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every traveller’s journey from the Mediterranean to the Court in the north.
    And so Lyon was larger than Paris, and, fed by the rich blood of its immigrants, grew richer and still more brilliant. It gave to the world silks and poetry, the finest banking system Europe possessed, and the most distinguished collection of printing houses. And from its wealth, it came in time to pay the penalty. Four French Kings, coated in silver-etched armour, had hurled themselves into warfare on the bankers’ ordersloyally proffered by Lyon, and the burghers were in no doubt at this moment as to why a Russian general with French and Scottish titles should be riding from Compiègne to address them. But none the less, on this Sunday, August 15th, they gathered outside the Hôtel de Ville on the Presqu’île and waited for the welcoming party to appear on the bridge with their visitors.
    And Jerott Blyth, standing with them in his expensive high-collared cloak and paned pourpoint wondered why, successfully settled in this handsome city, he troubled to further the career of someone who was, after all, no longer his commander. And why, gazing over the river to the tree-cloudy hill of la Fourvière palisaded with the tall, crowded homes of the bankers, the administrators, the clergy, he should find his gloved fingers clenched, his pulse hurrying.
    He had nothing to fear. He was beyond the age, now, of being hectored. He was even now, in a sense, part of the family.
    To his left, darkly curving, was the rue Mercière, the richest street in the city, in which stood his great house of Gaultier, which had come to him with his wife.
    There were some, he knew, who believed he had married Marthe for the house, or for her inheritance from the two people, now dead, who had lived in it. She had never troubled to conceal her illegitimacy. It still angered him that, set against her looks, her quick wits, her business acumen, it should be held to matter.
    The connection with Lymond she had never publicized. Until last week, when the letter to Jerott from Francis himself had referred to it. ‘Your former service with me is no doubt common knowledge. Since the resemblance between Marthe and myself will cause comment, you might refer to her now as my step-sister. Any antecedents you care to invent on this score, I shall be happy to substantiate.’
    It had, in fact, been difficult to persuade Marthe to agree to this, but he had succeeded and the reaction among their neighbours had varied, as he had expected, from austere disbelief to jocularity.
    There was no doubt that Lymond would never have dreamed of advertising the link except from necessity. The resemblance between himself and Jerott’s wife could have been no greater if they had been of one birth, brother and sister.
    As it chanced, neither Lymond nor Marthe knew the reason, and neither cared. One assumed that Lymond’s late father, a foot-loose nobleman, had sired Marthe and left her in France, where four years ago, Francis had come across her, on his way to Turkey.
    At the end of that voyage he, Jerott, had married her. But Francis had not seen her since, nor had he corresponded with her. Whatever its antecedents the link, so lately formed, had proved a tenuous one. Once, to be sure, he had got the impression they hated one another.
    Then the man on his left said, ‘There they are!’ and Jerott saw the flashing of halberds and morions and the flutter of flags between the tallhouses on either side of the bridge. The Delegation had spent the previous night outside the walls of Saint-Just and had come fresh this morning down the steep path of the Gourguillon, where a Pope had once lost his tiara, and along the crowded right bank of the Saône.
    Escorting it would be the twelve members of Lyon’s Consulat but not the Governor, the Marshal de St André. The Marshal was on campaign in Picardy. The Governor’s lodging, in an elegant square on the other side of this bridge, was where Lymond would