The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  The housekeeper of Gardington, a middle-aged lady with a pallid, ridged face, looked up when Philippa entered and opened her mouth. In the event, she neither screamed, fainted, nor dropped the bowl she was holding, although her hand gripped so hard that she cracked it, and, saving both pieces quickly, laid the two shells on the table and turned to face Philippa. ‘And who’s to pay for that?’ she said harshly.

  ‘I shall,’ said Philippa coolly. ‘And I’m sorry I shocked you so badly. But I seemed quite unable to make myself heard at the door, and very soon I shall have to return to the Palace——’

  The woman interrupted. ‘You weren’t invited. How did you get in? You’ve broken the door!’

  ‘The door is open,’ said Philippa, with absolute truth. Her fine, plucked eyebrows rose to impossible heights.

  ‘It couldn’t be!’

  ‘And besides,’ said Philippa patiently, ‘I have an appointment with Mr Bailey. If you would tell him I am here. Mistress Somerville, from Hampton Court Palace.’

  The woman stared at her, thinking. It was a crude weapon, but the only one Philippa could be sure of. She had used it also in her letter. Mistress Philippa Somerville, one of the Queen’s ladies, was a friend of the family Crawford with which he had some connection, and wished the favour of an interview. She had not said what her relationship with the Crawfords might be, and she had not mentioned Lymond’s name anywhere. The housekeeper said, ‘He’s not here.’

  ‘I know,’ Philippa said. ‘He’s staying with a friend, and you’re visiting a sick mother. It is not an offence, of course, for a gentleman and his household to try to hide from one of the Queen’s servants. It only gives rise to certain strange speculations at Court.’

  The language was too formal, she thought, for the housekeeper. But it might be more to the weight of the person whose foot had made the floorboards creak outside the door, just a moment before. And she had barely stopped speaking when the kitchen door was indeed thrown open with such passionate force that it gave way in one of its hinges and hung, like a hatch in a gale, framing the suffused face and gross, ill-clad figure of a tall man, powerful even in his late sixties, who turned his veined eyes and shouted at Philippa.

  ‘And who’s to pay for that?’ Philippa said, cheeringly, to herself.

  ‘Hide!’ Leonard Bailey was repeating. ‘You accuse me of hiding? Then what shall I accuse you of, Madam? Breaking and entering with intent to pilfer—take the candlestick, Dorcas! Move the cups to the shelf, there! How do we know where the woman is from … the Fleet, most likely, and wearing stolen clothes, and having lying letters writ for her by some renegade scholar!’ He stopped, breathing heavily, and twisted his lips in a smile Philippa found less than becoming. ‘The door was locked. How did you enter, if you aren’t a thief? And if you are a lady of quality, where are your servants?’

  ‘Outside,’ said Philippa repressively. ‘You would be able to see them if you were not bent, it seems, on conducting your business in kitchens.’

  ‘Accomplices!’ Bailey said. His face was still twisted.

  ‘Friends,’ said Philippa mildly. ‘My groom is Sir Henry Sidney’s, and wears his livery, if you will take the trouble to look. Why, Mr Bailey, I should dislike extremely calling unannounced at your house, if this is the treatment you mete to a family friend, who has written from Court to advise you of her visit. If it is my sex you take exception to, I cannot remedy that, although you seem to have no objections to sharing your house with a woman. If you resent bestowing hospitality, I have asked for none. If it is the Queen you misprise, it would be as well not to make your feelings too plain.’

  Harshly, the woman’s voice spoke in her ear. ‘Mr Bailey is a loyal subject of Her Majesty. None more loyal. It is lies and spite if you hear anything else.’

  ‘Be quiet, woman!’ said Bailey. He advanced unpleasantly close and stood, looking down at the bongrace. Philippa gazed at him with an outward serenity, and an inward gratitude that fruit and cheese were all that her stomach was saddled with. Then he said, ‘Come!’ and leaving the kitchen walked up the stairs.

  Philippa stood where she was. ‘My groom and——’

  He did not turn round. ‘Look after them, Dorcas!’ he snapped, and, flinging open a door, strode into his study. Philippa followed.

  The room was little more than a closet, surrounded by shelves, with a table-desk under the window, which this time was tight shut. The reason for caution was obvious, for in every available space in the room, on desk, floor, stool and all the lower shelves, were stacked ledgers and papers, held down, half of them, with rocks from the garden. On the other shelves, up to the ceiling, which was finely plastered like the one she had seen, was a dusty collection of book rolls and books which appeared to run into some hundreds and led Philippa, like a dog held by the nose, to walk staring up to the tightly packed spines. Mr Bailey, who had seated himself at his desk, rose and addressed her unpleasantly.

  ‘Your stool is placed here. I shall have to lock up my library, I see. Or some palace cockscomb who has learned to read, and maybe to add, will be walking through locked doors to thieve it.’

  ‘A bibliotaphos,’ said Philippa dreamily. She took the stool by his peremptory finger.

  The big, blunt-featured face, half shaven and threaded with veins, stared without apology at the sun-polished young one, with its delicate artifice almost invisible; its rich clothes bestowed with theatrical grace. ‘You have your manners to seek,’ he said. ‘I wonder, mistress, that the Queen allows impertinent children to clutter her chambers. It is a sorry outlook for her nursery.’ Taking his time, her great-uncle by marriage looked Philippa narrowly up and down, and then added, with heavy contempt, ‘But you are not here on Queen’s business, are you? No, or we should have heard many more of those piping threats, and a rattling of prison chains as well, I make no doubt. You are here on the affairs of that parcel of blustering rogues, the Crawfords of Culter.’

  ‘Who married your sister,’ Philippa said. With a training painfully learned, she avoided twisting her gloved hands together.

  ‘Who made a fool of her,’ said Bailey harshly. ‘Married at seventeen, dead at eighteen, giving birth to the heir. The great first Baron Crawford of Culter. He seized her dowry; he took her, and bedded her, and never came near her again, from the moment he planted his son until the hour she gave her life bearing him.

  ‘That,’ said Leonard Bailey, ‘is how the second Baron, Gavin, was born, and that is how he would have died, a half-orphan of brutal and vicious neglect, had I not been there to save him and care for him.’

  Philippa felt very cold. The half-orphan, Gavin. Sybilla’s husband. And the father—the putative father—of Richard and Lymond. She said, ‘Did you take him to stay with you?’ and then sat very still as he laughed.

  ‘You don’t know their history, do you? Whoever sent you on this little mission has kept the rarest morsel to himself. No, I could not take Gavin with me, mistress, because I was a child of eight, and an orphan myself when Honoria died. I was already at Midculter, the Baroness’s young brother, there on sufferance, there to be kicked and maltreated, and there to see them do the same to the baby when it was born. He saw it born, the great lord of Culter, then he barely waited to bury his wife before he was out of the castle. Out of the castle, leaving his son and his brother-in-law to the blows of the kitchen boys, to stinking food, to rags for then backs.’

  Philippa said, steadying her voice, ‘Were the family poor?’

  He laughed, the black cloth hat shaking; the sun catching the silvery nap of his beard. ‘Poor, madam? That dung-heap of rascals, respecting only the weathercock? They could have sold the Crown ten times over, and did. And did. No. He could have dressed us in velvets if he wished to, but the 1st Baron didn’t like children. Didn’t like Honoria, who knew too much of his love-nests. Resented her child, and loathed me, who reminded him of her, and who knew too much—damn me,’ said Leonard Bailey, his face sweating with anger remembered, ‘what does a c
hild of eight—ten—twelve not see and hear? He was away—at Court, in France; away for months. Away sometimes for years. But he heard. And we were told, sneering, by the men he had left to humiliate us. Gavin grew up as an animal grows, with no gentle company but what I could give him, and I knew little enough. But he grew handsome. And it was when the 1st Baron departed to France and stayed there that this woman laid hands on Gavin and married him.’

  ‘Sybilla?’ Philippa said. Her throat was dry.

  ‘A Semple. Sybilla, yes, was her name. A shrewd family. They knew there was money. They had seen none of it spent on Gavin or me. But Gavin was nearly of age, and when he came into his inheritance, the wife got it all. When his father came back to Midculter the marriage was legal, the money was hers, and she had spent it as a riddle would spend it—Midculter rebuilt and refurnished, and filled with her clothes and her pictures, her statues and jewels fit for Solomon’s temple.…’

  ‘Was he angry?’ said Philippa. Beautiful Midculter, with its painted roof and suites of fine tapestries. The jewel boxes in Sybilla’s own solar. Lymond’s wealth, now squandered also.…

  The harsh voice was sliding and slow, and so was Bailey’s glance. ‘Have you seen a sow burst apart in a furnace? That was his anger. That was the day which repaid all the years of my wretchedness.’

  Philippa said, ‘What did he do?’ from dry lips. She felt very empty.

  ‘What could he do? Break the marriage? He tried to, but she would have none of it. Take back the money? But that was impossible. It had been spent, and the house was Gavin’s as much as it was his. He could do nothing to Sybilla or Gavin, because, apart from all that, in his absence Sybilla had played her best card. She had given Gavin his heir, the boy Richard. No,’ Bailey said; and despite the fierce smile on his face, the long quill in his thick hands bent and snapped as he stared grinning at Philippa. ‘No: there was only one thing left for my lord to do in his rage, and he lost no time over it. I was flung penniless from the house. I, his dead wife’s own brother; for thirty years his dearest relation. I was flung from the house and left to live as I may. There, Mistress Somerville,’ said Leonard Bailey, and the glare in his eyes, fading, was replaced by the smile she was beginning to know, ‘there are the Crawfords of Culter. There are your friends. There are the people who send you. You will not be surprised, perhaps, if you were not greeted in this house with roses, and if I now ask you to take your groom and your woman and your high-handed Court ways and remove yourself from my property.’

  Philippa did not move. She said, ‘I knew none of this.’

  Its fury gone, the harsh voice was flat. ‘I gave you leave, Madam.’

  ‘I have no wish to stay,’ Philippa said. ‘Except for one thing. Where were Sybilla’s next children born?’

  Her fortitude no longer extended to stilling her hands. But it did force her, at least, to meet the long, speculative look he bestowed on her. He drew a slow breath. ‘Ah,’ said Leonard Bailey. ‘So there lies the heart of the matter. The girl is dead, so—your interest is in the boy, Francis?’

  ‘Yes,’ Philippa said.

  ‘And then,’ Bailey said, on the same genteel note of inquiry, ‘and then what is your interest?’

  Philippa answered as steadily. ‘That of a friend.’

  ‘A friend. So. Then the boy himself has sent you to inquire? He has doubts, perhaps? Or is it a question of inheritance? Or knighthood? Or some prize for which legitimacy—ah, that precious thing, Mistress Philippa—legitimacy is essential?’

  ‘No,’ Philippa said. ‘It is none of these.’

  ‘Then why?’ Bailey said. He was smiling again. He sat back in his hard-backed joined chair, the broken reed thrown on the papers, the coarse wisps of his hair escaped, in his emotion, from the thin greasy edge of the cap. ‘I fear you will have to explain it. My time is limited. I cannot gratify your curiosity for no reasonable purpose.’

  ‘He didn’t send me,’ Philippa said. ‘He is not interested, nor are any members of his family except myself; and my interest is soon explained. Mr Francis Crawford and I have been married.’

  His pleasure was a thing tangible to the sight: it spread from his shining broad hands to his mouth and his eyes; it emanated from him like an odour. ‘Married!’ said Master Bailey. ‘With Sybilla Crawford’s son for a husband! Then get you fast to a lawyer.’

  ‘Why?’ said Philippa bluntly.

  ‘Why? Because your sons, Mistress, will have no more name than your husband has, and an inheritance of a kind no one can tell. I knew her ways,’ Bailey said. ‘I knew Sybilla Semple, and while I was there, at Midculter, I could keep her in check. But I was thrown out of Midculter, and when the first Baron went off, there was no one left, in Midculter or out of it, to restrain her.

  ‘Richard is Gavin’s son,’ Bailey said. ‘But in the boy and the girl who came after him run the seeds of four, or six, or ten possible fathers.… Who could blame the dear woman? Rich, titled—there was only one flaw in the household, and that without remedy. It was too late by then to rear Gavin as he should have been reared in his youth. He was a rough man and a rude lover, but that was not poor Gavin’s fault. Get a lawyer, Mistress. Your children will be pretty, but nameless.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ Philippa said. Sybilla, wise, witty and fragile, was the woman he was speaking of. And what he had said was untrue.

  He was breathing hard still, with excitement, and the smile remained on his face. ‘Naturally,’ he said. ‘It is not in your interests to believe me. And in her old age, I am told, the lady is most persuasive. Can you not imagine her in her youth? Such blue eyes: such golden-haired purity. Each man she met fell in love with her. But she was circumspect with her lovers. She chose wisely and enjoyed them in secret—in France, or behind some stranger’s curtain in Scotland. And wherever the girl and the boy were begotten, the births both took place in France.’

  ‘I don’t believe it,’ Philippa said, ‘because the story I heard was quite different. I heard the second two children were not Sybilla’s. I heard they were fathered by Gavin.’

  ‘Then why come to me?’ said Leonard Bailey. ‘If that version pleases you then pray, mistress, believe it. But I’ll warrant you it came from a Semple. And without a paper to prove it, at that.’

  ‘And what proof do you have?’ said Philippa.

  He was enjoying it. He gave a laugh, his lips looped at the corners; the saliva winking between broken teeth. ‘What a keen nose for facts! How you long to hear me say, None. But I have proof, my mistress. First, her sweet children’s colouring. Gavin was brown-haired, and so is Richard, his eldest. What of the second son, Francis?’

  ‘It isn’t proof,’ Philippa said. ‘His mother might have been fair.’

  ‘You are right. It isn’t proof. But it gives you pause to consider, does it not?’

  ‘And in the second place?’ Philippa said.

  ‘In the second place, I have what no one else has. I have evidence, written evidence, that the children Francis and Eloise were Sybilla’s.’ He laughed again. ‘Don’t you wish you had scanned my shelves more closely? But they are not there, Mistress Philippa. The papers are where only I may find them. And there is only one way you will ever learn what is in them. If you send Francis Crawford here to me to ask me for them, with all the respect and duty that is my due as the creature’s great-uncle. Tell him to come to me, Mistress, and beg for them. Then I might let him see what his true ancestry is.’

  She could not move him. When at last she rounded on him, accusing him of the grossest misrepresentation and malice, he merely laughed again, and then, rising, took her by the arm and walked her out of the house. She made him stop on the threshold so that she could open her purse and fling down on the table the price of the cracked bowl for Dorcas. Then she marched down to the gate where George and Fogge waited, and mounted.

  Chapter 9

  The road Philippa took then was not back to Hampton Court Palace, but to the city; and because she had confided in the
m, Fogge and George, her groom, rode with her to her appointment at Tilbury.

  She made poor company. And they, after attempting to cheer her with conversation, lapsed into silence, glancing at her from time to time. Philippa, riding like one of Mr Dee’s mechanical toys, heard and saw nothing but the strident voice of Leonard Bailey, overriding and destroying what she had already, with such trouble, accepted: the story of the untoward marriage, and the part played in it by the woman she knew, who had been Sybilla Semple.

  In two days, she was to set sail for Russia. In three months or less she would be facing Lymond himself, already astonished and irritated by the responsibility of her presence, and would have to persuade him to come home to Scotland, and to Sybilla. And would have to tell him what Leonard Bailey had just told her … or would have to conceal it.

  She could not tell him. Of that she was sure. And he would never learn it in Scotland, if in all the years of his life there had been no rumour: nothing that had come to the ears of his enemies, and used against him and Sybilla. Any misconduct there had been in Sybilla’s life had taken place outside Scotland, Philippa propounded to herself, trying to face possibilities; trying to throttle the instinct to forget it all and do nothing.… Therefore if Lymond came home, who would tell him if she, Philippa, said nothing?

  No one. No one, that is, unless Leonard Bailey, roused by her visit, decided to take a last, exquisite revenge. That was one risk she took, in saying nothing to Lymond. The other danger was subtler still. Suppose that, given the choice, Lymond would prefer to be the son of his mother, on any terms whatsoever, than to be the offspring of Gavin alone?

  She knew too little about him. Kate would have advised her, but there was no time now to consult Kate. And even Kate could not see the circumstance, as she did, against a lifetime of war and diplomacy, education and statesmanship, in which this was merely a factor. To a cool-tempered man, a small factor. To an ambitious man, his emotional needs already sufficiently catered for, a factor of vanished importance. To Sybilla, life or death … which punishment was greater; which did she deserve? To Kate, what? There Philippa did not know either. She could plan nothing; understand nothing, until she met and weighed up whatever Francis Crawford had become.