, at the cock platform. Go and watch. But do not speak to him,' said the cocker; and grinning, made off through the crowd.

Austin gazed at his back. Then he forced his way with extreme firmness to the mat-covered platform of trestles.

Les Amis de Rabelais were there, vociferously...

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Verlag
Vintage
Erscheinungsdatum
1997
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0679777482
ISBN 13 
9780679777489
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
608
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Nicht verfügbar

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