The Ringed Castle (82 page)

‘I couldn’t afford it,’ Lymond said. ‘Nor could Cambalu. And I have a feeling you would need more than three doctors, even if all of them happened to be atheists. Of course, these explorations are important: perhaps the most attractive prospect the world holds today for anyone of imagination and stamina.’

‘But not so important as what you are doing for Russia?’ Philippa said.

‘I don’t know,’ Lymond said. ‘I only know that I believe it must be done, as Chancellor’s work had to be done.’

‘I tried to join you,’ Philippa said. ‘It was stupid, of course. But there is a saying about people who write letters to other people who do not trouble to answer them.’

‘Chi scrire a chi non responde O egli e matto, o egli ha di bisogno.…
Who writes to one who doesn’t reply, Is either a fool, or in need.… Was that in one of my books?’ Lymond said.

‘I,’ said Philippa forbiddingly, ‘have read some works other than the primary textbooks in the inadequate library at Midculter. Did you
read
my first letter?’

‘Yes,’ he said; and looked up as she put her palm over the top of his tankard.

She said, ‘There is nothing wrong. But you are going to need your wits.’

‘Ah, yes,’ he said. ‘So I am.… I read half of it.’

‘And stopped at the maternal outpourings. I was mad,’ said Philippa gloomily. ‘Kuzúm was the last person you wanted to hear about: any fool could have told that. And even more so if …’ She paused, rather pale. ‘Can I have one, little, creeping excursion into sentiment?’

And knew by his body, if not by his face, that he had divined already what she was going to say, and that the fear, the cold and brutal misgivings she had carried about with her for two days were true. Lymond said, ‘Margaret Lennox has told you of a conversation we had about Kuzúm’s identity.’

Philippa nodded, her straying hands firmly gripped in her lap. ‘She says that Kuzúm is Joleta’s child. The son of Joleta Malett and her brother. And that Khaireddin, who died, was your son.’

‘That was what I told her,’ Lymond said. ‘She believes it. And you
must pretend to believe it. So long as she thought Kuzúm mine, Lady Lennox would be a threat to his safety.’

There was a brief silence, during which Philippa Somerville fought and won a battle to keep her eyes dry. Lymond said, ‘I give you my word. It was a lie.’

Philippa looked at him. ‘And I don’t deserve
that,’
she said.

But this time, he did not give way. ‘Kuzúm is who he is. As everyone keeps insisting, parentage doesn’t matter. Love him for what he is: let your mother continue to love him. The death of the other child is my affair.’

‘And you run your affairs so efficiently,’ said Philippa, with sudden acidity. And then ashamed, she said, ‘Will you have a son by Güzel?’

‘With my heritage?’ said Lymond, and stood up. ‘I have my sons by peasant women and prostitutes, not by my mistress. If you are still anxious to reach Gardington and witness all my family secrets exposed, to the last ludicrous dregs, I think we should leave and get on with our journey.’

Which she did, silently, for she understood she had made an error of judgement. And from then until late afternoon he hardly spoke to Philippa until, in a small hamlet within about fifteen minutes of their desination, he dropped speed unexpectedly and, for the first time in a long while, turned to her. ‘Are you very tired?’

‘No. Yes,’ said Philippa truthfully. Her back ached. Her wet clothes, now the rain had gone off, encased her limbs, moist and warm as papier mâché. She sneezed.

‘Oh,
God
!’ Lymond said. It had such an unheard-of ring of feeling that she turned immediately, but he had swung himself abruptly from his horse and taking his own reins and hers had instantly resumed talking quite normally. ‘I apologize. It suddenly seemed to me that I have forced you to ride forty miles through filthy weather on an errand of impeccable charity, from which you will probably receive no reward but a fever. It was unchristian to be bad-tempered as well.’

Philippa gazed at him, and then at the inn courtyard towards which he was leading her. ‘
You
have forced
me,’
she repeated thoughtfully. ‘Oh, well. I don’t mind helping you to feel guilty if you must. On the other hand, I should point out that of all our various encounters, today is the only time you have favoured me with two civil words in sequence. I found it quite worrying.’

But the attempt to find safety in badinage did not bring the intended response. He went ahead of her into the inn to bespeak some refreshment while an ostler helped her dismount, and when at last she joined him, alone by the fire in the rush-strewn inn parlour, he was sitting quite still in a settle, his ringless hands clasped white together between his long, mud-splashed boots, and his burnished head bent brooding over them. She stood still, watching him until
she heard the bustle of servants behind, and then, moving forward, said calmly, ‘What can be done for these headaches?’

He rose immediately, and then glanced from her to the door as it opened, and a maid came in, with a tray of hot punch, and cold meat, and a loaf of new bread on a platter. ‘Short of execution,’ Lymond said, ‘I think the problem is insoluble,’ and smiled, and sat when Philippa sat and the maid, her burden deposited, had left them alone. Then, since Philippa continued to study him, he said, ‘I am sorry it seems to be so obvious.’

‘No. It isn’t obvious,’ Philippa said. ‘But it won’t help much with Mr Bailey if you have both a blinding headache
and an
excess of hot punch.’ She paused and said abruptly, ‘I shouldn’t have come. You were right. You have enough to contend with already.’

‘I think,’ Lymond said, ‘I can probably deal with Master Bailey and Mistress Somerville in one day, without succumbing altogether. If you give me a moment, I can probably even manage some frivolous conversation. And the hot punch is for you, not for me.’

So she disengaged for the moment. But later: ‘Why did you change your mind?’ Philippa said. ‘And come to see Bailey?’

It was a bad question, on an excursion where emotional matters were barred. For without emotion, his answer was chilling. ‘Because, I think, of something you said. One should be able to face anything. I have learned to play chess again. I have learned to listen to music, and to play it. I have learned to buy self-indulgence and enjoy it. I have learned to take a line of logic and follow it through, whatever the consequences. I should be able to withstand the revelation that I am a bastard, and my mother a whore.’

Philippa swallowed, and put her hands under the table. She said firmly, ‘So long as you allow yourself that kind of self-indulgence, you can expect to have headaches. If you can face anything, then face up to the one basic fact in all this. You told Míkál once, in Thessalonika, that you have never loved anyone. That was a lie. You feel for Sybilla quite as much as she has always felt for you.’

He had risen, his face too well trained to betray anything: after a moment’s thought, he walked to the window and stood there. Philippa said, bluntly, to his back, ‘If I were you, it would matter to me very much to prove that she was my mother. So much, that I shouldn’t even attempt to find out the truth, if I thought I might learn she wasn’t. I shouldn’t want to be Gavin’s son, either.’

‘I don’t think,’ said Lymond, ‘you could be.’ He sounded politely amused.

‘I don’t know,’ Philippa said. ‘Heredity is an odd thing. Look at——’ and then broke off.

‘Don’t,’ Lymond said. He had turned round, his eyes very bright. ‘Don’t, wise Philippa. The damage is spread too widely as it is.’

‘But,’ said Philippa, ‘even if you accept bastardy, you are left to wonder why Sybilla didn’t confess to you, since you have always been so very close. And from that, to surmise that the facts of your birth must be such that Sybilla knew they would destroy even your love for her. And that is why, at first, you wouldn’t make any inquiries or allow them. But now …’

‘Wise Philippa,’ said Lymond again. Standing very still, with his back to the window he offered no resistance to what she was saying, but simply remained, his eyes dwelling on her as she sat bolt upright in the firelight, her wet, combed hair glowing chestnut where it fell forward over the darkened brocade of her gown. He said, ‘Tell me, then, why I come now to Gardington?’

She drew a long breath and released it again, her eyes open and honest on his. ‘Because, as you say, absence has hardened you. There are things you can face now which you couldn’t face in Stamboul. And because, I think, at last, the bond with Sybilla is being shared with another. Before, all your mind and all your emotions were contained in your feeling for her. Now it is different. Now you have Güzel’s love also.’

He had been holding his breath. He released it all at once, leaving his fair-skinned face for a moment as drained as his lungs, and then, after a pause, inhaled again with a long, vagrant column of air, caught as on the teeth of a ratchet with snatches of shock, and of laughter and of a sort of tearing, choked self-derision. ‘Wise Philippa,’ Lymond said. ‘Wise, wise Philippa.… Do you know: after all, I do not think I can manage both Master Bailey and Mistress Somerville …?’

And when, looking at him, she said sharply, ‘Sit down!’ he did drop, abruptly, on to a stool by the window and remained there, his head in his hands, while Philippa found his unused cup and poured into it the last of the punch. Then kneeling beside him, she said, ‘It will be worse if you don’t go. Do you want me to stay here and wait for you?’

But instead of answering her he said, ‘Philippa, will you go away? Out of the room.… Anywhere, just for five minutes. I shall come to you.’

And so, leaving the cup beside him, slowly she did.

He did not come in five minutes, but in ten; and then, although still extremely white, he had assumed again, flawlessly, the supreme self-possession of the Voevoda Bolshoia. He said, ‘Poor Philippa: it must be worse than the Masque of the Pilgrims and the Irishmen. There are no more hands to be held. But I think, if you can bear it, you should come with me after all into Gardington. After that masterly exposition, you deserve to see how it all ends.… I have taken two rooms here for us overnight. Unless, of course, Master
Bailey offers us hospitality for the night. He is, after all, my great-uncle.’

‘And mine. By marriage,’ said Philippa in the same tone exactly. ‘But if he does, I shall look under the bed for the bombard.’

*

On the same day, Wednesday, April 28th, Peter Vannes, the former English Ambassador to Venice, reached the town of Sittingbourne on his journey from Dover to London, and at about the same time the idle onlooker from Dover, riding untrammelled at fullest possible speed, arrived at John Dimmock’s house in Fenchurch Street, London, where he found and had hurried words with Daniel Hislop.

Danny, with a catastrophe on his hands and no Voevoda to deal with it, made his excuses to Dimmock and his fellows of St Mary’s, threw a saddle on the swiftest horse in Master Dimmock’s stable, and set off for Sittingbourne as fast as he could go, making rendezvous with certain highly paid rogues on the way there. The idle man from Dover he sent, with a fresh horse, north-west to Gardington, in an effort to trace and bring back the Voevoda Bolshoia as fast as possible. The far from idle man, who had travelled seventy-two miles in an extremely short time, set out in good faith, but being overcome with sleep after sunset, made the mistake of hitching his horse and retiring, rolled in his cloak, for ten minutes’ rest by the roadside. He slept for eight hours.

At the same time, Danny Hislop’s absence was barely noticed by the household at Fenchurch Street, since something had happened which set all the merchants conferring. News had reached London of Thomas Stafford’s attempt to capture Scarborough Castle, and, helped by all the Spaniards at Westminster, the tale was not long in spreading.

Long ago, Thomas Stafford’s vainglorious plans had been discovered by the English Ambassador to the French Court, and long ago, King Philip had been made aware of them. But from Brussels, King Philip’s advisers were writing him daily:
Your Majesty’s affairs will benefit greatly if the English can be made to declare war on the French.…

In all England, therefore, no one had lifted a finger to stop Thomas Stafford from leaving France, nor to prevent Thomas Stafford from landing and declaring Mary Tudor an unrightful and unworthy Queen. Stafford had come from his refuge in France, with French ships and French gold and French soldiers. However Henri of France might deny it, the sluggish citizens of this unfriendly country could place only one interpretation-on that.

‘The French have spared us the trouble of breaking the truce. Now you will see,’ said Philip of Spain to his Councillors. ‘At last … at last we have this nation of Englishmen ready for war.’

Once before, the old man at Gardington had got the notion that someone would rob him, and all the able boys in the neighbourhood, and one or two lads from the smithies, and some pikemen from the town had come out to lend him a hand, with their bows and long staves and cheap swords and sharp-headed pikes, to protect Leonard Bailey and his property.

That time no thief had come, and the pay had been as you would expect from the twisted old miser, but the woman Dorcas had made them all a rabbit broth with bran bread to dip in it, and if you went about it the right way, she would serve spitted urchins. So when the old man called them round next time, when the great-nephew from overseas was coming to steal the old fellow’s books and cut the old fellow’s throat in his bed, by his way of it, the idle stout arms in the district came again with their bills, and got their potage, and hung about in the barn and garden and kitchen, waiting for the rogue to arrive since news had arrived from a groom at the
Chicken
that he was coming. There was a lady with him, they said.

Since the rain had come on again, Leonard Bailey’s henchmen were mostly in the barn when his great-nephew finally came to the gate, in a great cloak and a feathered hat with a jewel, and a young, hooded lady with fold after fold of blue velvet skirts hanging down by the fringe of her horsecloth. Twelve pairs of admiring eyes rested on Philippa Somerville, and then the leader, collecting himself, ran to the gate with his fellows and presenting a pike at the gentleman’s chest said, ‘Stand!’