The Ringed Castle: Fifth in the Legendary Lymond Chronicles

by Dorothy Dunnett

  ‘I am sure,’ Philippa said. She would not be there to persuade Lymond. Her first two letters had brought no reply, and she had not sent a third, since Diccon Chancellor had sailed without her. She knew she would never commit now to paper what Leonard Bailey had told her. She knew that whatever excuse she had given, Margaret Lennox had placed her under restraint for one reason only: to prevent her from sailing to Russia.

  How had she discovered her plan? Or was it merely a guess, based on the knowledge, somehow acquired, that Lymond was living in Russia? And why had she been prevented from sailing? Of all people, Margaret Lennox had no interest at all in her safety.

  She had found no solution to that. Or to the choice she saw standing bleakly before her. Whether to sacrifice Sybilla’s wellbeing to her son’s peace of mind and safety in Russia. Or whether to persevere: to bring Lymond home to face what he already knew from the Abbess; or to be pursued and confronted by the outrage of his great-uncle’s spite, needlessly destroying both himself and Sybilla?

  Perhaps, Philippa thought flatly, they were wrong, all of them, in their view of him. Perhaps he would learn the truth, whatever it was, with perfect equanimity, indifferent to the lives of his parents and the accident of his own origin; occupied, sensibly, with his own future. If that were true, then for Sybilla’s sake he should come home, for nothing could hurt him.

  It had been a long silence. Coming to herself suddenly, Philippa looked up at Sir Henry and grinned, and said, ‘Or I think I’m sure. Confidence, like Admiration, is the daughter of Ignorance. But so long as he writes, does it matter?’

  ‘It matters now,’ Sir Henry said. ‘I am glad, Philippa, you are not going north. I would like you here when the ships come back from Muscovy. Because I think they may bring you word of your husband.’

  The pause was perhaps a second too long, but she did not make a single mistake. ‘From Muscovy!’ said Philippa Somerville.

  ‘You didn’t know? He hasn’t written you?’ said Sir Henry quietly. And to the latter part of the question she answered with a truthful shake of the head.

  ‘I wondered if perhaps he had. I have been in two minds whether to speak to you, Philippa. But if these ships bring letters for you, it is right that you should answer them fittingly. Mr Crawford, Philippa, is in service in Muscovy. His employment is honourable, but it is one which closely concerns this country and others in Europe. He is believed to be helping the Tsar to train and muster his armies. For that reason, no doubt, he has not written to you. And for that reason, his whereabouts have not been made known outside Russia so far.’

  Philippa said briefly, ‘Who told you?’

  Henry Sidney said, ‘That is why this door is closed, and why I must ask you not to repeat to anyone else what we are saying. Diccon Chancellor was told the news, before he sailed, by the Countess of Lennox.’

  ‘Whom Mr Crawford had told?’ inquired Philippa.

  ‘She did not say, but I think it unlikely. She did appear, however, to be perfectly sure, although she took the trouble to swear Diccon to secrecy. Fortunately Diccon and I have known each other so long that in the matter of promises we are one soul and one flesh. But no one else at Court knows, or must know.’

  Philippa said, ‘I still don’t see how she could have known. But since she did, why tell Mr Chancellor? He’ll find out in Russia in any case. Or … I see. She wished to send Mr Crawford a message?’

  ‘She wished Diccon to tell Mr Crawford to return,’ said Sir Henry in the same clear, subdued voice. ‘Mr Crawford was to be told that, unless he returned, there would be no annulment for you. He was to be told, that in the event of a war between England and France, your safety would be in question. He was to be told that if your marriage persisted, as it would unless he returned, Flaw Valleys would be seized to preserve it, and your mother obliged to remarry, at the Queen’s instance. Diccon was told to use every means in his power to ensure that when he sails in the spring, he brings Mr Crawford back with him. And he has been told that if he fails, when he returns he will face an indictment for heresy. At worst, the stake. At best, ruin and banishment at the start of a brilliant career.’

  ‘Then the Queen knows?’ said Philippa, her heart plodding within her.

  He shook his head. ‘Only the Lennoxes. From what spite they do it, I don’t know. Perhaps you can guess better than I. Perhaps they think truly they may do England a service. With all this secrecy, it seems unlikely. But Margaret Lennox is the Queen’s cousin and what she threatens, she can carry out amply. She has threatened Diccon with death. She has told him this also. If Mr Crawford does not leave Russia now, he will never leave it. He will be dead before the ship sails, by her agency.’

  She did not speak. Nor could he possibly know the pressures of thought which for once had rendered her speechless. He said kindly, ‘You are not to be frightened. These are serious threats, but he is a responsible man, Diccon, and so is your husband. They will return, I am sure, since they are forced to. But once back, these toils will be straightened.

  ‘Meanwhile you must pray, as I do, that he comes.’

  *

  On 29 August, thirteen and a half months after his arrival, the very high and mighty Philip, by the grace of God King of England, France and Naples, and Prince of Spain, took barge at Greenwich to travel to Gravesend by water, and from thence on to Dover and Brussels. Before leaving, the King took leave of Queen Mary, who chose then to walk with him through all the chambers and galleries to the head of the stairs, where, in the face of the crowd, she bore herself with perfect and regal decorum, although visibly moved when the Spanish nobles bowed, saluting her hand, and, as was the custom in England, the King bestowed a kiss on each of her plain, weeping ladies.

  Once in the barge, the King mounted the steps to be seen, and waved his bonnet back to the palace. The Queen stood at the river Windows of her apartment until he had embarked and sailed out of sight, and then was overtaken by an unrestrained bout of violent sobbing. Later, as was her custom, she sought comfort in prayer.

  ‘Domine Jesu Christi, qui es verus sponsus animae meae, verus Rex et Dominus meus … O Lord Jesus Christ, Who art the true husband of my soul, my true King and my master. Thou Who didst choose me for spouse and consort a man who, more than all others, in his own acts and in his guidance of mine, reproduced Thy image; Thy image whom thou didst send into the world in holiness and justice. I beseech Thee, by Thy most precious blood: Assuage my grief!’

  Part Two

  Chapter 1

  At Sweetnose, there was frost in the shrouds and a cold midsummer fog which forced the Edward Bonaventure to lie idle on the last stage of her journey to Russia, with the boom of the whirlpool in Chancellor’s frustrated ears, and a flotilla of impertinent Lapps gathering under his poop, assembling for the midsummer fishing of belugas and walrus and salmon at Pechora.

  He did not know until one of the grinning creatures climbed aboard, crucifix swinging, with a gift of fresh salted salmon, that Christopher had been off with them at half-tide to smear oatmeal butter on the Kamen Woronucha, the biggest rock by the whirlpool; and when the fog presently lifted, he viewed Christopher’s crowing with fatherly disfavour, and mentioned to his sailing-master, John Buckland, that he should probably be burned as a heretic.

  Buckland, a stolid Devonshire seaman, grinned without answering. Light-hearted by nature, with a questing, vigorous mind and a long apprenticeship in the exact arts, Diccon Chancellor was a good friend on shore. But at sea, launched on his adventure with the stars caught in his astrolabe, he carried, like a man drunk on small wine, an aroma of happiness.

  It had been a fine trip, Chancellor thought; and better still since he had left the Philip and Mary to discharge her cargo and drop her agent at Vardȯ, and had been able to sail on alone, with his charts and his sightings, and Buckland, who knew what he wanted. Christopher had been all he had hoped. The new merchants had been no trouble, and three of them had been with him before, and knew what to expect; or were here because the
y liked the unexpected. Eleven reasonable men, barring the two Members’ sons, Judde and Hawtrey, who had needed a little careful handling until Buckland got them interested in navigation. And Best had drummed some Russian into them as well.

  ‘If we can keep the cook sober,’ Chancellor said to the Master as, pitching slightly, the Edward stubbed her way round to Cross Island and headed for Foxnose across the wide gulf of the bay, ‘we’ll have sailed two thousand miles in a month. Then you can turn round and go back, while our troubles are only beginning.… D’you know why the Germans can’t keep a navy afloat?’

  And Buckland, who was in a state of some elation himself, grinned and said, ‘Why? No oatmeal and butter?’

  Richard Chancellor batted a derisory palm. ‘No! The cooks burn them down to the waterline.’

  They crossed the bar of the River Dwina on 23 June, and anchored off the village of Nenoksa, in the roadstead of St Nicholas, where the brine pipes ran in from the ocean. As before, the log cabins were plumed with the steam of salt boilings, and as before, there combined with the breath of violets and rosemary, drifting over the water, the fishy reek of the hot trenches swimming with blubber.

  But this time, there was no need to send a party ashore, and to demand food and hostages. Men were aboard before they were content with the grip of the anchor, with gifts of eggs and butter and beef, and mutton from the white-faced black sheep they saw moving about the short grass. And in a matter of hours, Chancellor and his son and the members, agents and other employees of the Muscovy Company were within the log walls of St Nicholas Abbey and feasting upon mead instead of sour beer, and duck and goose and roast swan and pancakes instead of biscuit and salt pork and the never-ending diet of fish. The foolish loaves, fashioned like doughnuts and horseshoes, disappeared each with a powerful bite, and the regrettable fish-tasting bacon was devoured clean from the plate under the twenty pairs of calm, hooded eyes.

  And the language came, creakingly, to the tongue again. Often as they had practised it, one forgot the abrupt, vehement cadences. Chancellor talked, haltingly, to the Abbot about his journey, about the weather here at St Nicholas, about the news from Kholmogory, the nearest trading town up the river; about, with difficulty, the health and affairs of the Tsar. It was only half-way through all this, applying to Sedgewick and Johnson and Edwards for missing nouns and incompetent verbs and delinquent adjectives, that he realized what the Abbot, in turn, was trying to tell him. They had found Sir Hugh Willoughby.

  He said, ‘By your leave?’ and fought off the chorusing voices of his companions, like a nest of competing and baritone birds, and the beautiful Russian of Robert Best, the most successful grammarian of them all, confident in delivery and despairing of understanding the tongue he had barely heard except from Chancellor before.

  ‘By your leave, sir. Sir Hugh Willoughby and his two ships are safe?’

  ‘My son, how could such news be?’ said the Abbot. ‘The ships are safe. You will find them here in the roads of St Nicholas, with their stores intact as on the day the storm divided you, two years ago. They were discovered last spring by the Lapps in Nokuyef Bay, on the Frozen Sea, at the mouth of the River Arzina, and word was brought to the Governor. They were drawn here with great pains, sailing from harbour to harbour, and when the sun rises, you will see their masts, over the bay.’

  ‘But the men?’ Chancellor said. ‘Where are the men?’ And this time no one spoke but the Abbot.

  The men were aboard, every one, from the least of the seamen to your lord, the Captain General himself. And dead, every one: frozen and dead, with ice for their shrouds.’

  They took the pinnace next morning to where, lodged quietly at anchor, the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia lay, the flag of St George still flying in the clear Russian air. It was silent on board: their feet on the rungs of the ladders echoed through the crowded chambers, and a footfall on the deck above sounded out of place: hesitant and stealthy instead of light, uneven, purposeful; the footsteps of men at sea, about their business of sailing.

  It was all as the Abbot had said. The cargo stood still in the holds; uncrated, so that the kerseys were white with mould and the copper spurs sweating and green. There were unwashed bowls where men had eaten at random, long after the rusted ovens were cold; and the surgeons’ jars stood in rows clouded with dust, with their corroded blades and their books. The pilots’ instruments were intact, and the charts, settled like cloth in the tube. And there was powder still, like cement, and slow matches stored by the cannon.

  But in neither ship was there a rag or a blanket, or any item of clothing, from the Captain General’s ceremonial doublets to the ship’s store of blue watchet livery. Nor was there anywhere a ledge or a stool or a table, a door or a panel, a box or a crate or a chest which could be hauled out and burned. Only, emptied by the Muscovites, were the barrels which had held their food, and the makeshift bows and shafts they had used in their hunting. And one table and one chair, in Willoughby’s cabin.

  Willoughby was there too, that tall and fashionable man, with his long nose and high forehead and dark, pointed beard in a finely carpentered coffin, dust covered, which gave no offence. And by the coffin, laid there by the Russians, were the possessions of all his seamen, who had found graves less dramatic in Lapland. Chancellor did not touch the keys or the money, the knives or the rings or the crosses. Instead he walked to the desk, on which stood the hourglass, and the inkstand and the pen, still laid where Sir Hugh had replaced it when he wrote his last words in the log.

  The log was there too. With hesitant fingers, Chancellor turned back the limp pages. The Voyage Intended for the Discovery of Cathay, Sir Hugh Willoughby had headed it; and below he had listed the souls in his charge on each ship. And below that, day by day, an account of their wanderings until, lost and despairing, with the Confidentia leaking and the inshore sea thickening to ice, he had run into the deep bay and stayed there. He had sent three search parties ashore, but found no human life in the darkness: the fishermen and hunters had long since left the north coast for the winter. And although it was only September, snow and hail came upon them, and severe frosts, which sealed them into their harbour.

  They had had food for eighteen months, but heat and water were different matters. They lived, it seemed, through Christmas to January, and Sir Hugh himself was one of the last on board to die.

  Chancellor took the log with him back to the Edward. To cross the sea in the sunlight; to step into the hot, reeking uproar of his own living ship, was a comfort whose poignancy brought tears to his eyes.

  Then he set his men hard to work, for in a week’s time the Governor of the Province would arrive, to escort them on the first stage of their thousand-mile journey to Moscow.

  To Christopher, it was all fresh to his appetite, like food laid on a white cloth, tempting him with recondite colours and odours. And yet it was not so alien. No one spoke English. But who could speak English in Antwerp? There were trees outside, of a scrubby kind; and four little houses, and hens, which looked a bit smaller than London hens, but were still poultry; and sheep which looked about the same size as Norfolk sheep, although a different colour. And the church, although without pews and packed full of paintings and tapers and candles, had a cross on top, which everyone did reverence to.

  During that strenuous week, he found time to explore the thick pine and birch woods and the small, straggling islands parting the Dwina’s four mouths. He picked wild strawberries and saw the cinnamon rose spilling its single-starred blossom over acres of meadow; he walked along virgin white beaches, and ate blackcock, and bought snow larks, fat and sweet, for three kopeki a basket, and wished that his father or Rob Best were there to translate for him what people shouted at him, from the doors of their cabins, before they hurried inside with a swing of coarse cloth and stained deerskin waistcoat.

  He helped them all unload the Edward. Under the carpenter’s direction a log shelter was made, a primitive warehouse, to hold the Hampshire kerseys, the
fine violet in grain, the London russets and tawnies and good lively greens; the barrels of pewter and the butts of Holland wine and the six hundredweights of sugar, which Christopher helped the purser to mark off and check. By the time the Governor came, the Edward was empty, and lying further east off the island of Jagrô in a cloud of gnats, from which, provisioned and loaded, she would leave them to go back to England.

  The Governor’s name, alarmingly enough, was Prince Simeon Ivanovich Milulinsky Punkoff, and with him came Fofan Makaroff, the Chief Magistrate of Kholmogory, together with three of his colleagues.

  Chancellor knew them all. By then his Russian had regained its fluency: he introduced his son, and his own three countrymen from the previous voyage, and then one by one the agents and merchants who had not been here before.

  This was his duty, no less than the long weeks of pilotage and the tasks in which lay his real interest: in defining and mapping this country of Russia, and discovering what had been unknown before. This journey to Moscow was his duty, and all the stately mummery at the Kremlin, where he must exchange regal gifts and regal greetings once more with the Tsar.

  This was what, last time, Willoughby had been chosen to do and what he, with common sense only to guide him, had had to manage somehow, alone. And manage so well, be it said, he thought with a twinge of wry self-congratulation, that at least he had been elected to carry out both tasks again. Through all this winter, he was to stay in Moscow, the figurehead of the new English traders now settling in Muscovy. And come the spring, with the cloth sold and the merchants well established, he would leave them there and, with Christopher, sail back with the new cargo to England, to tell the Company all he had learned, and to persuade the Company to send him once more, and untrammelled, to try for the route to Cathay.