Checkmate Read Free Page A

wings, it attacked and went on attacking its enemy’s body.
    It should have been the end. The yellow bird twitched and raised its stained head. It lifted itself, shivering. It stood, and might have fallen.Instead, in a single magic explosion of courage and anger, it hurled forward the naked head and caught the blinded red foe by the throat. Then springing high in the air, the yellow cock brought down its spurs in a stroke no living bird could have fended.
    The black-breasted red toppled and lay, in the jumping, glistening stream of its blood. And the yellow stepped on its back, and moved its one wing, and throwing back its gored head, crowed in triumph.
    Courage, of a noble and humbling order. Courage of the brute, subject to neither reason nor discipline. Courage which could inspire emulation or greed, or brutality. What were they celebrating now, these bellowing figures about him, but a win against odds, and the making or losing of money?
    Opposite him, the red-haired student had won his wager. The others had thrown him in the air and he descended upside down, in a rain of silver, attempting through hiccoughing laughter to semaphore to himself a serving of Auxerrois.
    It was easy now to get away from the mat. Austin Grey turned, his face unsmiling, and ran up the gallery stairs to his chamber.
    Inside was the Piedmontese cock-master and two other men, one of whom closed the door behind him and locked it. The other, as Austin snatched at his scabbard, pricked with a blade the wadded back of his doublet. They took his sword from him.
    ‘Ah, Lord Allendale,’ said the Piedmontese, indolent thumbs in his sword-belt. ‘A fine, small head; a muscular pair of shanks and a bold, smart demeanour for a game fowl. But all the same, as you will note, we have our spurs in you and you will shortly (bind the gag tightly, Demetrio) also be made, as you see, safely voiceless.
    ‘What are you trying to say? Where are we taking you? To France, of course. It will be a pleasant captivity, and short-lived, unless your uncle is foolish. But then, I don’t imagine Lord Grey could ever be foolish. And you are, are you not, as a son to him?’
    They had to shift the knife in order to bind him and he fought then with considerable success, because he had been well trained and did not care, in that moment, what they did to him. But against three, he had little chance; and soon enough his limbs were tightly corded and he had been heaved, wrapped in his cloak, into a smaller room where they dropped him on a pallet and left him.
    Bound, gagged and thrown in a corner with less accommodation than any trussed fowl in its cock bag, there was nothing Austin Grey could do but give way, breathing hard, to bitter anger.
    If Francis Crawford wishes to leave Western Europe
, his uncle had said,
then it is England’s duty to help him
.
    And what if it is a French trap?
he had answered. For of course, a man who revered bloody courage and was stirred to wildness and laughter by its apotheosis was not of his kind, and did not hold to his rules. But his uncle had trusted the fellow.
    He could not move. Through the shuttered window he could hear from the noise, surging and checking, that another cock fight had started. Perhaps the ‘Piedmontese’ had been forced to take part in it, since this was his alibi. And of course, as a travelling cocker, he would have horses and carts and a perfect excuse for leaving late at night for his next station. No one would look in his feeding sacks, or under the straw. No one would suspect he was a French spy taking back captive an Englishman.
    Of course, the cock-master was not a Frenchman. He had spoken fluent Italian, and his English, though accurate, was inflected with the same accent. Naturally, since the Queen was a Florentine, the French court was full of Italians.
    A Florentine …
    What was it Lord Grey had said, testily, only last week?
The devil has a charmed life. He got a hackbut ball full in the mouth while in