The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  She had told Sybilla’s sister the Abbess that Lymond would return if assured that his mother was blameless. Relating the whole matter, with difficulty, to herself in the same unlikely dilemma with Kate, she still stoutly believed it. What, with all her determination, she could not bring herself to do was put what she had learned in cold blood into a letter.

  How did you inform a man, even a worldly and middle-aged man, that he was not the cadet of a fine Scottish family, but the nameless son of some woman in France? She lay awake toiling over the wording. She looked up a number of books, and assembled a number of apt quotations. She then concluded that whatever she wrote, she could not tolerate the thought that, on the blind and uncertain journey to Volos, it might be opened and read by eyes other than Mr Crawford’s.

  The safest course therefore was to wait. To wait until she had a reply, with address, to her first letter. Or to wait until somehow, from somewhere, the news of Lymond’s whereabouts filtered through.

  Then had come the offer of a Court position with Queen Mary. Kate had been astonished at her alacrity, accepting. ‘The tedium will send you to drink in a week. Little glasses of holsum bolsum. Remember your cousins.’

  ‘They had livers,’ Philippa said calmly. ‘I am a virgin with regular habits.’

  Her mother Kate looked at her sourly. ‘And what, pray, has London to offer that the great metropolis of Flaw Valleys has failed to supply of mad gaiety?’

  ‘Austin Grey,’ Philippa said. ‘A Spanish nobleman, if I can find one, rented to the value of eight thousand crowns a year or thereby.’ Reason, she might have added, to absent herself from the over-perceptive eye of the Dowager Lady Culter, and there to await further news of her husband. And opportunity, she might have said, to seek out the second of her elderly relatives who had been withheld so discreetly from her attention: Mr Leonard Bailey, her great-uncle by marriage.

  So Philippa departed for London, with Fogge her maid, and a train of baggage which caused Kate’s cook to jump up and down on the threshold. And so, prior to assuming her new post of lady in waiting, she arrived for training at the Sidney household in Penshurst.

  This was Austin Grey’s doing, with Tom Wharton as his willing accomplice. Austin, because his cousin was married to Sir Henry Sidney’s best friend; Tom Wharton, because his wife’s nephew, as he explained freely, was courting Sidney’s sister Frances. And both because Jane Dormer, Sidney’s sixteen-year-old niece, was already at Court and among the Queen’s dearest companions.

  Accustomed to the muddle of marriage alliances which joined English family to family in little but litigation, Philippa received the news philosophically, wondered who was paying whom and allowed herself a brief groan at the prospect of another girlish companion. The wide winter sky and soft country of Kent restored her natural optimism, a little overturned at the sight of the grey, Gothic splendours of Penshurst. The welcome she received from Sir Henry Sidney and his wife Mary not only redressed the balance, but added another dimension to what was already becoming a decidedly unorthodox life.

  Witty, talkative, scholarly, Henry Sidney at twenty-five was an ornament to any society with his long-boned bearded face and thick brown hair and a degree of good sense and good taste which extended from his friendships to the Spanish black-work on his shirt. And he was a courtier, born and bred. His father had been tutor and household steward to the Queen’s young brother Edward, and from the age of nine Henry had been the other boy’s closest companion until he had died, a King in his arms.

  Of his political sense and adroitness there could be no better proof than Sir Henry’s present survival. Few of the late King Edward’s near friends were also friends of his sister Queen Mary. More than that, Sir Henry’s bride of three years was the daughter of Queen Mary’s worst enemy. The Earl of Warwick was now dead, beheaded; but Lady Mary Sidney lived undisturbed with her husband, fair, stately and—Philippa found—cheerfully pregnant, and the Queen accepted their agreeable service, and did not molest them.

  Like the Station Laudable of the prophets in Paradise, the gates of Penshurst opened to receive Philippa and she discovered a way of life with no parallel in Flaw Valleys or Malta or Turkey or Richard Crawford’s cordial and uncomplicated household in Scotland.

  Below the tall timber roof of the hall there met poets and politicians, churchmen, navigators and merchant adventurers, scholars from Oxford and Cambridge; men who talked about hops and men who talked about ironworks. And it was in this company of men that Philippa, by Henry’s decree, spent most of her time, or those parts of it which she felt Lady Mary could spare her. For to one trained under Kiáya Khátún, there could be little to learn in dress or deportment or manners, and the additional skills she possessed were of a kind better forgotten than exercised. But she read and sewed and chatted with her gentle hostess, and managed to recover, for Lady Mary’s delight, her old skill at the lute and the virginals.

  She enjoyed being praised for her playing, although she could not be prevented from pointing out, critically, her own errors of taste and execution after every performance. She enjoyed spending Madame Donati’s despised money on gowns with shirred necks and cuffed oversleeves and fur and galloon in appropriate corners, although she protested mildly at the pronouncement that she must knot up her well-kept brown hair and cover it with a black gable headdress with lappets. ‘I shall look,’ she pointed out grimly, ‘like a sentry-box.’

  Henry Sidney, who was just discovering that his latest protégée was an original, sat on his wife’s bed and laughed. ‘Unbound hair is for maidens and brides on their wedding day. You are an old married woman.’

  ‘She is just seventeen,’ his wife intervened, blandly chiding. ‘And surely you recall what Allendale told us. It was a marriage of propriety. Was it not?’

  ‘A singular act,’ said Henry Sidney, ‘of Anglo-Scottish co-operation. You have no idea what trouble your uncle and Austin and I have been put to to satisfy the Lord Chancellor that we are not corrupting his pure English corn with the malicious Scotch weeds of coccle. But you are having the marriage annulled?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Philippa. The papers would be in London, Kate had said, in a month.

  ‘Perhaps the Papal Legate’s first deed on his arrival?’ Sidney said. ‘Who should be called not Pole the Englishman but Pole the angel. I may not have told you, but I met your husband three years ago at Châteaubriant. I was with a dull English mission and he was distinguishing himself in various unusual positions as a herald of the Queen Dowager of Scotland. Half the French court, male and female, were angling for his attentions, as I remember. Perhaps you should consider retaining him.’

  ‘But if the marriage is dissolved,’ Philippa said, ‘I needn’t wear black gable headdresses. Or should I have to go into mourning?’

  Henry Sidney laughed again and got off his wife’s bed. ‘I should think your friend Mr Crawford will go into mourning,’ he said. ‘You are much too acute for your years. Poor Jane is going to be frightened into a fever.’

  ‘It’s just the novelty,’ Philippa said. ‘No affected phrase, but a mean and popular style. Do you think I should learn to speak Spanish?’

  Sir Henry Sidney, knight, stared at her. ‘I do,’ he said. ‘I am convinced that you must. I think you are exactly what the King’s poor homesick nobles require to take their minds off the beer, the Pope, the prices, the climate and the women. Even when dressed like a sentry-box.’

  Philippa Somerville lived at Penshurst for six weeks before taking her place at the Court. It was a strange interlude between the easy backwaters of Midculter and the chill reality whose shadow she felt even in that time, as she put it, of training and refitting: the stark reality of central office, where men strive with the management of human affairs.

  From that interlude, out of much that was bright and shifting and sometimes unintelligible, two people made a deep impression on Philippa. One was Jane Dormer, her future companion, a fair and ethereal sixteen-year-old with a soft voice and an incredible pe
rfection of deportment and manners. The other, visiting his motherless sons who were already part of the great scattered household of relatives, dependants, wards and pensioners of every degree, was Diccon Chancellor.

  Philippa’s first view of Chancellor was piecemeal through the segments of a man-high contraption of wood, advancing upon her card-table from the other end of the hall. Arrived before her, the object was placed firmly aside, revealing a short, stocky man in his thirties, with untrirnmed black hair and a beard and round slaty eyes below a brow lined like a wrythen ribbed beaker. By his side, Sir Henry Sidney also came to a halt and addressed Philippa, one hand on the other man’s shoulder.

  ‘You’ve met his sons,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Richard Chancellor, who grew up here as a schoolboy and learned from Cabot all the tricks of the Seville hydrographical bureau, such as how to find the Great Cham of China in Moscow. Diccon, meet Philippa Somerville, an English lady within the years of innocence who knows more about the Levant than you do, and is at present disowning her husband.’

  The confronting parties stared at one another. ‘More than any masterful sorner I know,’ Richard Chancellor said, ‘Henry has to a wonder the art of suffocating conversation and then leaving others to bury it. Christopher tells me the Sultan of Turkey is shortly visiting Hexham.’

  ‘Your son exaggerates, as does everyone under this roof,’ Philippa said. ‘Is the new quadrant for Moscow or China?’

  ‘What years of innocence?’ said Diccon Chancellor sourly to Sidney. He gave a passing stroke to the painted wood of his instrument and dropped into the nook of a settle, while Sidney came to rest on its arm. ‘John Dee and I are about to take it to Cabot. Anticipate a long argument, and an abusive lecture on the variations of the magnetic needle and how to measure therefrom one’s travels east or west on the earth’s surface.’ He flung up his hands. ‘How do I know where I shall go with it? The Kingdom of Women? Barinth’s Isle called Delicious? The land of the Cariai, who dry the bodies of princes on hurdles, and so reserve them, involved in the leaves of their forests? Ask my masters.’

  ‘He means me,’ said Sidney.

  ‘I mean George Barnes and Tony Hussey and John Dimmock and Will Chester and Edmund Roberts and Will Garrard and all the other comfortable drapers and staplers and skinners and pewterers and haberdashers and grocers who sat back and thought up the Voyage to Cathay, under the direction of the right worshipful Master Sebastian Cabot Esquire, governor of the Mystery and Company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and places unknown, in the year of our Lord God 1553. And expected me to sail east of Norway.’

  ‘You asked to be pilot-general,’ said Sidney calmly. ‘They didn’t know you wanted some riotous living. Think of all the free drink you’ve had as the first man to sail east of North Cape and arrive by the north route in Muscovy.’

  ‘Think of Hugh Willoughby,’ said Chancellor sharply. ‘They picked him, too.’

  Philippa looked at Sir Henry who obliged, undisturbed, with an explanation. ‘Diccon’s was the only one of three ships to get through. They reached the Lofotens, and then ran into heavy weather and fog, just past North Cape. When it lifted, the other two vessels had vanished, with Sir Hugh Willoughby, the captain-general, on one. Diccon waited seven days at Vardȯ, but they didn’t come, then or later. Diccon, who doesn’t like good-looking men, is inclined to blame Willoughby.’

  ‘Bugg,’ said Chancellor. ‘His name was Bugg, till an ancestor changed it. I’ve nothing against him. He was well born; well connected; an excellent soldier and had a fine manner to parley with princes, and a lofty contempt for the sea. They didn’t know it. They pulled the pole from the hop and dispatched him.’

  Sir Henry’s niece, walking past, sat down at the other end of Philippa’s backgammon table and bent a grave look on Chancellor. ‘He paid for the fault with his life,’ Jane observed. ‘And rendered his immortal soul to his Maker.’

  ‘In December, I should accept it: a tragedy,’ Diccon said. ‘But in August?

  Sir Henry cleared his throat. ‘When you,’ he said to Philippa, ‘were scaling forbidden royal trees and punching stable boys in the stomach, my Jane at six was reading the Office of Our Blessed Lady in Latin daily at Aylesbury, crossing occasionally with her governess to Ashridge to play, read and dance with the late child Prince Edward. We all fall silent when she speaks, except Diccon, who might as well have perished with Willoughby, for all we have heard about Russia.’

  ‘I’m sick of Russia. Eden will tell you,’ Chancellor said.

  ‘I don’t want to hear it in Latin,’ Sir Henry said. ‘My God, I’ve had enough Latin. I did you proud, anyway. Vehementer pium institutum vestrum amplector, viri honestissimi … “Prompted by your ardent affection for your native land, you are applying yourselves to the furtherance of a project which will, I trust, prove beneficial to the people of England and reflect also honour on our common country. I part with Chancellor for this reason: not because I am tired of him, or because I find his maintenance burdensome to me, but that the authority and position Chancellor so well deserves may be given him. While we commit a little money to the hazard of fortune, he commits his very life to the remorseless sea. With what toils will he not be broken? With what dangers and watchings will he not be harassed; with what anxieties will he not be devoured? While we shall remain in our ancestral homes, he will seek foreign and unknown realms; he will entrust his safety to barbarians and unknown tribes; he will even expose his life to the monsters of the deep,” I said. I hope Jane is listening. And now what? Back wined and dined and hanging with furs from the Kremlin, you complain because a man has not the skill to get himself drowned in December. Now I look at you, you’re getting fat.’

  ‘He isn’t,’ said Jane. ‘I hear the castle of Moscow is fine, and is set on a fair wooded hill.’

  ‘There is a handful of churches and palaces, ringed about with high walls and rivers. The Tsar’s home, the Kremlin, lies in the innermost ring, and the city outside it.’

  ‘And is Russia rich?’ added Philippa obediently. ‘What nature of land is it?’

  Diccon Chancellor spoke to her, but his eyes were on something beyond her. ‘A land half-snatched by men from the hang-nails of winter, where heat and cold swing like a lodestone. For five months of the year the ice is an ell and more thick on her rivers. The poor may be smitten stiff in their cabins, and the sledges run into Moscow with the sitting dead grasping the harness. Of all the peoples of the earth, they have the hardest living.’

  ‘They plant crops?’

  ‘They are sunk in morasses and flooded with rivers: trees march through them like armies. They have no grains to export, nor jewels, nor spices nor any object of grace. They have walrus teeth and seal oil and sables, martens and grease beavers, hides and timber and tallow, salt and wax. They have no need of hives, for lakes of honey live in the trees. They say a man, slipping, lived in a pool for two days, and had to cling to a bear’s fur to pull himself out.’

  ‘They are a hardy nation?’ Jane Dormer said.

  ‘They are strong,’ Chancellor said. ‘Square, brawny men with short legs and big bellies, who do not repine. I have nothing, they say, but it is God’s and the Duke’s Grace’s. They do not think, as we do, that what is ours is but God’s and our own. They are content to scrape and scratch all their lives at the Tsar’s princely pleasure.’

  Philippa’s brown eyes were wide open. ‘Don’t they rebel?’ she said tartly.

  ‘With what?’ Chancellor said. ‘They have only numbers. And without army, without navy, without order, without standing in Asia or Europe, where else can the Tsar find an income?’

  ‘I read,’ said Sidney, ‘what you set down for Eden. If they knew their strength, no man were able to make match with them; nor they that dwell near them should have any rest of them. Fortunately, they don’t know their own strength.’

  ‘Unless you teach it them, trading,’ said Chancellor.

  It had the ring of a lon
g-standing argument. Sir Henry Sidney caught Philippa’s bland eye and smiled. ‘Diccon’s dream is of travel and conquest. A new Caesar, a new Alexander who will reach further than India and bring back an empire without need for needles and hawks’ bells and looking-glasses, and certainly without lading sheets and kerseys, and garnishes of indifferent pewter. But if you will go exploring, Diccon, you must allow those who dwell in the external light, by the essence of mechanical arts, to attempt to pay for the bottoms.’

  ‘Without the inferior light,’ Philippa said, ‘which produces sensitive knowledge?’

  ‘I exclude nothing,’ said Sir Henry, ‘except that Diccon will clamour to join the Worshipful Company of Drapers.’

  ‘Why,’ said Jane Dormer, ‘may he not enlarge the Christian faith and dominion to the glory of God and the confusion of infidels, comforted by the English merchants peaceably trading in Russia?’

  ‘Especially,’ said Philippa Somerville, ‘if the Russians are taught to exterminate Tartars.’

  The men looked at each other. Sir Henry Sidney got to his feet, and laying his hand on his hip, gazed down on them all with benignity. ‘Thus,’ he said, ‘despite the late confused counsel of ministers, I am persuaded that in this schismatic world, those guided by lights external and lights inferior may well solve our problems in harness.’

  Chancellor rose in his turn. ‘I do not go,’ he said, ‘because I am tired of you, or because I find your entertainment burdensome, but because I am wrecked on the wit of your women. Mistress Somerville, I have to thank you on Nick and Christopher’s behalf for your interest in them. Take heed at court. There are more monsters there than are born in the ocean.’