Checkmate Read Free Page B

Italy, and all it did was shatter his dog-teeth
.
    The dark and masterful man with the broken mouth was not a Piedmontese or a cocker. He was Marshal of France Piero Strozzi, one of King Henri’s most able generals. And a friend, long since in Scotland, of Francis Crawford.
    The bragging red game-cock—two of them—against the tormented yellow, indeed. And since he had a high pride of his own, although he would have denied it, Austin Grey sought about him for a weapon … a baton he could wrench out with his fingertips, a sliver of glass … anything with which to free himself, or inflict injury at least on his captors.
    What he found, lost in the straw, was an eating-knife. He felt, disbelieving, the sting of its blade, and ignoring the blood on his hand, did not rest until he had disentangled it. Then, hacking and sawing, he cut through the cords on his feet and then, in a gory mess, those on his wrists, and freeing himself from the gag, strode to the door of his prison.
    It was locked and would not give way, although he charged it again and again. Nor, because of the noise, could he make his voice carry.
    There remained the casement. He ripped open the shutters. It did indeed give on to the courtyard. Noise and torchlight streamed in, but he could not get out. The window was barred.
    He could not get out, but it wouldn’t matter, if he could attract someone’s attention. Outside were his enemies, but there were only three of them, and Francis Crawford. In this room, even armed with a knife, he might have little chance against four resolute men. But what chance had four men in French pay in a tavern in Douai, once the burghers knew of their presence?
    So Austin Grey snatched up his cloak, and thrusting it between the bars of his window shouted at the fullest pitch of his voice, ‘Treachery! Treachery! There are French spies among you! The cock-master with the broken mouth is Piero Strozzi!’
    Faces turned. He waved his cloak and shouted again. With careful clarity he was still calling when he heard a key grate in the lock behind him. He wedged his cloak in the bars and whipped round, knife in hand, to defend himself.
    In the doorway stood Hilary of the red hair, with steel in his hand and neither laughter nor civility in his voice. He said, ‘Come with me.’
    Behind him, the door rested invitingly open. An eating knife versus a sword made long odds again, but it was worth a leap and a stab, which the other man countered quickly. In the moment’s fighting that followed, both weapons clashed to the ground; and Austin fell with a grim and heady satisfaction on the man who had so coolly betrayed him.
    But although brave and obstinate, he had not the iron will that subdues armies. He saw coming the blow which would fell him, but unlike the gold cock, by that time had no means to parry it. It hit him cleanly, and he knew nothing more.
    *
    He had thought, in his innocence, that a Marshal of France would enter Douai with only two men to accompany him. Had Austin Grey been conscious and still at his window, he would have seen the courtyard doors swung suddenly shut and, plucked from the crowd, a circle of thirty men range themselves, sword in hand, enclosing the cockfight and all its spectators. Men oddly attired: here a tinsmith, there a clerk or a book-pedlar. But none of the three remaining Amis de Rabelais who stood where they were, staring about them.
    Staring perhaps at the fourth of their number, who had stopped in midflight, sword in hand; with two of Strozzi’s men behind him at the top of the staircase and two below, their hands ready to grasp him. The fourth student Hilary, divested at last of red moustache and wig, who stood, looking down at Piero Strozzi, with the famous Crawford hair gilt in the torchlight.
    Strozzi said, grinning,
‘La plus belle de la ville
. I was not sure which you were, until you spoke to the beautiful marquis. You will have discovered. All the exits are guarded.’
    ‘Who betrayed