The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles by Dorothy Dunnett
The flame in Lymond’s hands, nursed, ran along the middle bookshelves, causing a little charring on the nearest calf bindings. A wisp of smoke, coiling, lifted. ‘Or I turn your books into ashes. Don’t call,’ Lymond said.
Bailey’s hand, shaking, put down the bell. He swore. ‘This lying family! Upright, you said! And now——’
‘But you will get your pension,’ Lymond said. The flame in his hands, rising, touched the books just above. He shifted his grip on the spill. ‘For, after all, you could still start a scandal, a rumour; and the originals, you claim, still exist. In any case, as I say, I keep my word. Your money will come. But it would be sad if, instead, you were to lose all your books.’
The smell of singed calf filled the room. A vermilion light flickered. A roll had taken fire.
Bailey cried out. ‘There! There, God damn you! There, son of a harlot, begot in the brake! There is your birthright!’ And he flung the documents over.
Lymond’s hand, disregarding the heat, closed upon the bookroll, and extinguished the small flame. And then, picking up the two papers, he reduced them to ashes.
Then he said, ‘Come, Philippa,’ and, moving forward, she let him take her downstairs.
There was hardly a man capable of climbing up to see if Master Bailey was in his room, alive and unharmed by his visitor, but Lymond waited until Dorcas, with Billy stumbling beside her, had clattered up to the study, and when they came down, he threw the man another gold piece and, collecting his sword and his dagger, left the house with not a few of them following him, and asking his interest for them in Russia, where the rooftops were all made of gold. He answered them smiling, and rewarded the lad with the horses, and lifted Philippa up, and then swung into the saddle himself. His hands, gripping Philippa, sent a rapid, vibrating pulse into her arm; but he appeared otherwise perfectly collected, and spurred off with exemplary vigour.
She followed him as best she could, for he rode very fast and the way was now almost dark. He passed the Chicken, as she had expected, and it was only an increase in the downpour and a realization, she supposed, that he could not expect her, as he would himself, to endure the hazards of a rough road in the dark that made him rein in at the next inn they came to, and, dismounting, find that there were two rooms to be had for the night.
Then he came back with a groom, who handed her down, so that she could not detect his state of mind by his touch. Inside the inn however, by the light of the lamps, it was a different matter. She climbed the stairs without speaking, and without speaking heard him wish her good night. She was to have a light meal, he said, served in her chamber.
The door to her room was beside them. ‘Come in for a moment,’ said Philippa. And as he made no immediate response, she added, ‘I know. My company isn’t going to help, but my medicaments might. I had a word with one of the maids there myself. Short of executions and violets and even the brain-pan of the blessed St Michael there are a few humble remedies which might make the thing a little less crippling. What does it spring from? The opium?’
He did come in, but not to sit down. She shut the door with a bang and knelt to improve the inn’s idea of a fire. ‘Lack of self-control, I thought,’ said Francis Crawford.
‘Yes. Well, I deserved that,’ said Philippa grimly, getting up. ‘I have seldom seen such an exhibition of howling restraint. And if you want to shout and smash things, please do. I should have been better pleased if you had smashed Master Bailey.’
‘On the contrary,’ Lymond said. ‘I think you were the restraining element. For which I am grateful. Philippa, I am better alone. You must forgive me.’
‘In a moment. Do you think he knows?’ said Philippa abruptly.
‘Who my father is?’ He moved incessantly, drifting from the table to the window to a chair, and back to the window again. ‘I don’t think so. Or my mother surely would not be paying him.’
Philippa said, ‘Do you want to find out?’
‘It seems a little late,’ Lymond said.
Philippa said, ‘Except that we both know Sybilla. Whoever he is, he must be a remarkable man. Your blood is not Gavin’s, which would please anybody: do you not want to know whose it is? You need to understand yourself better than you do.’
‘I have enough difficulty,’ Lymond said, ‘trying to understand your tortuous reasoning. You want my leave now to track down my father?’
‘That was by the way,’ Philippa said. She had a mild headache herself and wondered whether he had actually envisaged her sitting down, arms akimbo, to attack even the lightest of meals. ‘I was about to suggest that you must next find the originals of these certificates, and destroy them.’
He said, ‘Your mind works too well, doesn’t it, Philippa? I thought today we should come to the end of it.’
‘Something happened today,’ Philippa said. ‘You shared Sybilla’s burden. You didn’t want to do that before.’ She paused. ‘You can’t look for the papers yourself: you’ll be in Russia. Unless you want to confide in Nick Applegarth, let me do it. Or if there are things you don’t want me to know, tell me, and of course I’ll do nothing more.’
And she looked, candidly, at the place where he had come to rest, his arm on a chairback in the shadows.
‘I know no more than you do,’ Lymond said. ‘The papers will be in France, I should think. Perhaps Sevigny is a clue.… It was in the family, and Sybilla perhaps stayed there. One might look among the Dame de Doubtance’s papers, or seek the witnesses, or question priests and wetnurses and midwives.…’ He broke off. Then he said, ‘I don’t think I can stand the thought of that particular kind of prying. No. I don’t want you to do it.’
‘Because of the prying?’ Philippa said. ‘Or because of the certificate that wasn’t there?’ And as he looked at her without speaking she said, ‘For there should have been three papers, shouldn’t there? There was no certificate for your other sister, whom we know was illegitimate. There was no paper for Marthe.’
She did not know that her headache showed too: that the fresh colour had gone from her cheeks and had left behind it two half-circles of strain under her thinking brown eyes, and a single line across the clear brow, between the sheer, silky falls of her hair. She stood lost in worried contemplation and was only moved to look up when a sound told her, to her surprise, that he had found his way without warning to the door.
Francis Crawford stood with his back to the doorpost and said, ‘Yunitsa, forgive me. My ailment will be the worse for it, and so shall I, but I am going to leave you.’
She had seen him look like that before once, at Volos, and she made no move to stop him. Only, ‘Yunitsa?’ she said.
He smiled, a glimmer in his darkened blue eyes. ‘What, after all Best’s Russian teaching? It means heifer,’ he said. ‘Good night. And thank you, wise Philippa.’
The maid came soon after that, with the food and the potion for headaches. Philippa sent the meal back, and, rather desperately, took the mixture herself.
*
The idle fellow from Dover, aghast at his ill-timed sleep by the roadside, set off in the dawn light to Gardington and was fortunate enough to find an inn called the Chicken just short of it, where Mr Crawford had ordered beds for the night. He and the lady, it seemed, had failed to occupy them. The innkeeper, discussing the matter, began to have hopes of compensation. When none was forthcoming the innkeeper, disgruntled, recalled something else. A reward, Mr Bailey had said, for every soldier of Crawford’s whom he managed to detain on the way.
There had been no soldiers so far. But this was a powerful fellow: not the kind of man an old gentleman would like for a visitor. The inn host, switching the talk to refreshment, showed his unwanted visitor into a chamber and, slamming the door, turned the key on him briskly.
*
Waking next morning wan, limp, but full of persevering good sense, Philippa Somerville was surprised to find, passing Mr Crawford’s neighbouring bedroom that the door was standing ajar, and inside there was no sign of an oc
Considering this, she came only slowly to realize what the innkeeper was also explaining. ‘It’ll be the news, mistress. Everyone is going to London. They say it will be war, within days.’
‘What news?’ said Philippa hardily. And listened in silence to the account of Thomas Stafford’s ill-timed Scarborough raid.
‘They say,’ said the innkeeper, ‘that the French have already been warned to fly from the country. And the Scots will declare war soon, so they expect. All the high officers are called back to London. War.… It’s a dreadful thing, Mistress.’
He sounded pleased, Philippa thought. A longing for novelty, peculiar to this nation. Or so the Venetians said.
She didn’t want breakfast. She left the inn while he was still exclaiming and rode with her two grooms to London with a premonition, and a fear, in the back of her sensible mind.
Chapter 12
There was rumour of war at every halting-place between Gardington and London. By the time he reached Fenchurch Street, it occupied Francis Crawford’s mind to the exclusion of almost everything else: the French had sent five hundred Gascon foot soldiers to Scotland and were to dispatch three thousand more; Scotland had been asked by France to raise fifteen thousand French-paid Scots infantry. The Queen Dowager had been voted sixty thousand pounds by the Scots Parliament. On the Border, the English were planting fifteen hundred reinforcements at Berwick and Carlisle, Norham and Wark.… When war came, Richard Crawford, who was not his brother, would be fighting for Scotland.
But he, the Voevoda Bolshoia, would be in Russia. He had reached Dimmock’s house before he was reminded, by the bustle outside, of the thing he had contrived to lose sight of: that today, Thursday April 29th, he was to attend the great banquet to be held by the Muscovy Company to mark the departure of the first Muscovite Ambassador. His coat for it, already chosen, was Russian, and made by Güzel’s staff: it was so heavily jewelled that Dimmock’s servants, terrified, had offered a special case with three locks to keep it in.
Güzel had made no such provision. It is only the poor man, said Güzel, who counts his belongings. The rich man guards himself, and lets his goods fall where they may.…
On Saturday Ely and Petre would come, with the royal letters and presents. And by Monday the four ships, towed downstream, would await the Muscovy party at Gravesend, there to take their leave of England.
So by Monday he must complete all his arrangements, receive the last papers, organize the last interviews. Four days so planned that it might be done, at the cost of a little hard work. But there would soon be time enough on the Primrose to rest and reflect. And it allowed no time—no time at all for personal business.
Adam Blacklock met Lymond at the door of Dimmock’s house. ‘Nepeja is going mad. You know that it is only an hour to the banquet?’
Lymond stared at him. ‘Calm! Calm,’ he said. ‘They are not likely to begin it without us.’
‘Well, they’re likely to begin it without Ludo and Danny,’ Adam said, who, no longer in Russian employ, had rebelled against Russian edicts. ‘They both rode out of London yesterday, and neither of them has been heard of since.’
Someone had taken Lymond’s horse. With Adam at his side he was already running upstairs to his room when the implication of that statement reached him. He stopped. ‘Together?’ said Lymond.
‘No,’ said Adam, his uneasiness suddenly crystallizing. ‘Danny first, and then we found Ludo had gone later. Neither of them left any message.’
‘Blackheath?’ Lymond said.
‘No. I sent there,’ said Adam. He added, worrying, ‘Have you come straight from Gardington?’
‘Forty miles. I am unlikely to live,’ said the Voevoda, with an air of abstraction. ‘Did Hislop receive any message, that you knew of?’
‘I asked that as well,’ Adam said. ‘It seems someone did call and ask for him. There is an impression Danny sent him off straight away. I wondered if he had dispatched him to you.’
‘Well, if he did, he didn’t reach me,’ Lymond said. ‘Good God: is that Nepeja?’
‘He has been ready,’ said Adam, ‘for the last hour and a half.’
‘You look very pretty as well,’ Lymond said, and disappeared into his room.
He was, astonishingly, ready in time, with no trace of the dust of his journey, and the work of Güzel’s sempstresses and goldsmiths and embroiderers like a riza adorning his person. There was a ceremonial ride, this time through Lombard Street and Lothbury to the towering oriel windows, painted, gilded and carved, of the Drapers’ Hall, hired by the Muscovy Company to do justice to the splendid occasion.
Inside, gathered in heated bales of fur and velvet and brocade, were the Governor, consuls, assistants and sad, discreet and honest Members of the Muscovy Company, waiting to convey their guests to their places at the long, laden tables before the blue cloth of state with its shield showing a ship in full sail, with the lion of England above, and round it the motto of the Company: Refugium Nostrum In Deo Est.
‘If the war comes,’ said Sir George Barnes on Lymond’s left hand, “twill be the only harbour we may trust. They say England will pay the whole cost of it, and all for King Philip’s purpose, not for our own. Trades suppressed, new taxes imposed.… How else will we finance the foot and horse they say the Queen has promised to send? The King can’t collect any more money in Brussels or Antwerp; they say Ruy Gomez can’t even raise it in Spain, or why else does he delay?’
It was all they could think of, the merchants crowding here to do public honour to the Ambassador, although they chatted and joked and called across the tables to one another between the entertainments: the jugglers and the singers and the acrobatics, and the one-act interlude by players in false heads, between the blubber dainties and the dariolles. There were no Sumtuous Hores.
The Voevoda Bolshoia, a civilized and entertaining companion, for a Scotsman, kept afloat the cross-conversations all about him, as deftly as the jugglers their balls, and gave no sign of the two, and three, and four other subjects which were occupying the rest of his mind in the meanwhile. Most of the senior officials were there. At the head of the table, old Master Cabot, with his broad face and broken nose and long, white forked beard. The knights, Andrew Judde and Will Chester, part-owners of the Primrose and the John Evangelist, and John Dimmock his host, owner of the Anne, now waiting to leave St Botolph’s Wharf with the Trinity, fully laden with twenty-one bales of cotton stuff and two hundred sorting cloths and five hundred pieces of Hampshire kersey in sky blue and red and green and ginger and yellow, with sugar and with nine casks of pewter of Thomas Hasel’s making, the cloth alone being worth £3,400. And below the casks and the crates and the bales, another cargo whose worth was not public knowledge, and whose contents had not been broadcast at all.
Sir Henry Sidney, soon to go back to Ireland, with his friend Edmund Roberts, newly back from his labours in Scotland, from which five hundred pounds of the cargo of the wrecked Edward Bonaventure had been recovered and was now on its way south in a hired English ship. Between them, Sidney and Roberts had given him the men and the advice he needed to mine the iron in Russia, and work it, and in time give them, he hoped, a steel surpassing that of the Turks and the Persians. In time.…
Anthony Hussey, whose cousin Lawrence had had such a signal success with the Queen Dowager in Scotland. As soon as he left for Russia, Lymond knew, a letter would be on its way from Scotland to the Queen Dowager’s dearest sister, Mary of England, regretting that she could not, without her dearest daughter’s advice, dispense with the rebellion of the sometime Earl of Lennox, and that therefore, as the wife of a man without civic rights, Lady Lennox’s claim to the Angus estates would instantly be stopped.
John Buckland, Master under God of the new flagsh
William Garrard, who had told Philippa how to reach Bailey’s house: a good thing, or a bad? Robert Best, who knew as much as anyone about the Voevoda’s activities in Russia, but who was going back to Russia with him, and therefore had to be circumspect. Philip Gunter, whom he had met with Sir Henry; and Harry Becher, with the harem of drakes, whom he had not met at all.
Those with office near to the Queen: Sir Henry Jerningham, Vice Chamberlain and Captain of the Guard; the Earl of Arundel, President of the Council; Sir William Cecil; Sir William Petre, who left the chamber unexpectedly with Dimmock beside him, and did not come back for ten minutes.
The speeches began. Wine, in a loving cup, was passed back to back through the whole company to pledge the departing Muscovite Ambassador; and then the old man, Cabot himself, made the announcement they had all come to hear. To Osep Grigorievich Nepeja, first Ambassador to England from the Tsar of all Russia, the Company here present were agreed to bear the whole cost and charges incurred by the Ambassador and those travelling with him from Scotland to London, and also during his stay until sailing, as testing and witness of their good hearts, zeal and tenderness towards him and his country.
There was a touching display of appreciation, as this generous offer was translated by Rob Best and received by the Ambassador with hands clasped over his sturdy pearled chest. He embraced Master Cabot. He embraced Sir Andrew Judde and Sir George Barnes. He almost embraced Rob Best until he remembered that he, a mere servant of the Company, would be returning to Russia. Then, in rolling tones, the Ambassador started his answer.