The Ringed Castle

by Dorothy Dunnett

  Francis Crawford had decided, quite sensibly, to give up, just before the fishing boat found him, there being a point beyond which in any philosophy, fruitless endeavour served no valid purpose. The white-hot wires by which he was operating had turned long ago into fodders of lead. His limbs, barely stirring, answered him rarely and he knew that none of his senses could be relied on, any more than a wrestler’s, who had been punched, continuously, on head and body for a very long time. The final point, the deciding factor was that if he found Chancellor in the next thirty seconds he could do nothing about it, except possibly drag him down to his death. And if Chancellor had to die, let him do it ignorant of this small fiasco, at least.

  So, characteristic of an impervious and versatile engine, the ‘Not yet’ became, with logic, ‘Now.’

  The lantern found him, because his hair was so bright. The Buchan man in the prow of the big, solid boat said, ‘There’s a loonie there. Bring her round, then.’

  They hung over the side, fascinated, while the rowers, swearing, got to work on the oars. ‘It’s a Russ, for sure. Is he deid?’

  ‘Aye, he’s deid,’ said the owner. ‘But he’s got rings on his fingers.’

  ‘Then bring him in,’ said the owner’s uncle, impatiently. ‘See’s the lantern, Aikie. Are we far fae the ship?’

  ‘Na. But the sailing-maister’s in Martin’s boatie. He’ll see us.’

  ‘Never a bit. Or tell him we’re saving the cargo. If she lifts off the rocks, it’s tint onyway.… He’s no deid.’ It was the voice of regret. A moment later he said, ‘Jesus, did he hear what I said?’

  The owner, who had skinned his fingers landing their catch, looked at him without sympathy. ‘I dinna ken. Ye’ll hae tae wait and find out. And then you’ll hae tae set to and mend it. Them that burns their arse has tae sit on the blister.’

  There was no possibility, hearing that, that he had arrived either in Paradise or Purgatory, or regions less monotonous. Returning as an act of obedience, as Timothy to Paul, Francis Crawford said, without opening his eyes, ‘I am very deaf in both ears.’

  ‘It’s no a Russ!’ Aikie said.

  ‘I hear it’s no a Russ,’ said the owner’s uncle. ‘My lord. But for my sister’s son here ye’d be droont.’

  ‘On the other hand,’ Lymond said, keeping to a misty but obstinate point, ‘the Courts of Admiralty are extremely strict about stolen cargo.’

  There was a long pause, occasioned by shock on the part of his audience and extreme inertia on the part of the swimmer. Then Lymond said, ‘But for one consideration, I shall see to it that no questions are asked.’

  For his pains, he was swamped by a full wave of white water, and it was some time before they baled out and set themselves once more to rights, with an exhibition of colourful cursing in the direction of the bemused oarsmen who had neglected their duties. Then the owner, who had evidently achieved some serious thinking, said, ‘And fin ye say, no questions asked, fa might ye be?’

  ‘A Crawford of Culter,’ Lymond said. ‘And able to do what I say.’

  ‘And fit are we to do?’ asked the owner’s uncle. Impelled by sudden optimism, he helped the stranger to sit up.

  ‘Search for two men,’ Lymond said. ‘And bring me them both, or their bodies. Before you unload that cargo.’

  ‘And if we dinna find them?’ said the owner, a realist.

  ‘Then I’d advise you,’ said Lymond, ‘to leave the cargo alone. You won’t fox the master.’

  ‘Na,’ said the owner’s uncle, pulling his lip. He stared at the Crawford of Culter, who had lost a brief, if inevitable, battle, and was now, for the moment, no longer with them. ‘He’s dwined away. Ye mith pit him back far ye got him.’

  Aikie said, ‘Fat’s her cargo?’

  The owner said, ‘Fae the Emperor o’ Muscovy. They’ll watch it like gleds.’

  His uncle said, ‘Culter’s namely. Could he dee it?’

  ‘Keep the Admiralty off? Like enough. It winna hurt us tae claa his back an’ dee as he wants us. Twa men. Russes likely. And never a mile fae a coo’s tail likely, the callants.… There’s Martin’s boat.’

  ‘Then wave your bluidy lantern!’ his uncle yelled.

  So Buckland brought Lymond back, in the boat owned by the opportune Martin, and Robert Best on one side and Adam Blacklock, cursorily restored on the other, stood in the surf and helped haul it in. Lymond was virtually conscious and walked, with Buckland’s support, as far as the fire. D’Harcourt got up on one elbow and Adam could sense, on the other side of the blaze, that Osep Nepeja was stirring and also about to turn and struggle on to his feet. He stood between both of them and Lymond, and waited until Buckland had laid him full length on the sand, and wrapped sacking round the shredded cloth on his shoulders.

  His eyes were shut, which meant very little, except that he did not intend to be sociable.

  ‘Soup,’ said Buckland. Adam followed him to the cauldron, stopping on the way to speak to Nepeja. Solid, bearded and hatless, after weeks of hunger and desperation, when he saw his compatriots drown and went from day to day, more than them all in fear of his life he sat now, his hands on the great silver crucifix which had hung from the day he was born at his neck, and prayed to his God, two thousand miles off in Russia. It had been a Russian, mad with panic, who had overturned the Edward’s small boat. And the man hurt most perhaps by what had then happened was this man, surviving.

  So Adam spoke to him reassuringly in his serviceable Russian, and saw him sit down, and went to Buckland and said, ‘A man Fraser has offered us hospitality, and Forbes of the castle up there. They seem well-meaning and responsible: horses are coming, and carts for those who can’t walk. They have room for the seamen.’

  There were nineteen men on the beach, out of fifty. Or out of a hundred and thirty-five, if you cared to count the four ships.

  Buckland said, ‘Who——?’ and broke off, with the steaming ladle still held in his hand. And Adam understood. Of the seven men of birth who were left, who was to lead them? Robert Best, interpreter for the Muscovy Company, or John Buckland, their hired sailing master? The Ambassador, dumb without his interpreters? The three men, once of St Mary’s? Or …

  Buckland looked back, and Adam with him to where Francis Crawford lay still in the brilliant glow of the fire, his lashes parted; and the seawater bright on his skin.

  ‘The Voevoda,’ said Buckland firmly, and prepared to march with the soup to his patient.

  Adam’s hand on his ladle-arm stopped him.

  ‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘The Voevoda. But for the mercy of God, not just now.’

  *

  Although the fishing boats searched, for their own venal reasons, for quite a fair length of time, no man that night or any other laid hands on Richard Chancellor, Grand Pilot of the Muscovy Fleet, or his beloved son Christopher.

  Long before then, they had moved out of the bay, at first tangled kindly together, and later alone, out of sight of each other, but with the same broad and harmonious current bearing them east.

  Over the lightening sea lay the path Chancellor had discovered, and the door he had opened, expending on it a sovereign order of courage in an element exacting of courage, for he sailed from home, and not towards it.

  We commit a little money to the hazard of fortune; he commits his life. Wherefore, Sidney had said, you are to favour and love the man departing thus from us.

  The way he had found opened for him, and his long-studied seas with dignity gave him his bier. And in the morning, he was accorded the crown of dead men, to see the sun before they are buried, and he set out with shoes on his feet as do the Muscovites, for he had a long way to go.

  Chapter 3

  The Edward touched her rock and settled on it, frail as a fly, and the filament of intelligence, from London to Brussels to Fontainebleau, trembled and marked it.

  Within three days, the news was in Edinburgh where, freshly back from the North, the Queen Dowager, Regent of Scotland, sat with her lords an
d examined it. Then, since one English ship was not an invasion and the ambassador of any reigning monarch should not, unseen, be offended, she made her dispositions and sent her heralds north to the Earl Marischal of Scotland in his castle of Dunnottar, to convey the noble refugee to her court. Then, of certain subtle intent, she dispatched a courier west, to Midculter.

  Four days after the wreck, accordingly, Sybilla Lady Culter received word from her Queen that Francis Crawford her son was in Scotland and, for the first time in her long life, fainted before the courier’s eyes. And Kate Somerville, who was staying with her, swept up the royal dispatch and read it, sitting by the Dowager’s bed, long after the courier had gone and the excitement had died away, and then sat pale faced, with her sight quite detached from her brain until the exquisite little woman on the bed stirred and opened her eyes, and a moment later, summoned a smile. Then Philippa’s mother, abandoned equally by her unaccountable young, fell forward, eyes streaming, and hugged her.

  The tidings reached London on the first of December, and were brought to Philippa forthwith by Jane Dormer, entering their own room and clasping her hands. ‘Mr Crawford is back.’

  To Philippa, who had been reading Bartholomew Lychpole’s correspondence for weeks, this was not the news it might appear, but a franchise at last to display the satisfaction she felt at his coming. She said, ‘I must write to his mother. Where is he? St Anthony’s?’ And then, taking time to read Jane’s transparent face, she said baldly, ‘What?’

  Because Philippa knew the men of the Muscovy Company, it was hard at first to conceive the scale of the disaster; the fact that every ship had been lost, and every life, save for a handful of men on a beach in the north-east of Scotland. And Diccon. And Christopher. She stood by the window while Jane told her and then said with flat efficiency, ‘Will you go to Penshurst, or shall I?’

  Alone and sick on a diet of promises, with war rushing towards her, and her sister, sweetly recalcitrant, in the city, the Queen was in no mood to permit her women to leave her. It was Philippa therefore who fell ill with an unexplained fever and retiring from court, rode thirty miles through icy roads to tell Mary Sidney that her dear Diccon Chancellor was dead, and to break the news to his younger son Nicholas. She missed therefore the brief appearance in London of Robert Best and John Buckland, brutally altered, during which they attended meeting after meeting, answering the endless, harassed questions of the Muscovy merchants and set out north again in the second week of December in superior company, and armed with two documents. One, drawn up by the Muscovy Company, was a public instrument for registration in the books of the Lords of Council and Session in Edinburgh; the other (rycht excellent, rycht heich and mychtie princesse our dearest sister) was from the Queen of England to Marie de Guise, Dowager Queen and Regent of Scotland. Both referred to the merchant ship called Edward Bonaventure of one hundred and sixty tons’ burden, thrown shattered and broken by storm on the Scottish coast next to or near the shore called Buchan Ness while making for London, and which so perished and sank that part of its goods had been lost, floating in the sea, and part thrown into the hands of the inhabitants from the coast at Buchan Ness and other adjacent coastal places belonging to the Serene Queen of Scotland and by them unjustly seized and detained.

  The Company, legal in Latin, begged by these present instruments of administration that Queen, Council and officials of Scotland would have these goods returned to their owners, and recommended the party of six, including Robert Best and John Buckland, through which their request was conveyed.

  The Queen, requesting letters of safe conduct for the same little party in Scotland, dwelt longer upon matters proper to kingdoms, such as the person of good estimation sent from the Duke of Muscovy in embassy with certain gifts and jewels to be presented to us. These goods, jewels and letters she asked to have restored, along with those of his fellow survivors, reasonable reward being given to those who recovered them. Her dearest sister would also, she begged, succour the Ambassador during his stay in her country, and also those loving subjects of England now coming north to see to his business and to conduct him thither to England.

  Thus the news came to London and spread. Spread to King Philip at Brussels. Spread to the Hanse towns, and Sweden and Poland. The last to hear it was Russia. The first to hear it was the man for whose sake, because of a prophecy, Francis Crawford was committed to his deliberate and industrious exile.

  Richard Crawford, third Baron Culter, was at Dunnottar Castle, sixty miles south of Pitsligo, when the news came of the Edward, sent by Alexander Fraser, seventh Laird of Philorth, the biggest landowner of the Pitsligo area, and the Earl Marischal’s kinsman by marriage.

  It arrived late on Wednesday, November 11th, the day after the shipwreck, and the two men read it together; both moderate, middle aged and agreeable: William Keith, fourth Earl Marischal of Scotland and its wealthiest citizen, and Richard Crawford of Midculter, Lanarkshire, whose well-run lands provided him and his widowed mother and young, growing family with a living of comfort and grace, and whose steadfast and unpublicized services to his Queen and to his country had not gone through the years without recognition, though never with the traumas of love or hate, fear or envy which had surrounded the life of his brother.

  William Keith read the message in the Upper Hall of the strongest castle in Scotland, and then, because his secretary was in Aberdeen and the script was too small for his spectacles, he handed the page to his guest who had toiled for two months with macers, clerks, Justice Deputes and aggrieved plaintiffs over the aftermath of the Queen Dowager’s Justice Courts up in Elgin, and who, thankfully, had been about to take his leave and ride back to Edinburgh. And so Richard saw the unmistakable writing, clear and even, and straight, line after line, as if ruled by the thread of the mistar. And at the foot of the page, without flourish, the signature: FRANCIS CRAWFORD OF LYMOND AND SEVIGNY.

  Nor, making his quick dispositions; taking directions of the tired courier, discussing with the Earl Marischal the steps necessary to warn the Queen Regent in Edinburgh or brushing aside, with grim heartiness, the Earl Marischal’s views on the folly of setting out on a sixty-mile ride without sleep on a wild night in November, did the third Baron Culter dream of the degree of cold, considered thought which had forced the dispatch of that letter.

  Instead, smiling, he left his host, and climbed the steep cliff-face path with his servants, and, looking back, saluted the rock of Dunnottar, glossing the sea as it rose from its coarse russet crust, appled with primaeval pebbles. Then he set off, buffeted by the unruly wind under a sky like a pod of grey whales, slowly moving, outlined in apricot.

  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 bee
n 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.