The Ringed Castle (60 page)

It was after five of the clock and lamplight showed, here and there, a pale yellow. To the west, you could see a salting of rain, shaken over the marshlands, and a shallow pool by the roadside was full of blurred, running wavelets, fine as bird claws. Soon it would be dark, and all the sea would be dulled by the hammer marks of the rain. He nodded to his men, smiling still, and wondered if he would ever meet his only brother without this groundless turmoil in mind and in body, which was not fear for himself but fear, he knew, for all those dearest to him. And further wondered why, in the midst of relief and thanksgiving, he should have such misgivings at all.

*

For a man who did not wish to be in Scotland to stay in Scotland, and to advertise his presence there, mystified Adam Blacklock, until he thought it through, and realized why Lymond had written the letter which Alec Fraser, as red as a Rosehearty onion, had dispatched with such elation to his son’s guid-brother, the Marischal. Best and Buckland had to go south, to report the loss and set in train all the processes which would extract both their goods and their Muscovite passenger from this alien country of Scotland. Englishmen both, it was something they alone were able to do.

Conversely, someone in authority must remain with the Ambassador, to be his interpreter to his hosts, his guide and his protector; to safeguard what was left of the pitiful cargo. Since they had been swept into the tall keep of Pitsligo and from there, against John Forbes’s voluble protestations, to the ampler hospitality of the manor of Philorth, the bay had been thick as peasemeal with row-boats; large and small, well manned or driven past reef and through breaker by one dedicated pair of stout Buchan arms.

What was left of the cargo of the
Edward Bonaventure
was transferring itself, swiftly and effectively, into the pockets of Buchan, and Alec Fraser seventh Laird of Philorth, four miles to the south-west of Pitsligo and forty from Aberdeen, of which city his wife’s father was Provost, was doing little to stop it.

Nor was Lymond, but for, Adam suspected, quite different reasons. Whatever strange bargain had been struck out there in the dark and the wind, fishing boats had quartered the bay long after the fire on the shore had died down and the last exhausted man from the
Edward was
sleeping. By dawn half of the
Edward’
s cargo had gone, farther than any Pitsligo fisherman would locate it. And the rest had been worked for.

That act of Lymond’s alone would have marked him. His name was known, his authority obvious; soon they would discover his station. To abandon his charge and disappear like a tinker over the Border; to be found lurking under an alias would discredit his mission and turn Nepeja’s despair to hysterical fury. Only now, in the peace of dry land, was there leisure to study how storm and sea and mistrust of the unknown had changed Osep Nepeja, the wealthy Vologda merchant, with the pearl-collared dress and the fine house and the invisible, obedient wife. His colleagues Grigorjeff and Makaroff had disappeared, with eight of their fellows, on the foundered
Confidentia
. Two days before, he had seen seven other Russians die and all his wealth sink into the cold Scottish waters. The Muscovites who served him now were Lymond’s servants, but for two whom the Voevoda had kept at his side. Accustomed to Lymond and accustomed, as well, to unquestioned obedience the men had settled first, and, though quieter than usual and frankly wolvish at mealtimes, they showed no permanent harm save exhaustion.

Nepeja was different. Through all the rescue he had prayed, his voice rising and falling, his hands working on the great silver crucifix, his forehead beating the sand. Now, in the little stone room given him in Alec Fraser’s brave manor, he took to his bed and only clambered out of it to peer at the weather, and rub his hands at the fire and attack Lymond, whenever he opened the door, with questions and anxieties, accusations and complaints.

It was understandable enough. He had been told he was coming to London; he had expected to arrive, richly dressed and primed with gifts, with his merchandise in chest and barrel behind him. What was he to understand, knowing nothing of the sea, of a nation which, far from achieving these things, cast him naked on the shores of a different country and made of him, it seemed, not an ambassador but a beggar?

And to all these outbursts, Lymond was patient. Patient as he was not when the night before, wandering half-slept up and down their big room, Robert Best had stopped and said, stupidly, ‘I am the only one left. All the freighting of those bloody cargoes. The lists and the invoices, the account books and ciphers, the notes and charts and letters of privilege. All the stuff that we bought in Pskov and Novgorod and Moscow and Lampozhnya; the furs we worried about, the tallow we thought had too great a foot, the honey we haggled over … even Brook’s cargo we took on at Vardȯ … all of them gone. The seamen gone to the bottom, with all they could teach of the coast. The new compass, the new astrolabe, the man the Tsar knows and trusts, lost and gone. Lost and lost and lost and lost … and no one to tell of it. No one knows it but me.
My God, I’m the only one left!…’

And his voice, rising and rising, had snapped like a stalk, for Lymond, standing cold-eyed before him, had struck him full on the face. And then, with a thrust of both hands had made him collapse on the floor, where he sat, his face livid, staring up at the Voevoda Bolshoia who said, ‘You are an adult Englishman, I believe. Then act like one,’ and walked away.

But Best did not break down again. Nor did anyone else.

So, in private and derisive challenge to the unmannerly fates, Lymond wrote the letter the Laird of Philorth was to dispatch, notifying the world of the end of the third Muscovy voyage, and in the same temper signed it. And thus on the second dawn after the wreck, riding on an uneven road through a night black with wind and arched with a glittering frenzy of stars came Richard Crawford of Culter, and saw the forty-foot grey castle of Philorth, with its new keep and round tower rising from its green mound, and the white running light of its stream, spilling through the short marshy grass to the dunes and between the rocks to be lost in the sea.

What made him look to the sea, he never afterwards knew, unless his eye was drawn by that trickle of sweet running water, and the
noise it made in the silence of sunrise, against the spaced hiss of the waves and the wind sound, never wholly expended, as of a man whistling absently now and then, high and low, soft and loud, through his teeth with a muffled orchestration behind it like kettledrums beating dried out by distance.

He looked to the beach and saw, far off, a man standing there; and without knowing why, stopped his servants, turned his horse and, alone, set out towards him.

The grass was bright yellow-green and caulked underfoot with brown mud, from other horses and Philorth’s black cattle. Behind it the rain-wet beach was the colour of pastry, with the sea beyond, white against grey, and a paler grey sky flat and heavy above.

It had been, until now, a mild autumn. There were still, here and there, the tall white heads of angelica, and starry fool’s parsley, as well as club rush and deer’s grass and the wide leaves of plantain. There was, somewhere, a small budding of gorse and he had seen, coming, a single harebell and some soiled, green-eyed daisies. The wind still blew, sending light leapfrogging through the short grass, and the bearded dune grasses ahead stood combed, like a fine Arab’s mane. But it was not the wind of two nights ago, bemusing the nostrils with its uneven force, exposing the thin pain of face nerves, the icy ache of cheek flesh and the flanks of the nose, the aching seizure, like cramp, in the fingers. A crow passed, planing, like a still, triangular rag and he thought, suddenly, that the man on the beach had moved also, and vanished.

Then he saw, rounding a bluff, that this was not so. He was still there, far across the grainy dark peach-coloured sand, resting in a coign of dune and grey rock, his hands round his knees, his face quite still, turned to the sea. An oyster-catcher, which had risen, piping, settled again at the water’s edge in a flash of black and scarlet and white and began its angular walk. Richard, dismounting, tied his reins to a gorse bush and walked also, across the heavy sand, to that unreal figure.

Half-way there, a touch of his normal common sense returned to him and he slowed down, wondering what exchange of courtesies he was going to offer a vagabond, an Abram man, or an idiot. Then the man turned his head and Richard saw that he was none of these things. That the frieze cloak he wore was rich, and fell back from the silk of a high-collared tunic; that his hair, flicked by the wind, was yellow as mustard and the shadowless face, faintly engraved upon and tired as cered linen, was indeed that of Francis his brother.

Lymond did not move. His head lifted, watching, showed no conventional welcome; his brows, cloudily drawn, suggested the weight of something so firmly extinguished that nothing was left, in thought or expression, save a curious air, part of resignation, part of defiance
which had to do, perhaps, with his stillness. Only the edge of his cloak stirred tardily, with his inaudible breathing. His parted lips closing, Richard Crawford came to a halt and stood, looking down at his brother.

‘There is not a soul but over it is a keeper,’ Lymond said. ‘Welcome,
brother
.’

You cannot embrace a seated man whose long sleek hands, broken with callouses, remain strictly clasped round his knees, and whose two open eyes are discs of smooth blue enamel. Richard stood where he was and said simply, ‘Thank God you’re back. And safe.’ And then, moved beyond pride, dropped on one knee.

Lymond’s face warned him off. The repudiation, though he did not move, was as stark as if he had jumped to his feet, coldly incredulous. Shocked, Richard said abruptly, ‘Are you ill?’

With care, Lymond changed his position. It was not a retreat, but the space between them undoubtedly widened. It made it possible for Richard to move in his turn, and finding a stock of grey rock, to sit on it, with a stone from the beach to employ him. He had picked it up before he found it was fractured; an eggshell guillotined by its fellows, to show a quartz yolk of glistening olive.

‘I must apologize,’ Lymond said. ‘One is afflicted with a certain enjambment of silence. Before our miscarriage at sea, we were accustomed to living like cormorants.’

‘Is that why you are here?’ Richard said.

‘That is why I am here. The nest is rather full, with a great deal of bill-snapping. It is a little like Ramadan. At the appearance of the first star nothing but gluttony, drunkenness and lust. Brechin will be rotten with pox.’

‘I was at Dunnottar. Did you know?’ Richard said.

‘No. I had, perhaps, a premonition,’ Lymond said. ‘The wonderful celerity of hasting nature. And here you are.’

He was, of course, very tired still and looked it; the voyage, wreck apart, would overtax any man’s endurance. But that didn’t account for quite everything. Richard said bluntly, ‘I thought I should be welcome.’

‘I have fallen out of the habit of talking to brothers,’ Lymond said. ‘Is the Earl Marischal sending a courier to Edinburgh?’

‘Yes. And a party north, some time today. They will see the two men you mention on their way south to London, and arrange to conduct the Ambassador by easy stages to Edinburgh. The Queen Dowager will wish to see him. In any case, there will be some legal formalities to do with the wreck and the cargo. Is there a guard on her?’

‘On the
Edward
? Of a sort,’ Lymond said. ‘Most of it has probably gone. And
pace
the Muscovy Company, it would be a benign gesture
not to pursue it too heartily. The fishermen gave up a good deal of their time on the night of the wreck at my instance, looking for Chancellor.’

He had heard the name before. ‘The new English pilot. A pity that,’ Richard said.

Lymond’s fair brows shot up, in a way suddenly and sharply familiar. ‘He died in tender years, but ripe in grace. And conducted to heaven these his sailors, being drawn to enjoy these celestial waters which God hath granted to the faithful. At least we don’t have to bury them.’

The edge, suddenly, was back, with all the hurtfulness he remembered so well. Richard said, ‘I hear you killed Graham Malett.’

Lymond opened his lips before he spoke. ‘Eventually,’ he said.

‘And saved one of the two boys he had taken. Don’t you want to know how your son is?’ said Richard.

‘Since Moscow is in the same planet as Philippa, I know how my son is,’ Lymond said. ‘At least, she sent me a letter. If he were dead, I imagine she would have mentioned it in the first sentence.’

Richard stared at his brother. ‘Philippa’s mother has him, at Flaw Valleys. They’re at Midculter on a visit, just now. He is all that any man would want his son to be. My God, Francis, you gave a year of your life towards finding him. He has the exact Crawford colouring.’

‘Egg mimicry,’ said Lymond. ‘How many more of yours have you hatched?’ He had loosened his hands and was delving his long, ruined fingers through the sand of the beach, scattered with immaculate shells and small sharp stones of all colours. Lower down, nearer the sea, lay the shining thick satin scarves and maypole confusion of seaweed ribbons: bright green; strong sage yellow; with great bronchial branches of tube and artery, five feet long. Beyond that, the profiled waves, bearded like trolls, came riding black to the shore.

‘I have another son,’ Richard said. ‘Three children in all. Mariotta is well. Sybilla is not.’

Lymond said, ‘Did Philippa get her divorce?’

There was a little pause. Then Richard said, ‘That was crude, for you.’

‘But as you will find,’ said Lymond softly, addressing the sand, ‘I am a very crude man. Did she get her divorce?’

The hammer strokes of fear, soft and regular as he had felt them at Dunnottar, began to beat in Richard’s chest. Now, he schooled his pleasant brown face and guarded his eyes as Lymond no longer needed to do, and said, in a voice of which he was not ashamed, ‘Don’t you know?’