Dorothy Dunnett - Checkmate

Dunnett is a name to conjure with. Her work exemplifies the best the genre can offer. It combines the accuracy of exhaustive historical research with a gripping story to give the reader a visceral as well as cerebral understanding of an epoch.

Christian Science Monitor

Dorothy Dunnett is a storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about suspense, pace and invention.

The New York Times

Dunnett evokes the sixteenth century with an amazing richness of allusion and scholarship, while keeping a firm control on an intricately twisting narrative. She has another more unusual quality an ability to check her imagination with irony, to mix high romance with wit.

Sunday Times (London)

A very stylish blend of high romance and high camp. Her hero, the enigmatic Lymond, [is] Byron crossed with Lawrence of Arabia. He moves in an aura of intrigue, hidden menace and sheer physical daring.

Times Literary Supplement (London)

First-rate suspenseful. Her hero, in his rococo fashion, is as polished and perceptive as Lord Peter Wimsey and as resourceful as James Bond.

The New York Times Book Review

A masterpiece of historical fiction, a pyrotechnic blend of passionate scholarship and high-speed storytelling soaked with the scents and colors and sounds and combustible emotions of 16th-century feudal Scotland.

Washington Post Book World

With shrewd psychological insight and a rare gift of narrative and descriptive power, Dorothy Dunnett reveals the color, wit, lushness and turbulent intensity of one of Europes greatest eras.

Raleigh News and Observer

Splendidly colored scenes always exciting, dangerous, fascinating.

Boston Globe

Detailed research, baroque imagination, staggering dramatic twists, multilingual literary allusion and scenes that can be very funny.

The Times (London)

Ingenious and exceptional its effect brilliant, its pace swift and colorful and its multi-linear plot spirited and absorbing.

Boston Herald

Dorothy Dunnett was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. She is the author of the Francis Crawford of Lymond novels; the House of Niccol novels; seven mysteries; King Hereafter, an epic novel about Macbeth; and the text of The Scottish Highlands, a book of photographs by David Paterson, on which she collaborated with her husband, Sir Alastair Dunnett. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth appointed her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Lady Dunnett died in 2001.

THE LYMOND CHRONICLES

The Game of Kings
Queens Play
The Disorderly Knights
Pawn in Frankincense
The Ringed Castle
Checkmate

King Hereafter

Dolly and the Singing Bird (Rum Affair)
Dolly and the Cookie Bird (Ibiza Surprise)
Dolly and the Doctor Bird (Operation Nassau)
Dolly and the Starry Bird (Roman Nights)
Dolly and the Nanny Bird (Split Code)
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise (Tropical Issue)
Moroccan Traffic

THE HOUSE OF NICCOL

Niccol Rising
The Spring of the Ram
Race of Scorpions
Scales of Gold
The Unicorn Hunt
To Lie with Lions

The Scottish Highlands
(in collaboration with Alastair Dunnett)

F IRST V INTAGE B OOKS E DITION , S EPTEMBER 1997

Copyright 1975 by Dorothy Dunnett

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Cassell & Company, Ltd., London, and in the United States by G. P. Putnams Sons, New York, in 1975.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Dunnett, Dorothy.
Checkmate / Dorothy Dunnett.
p. cm.
Sequel to The ringed castle.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76229-0
I. Title.
PR6054.U56C48 1997
823.914dc21 97-6673

Random House Web address: http://www.randomhouse.com/

v3.1_r1

In the end, as in the beginning,
for Alastair,
who was the inspiration of the
legend of Francis Crawford,
and whose love of Scotland,
in word and deed,
has done more for her
than Lymond ever could.

When, a generation ago, I sat down before an old Olivetti typewriter, ran through a sheet of paper, and typed a title, The Game of Kings, I had no notion of changing the course of my life. I wished to explore, within several books, the nature and experiences of a classical hero: a gifted leader whose star-crossed career, disturbing, hilarious, dangerous, I could follow in finest detail for ten years. And I wished to set him in the age of the Renaissance.

Francis Crawford of Lymond in reality did not exist, and his family, his enemies and his lovers are merely fictitious. The countries in which he practices his arts, and for whom he fights, are, however, real enough. In pursuit of a personal quest, he finds his wayor is drivenacross the known world, from the palaces of the Tudor kings and queens of England to the brilliant court of Henry II and Catherine de Medici in France.

His home, however, is Scotland, where Mary Queen of Scots is a vulnerable child in a country ruled by her mother. It becomes apparent in the course of the story that Lymond, the most articulate and charismatic of men, is vulnerable too, not least because of his feeling for Scotland, and for his estranged family.

The Game of Kings was my first novel. As Lymond developed in wisdom, so did I. We introduced one another to the world of sixteenth-century Europe, and while he cannot change history, the wars and events which embroil him are real. After the last book of the six had been published, it was hard to accept that nothing more about Francis Crawford could be written, without disturbing the shape and theme of his story. But there was, as it happened, something that could be done: a little manicuring to repair the defects of the original edition as it was rushed out on both sides of the Atlantic. And so here is Lymond returned, in a freshened text which presents him as I first envisaged him, to a different world.

In 1961 the initial manuscript in the Lymond Chronicles, The Game of Kings, was first launched in the United States of America. It had the great good fortune to be received and handled by a lady whose name is still known and respected throughout the publishing world, the late Lois Dwight Cole.

To Lois, for her unfailing support and interest throughout the series, my thanks will always be due.

I should also like to pay tribute to the Librarian and staff of The London Library, who have aided me so courteously over the years to assemble fact as well as fantasy.

The verse quoted at the head of each chapter is taken from the prophecies of Michel Nostradamus.