The Ringed Castle
Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
ACCLAIM FOR
Dorothy Dunnett’s
LYMOND CHRONICLES
“Dorothy Dunnett is one of the greatest talespinners since Dumas … breathlessly exciting.”
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
“Dunnett is a name to conjure with. Her work exemplifies the best the genre can offer. It combines the accuracy of exhaustive historical research with a gripping story to give the reader a visceral as well as cerebral understanding of an epoch.”
—Christian Science Monitor
“Dorothy Dunnett is a storyteller who could teach Scheherazade a thing or two about suspense, pace and invention.”
—The New York Times
“Dunnett evokes the sixteenth century with an amazing richness of allusion and scholarship, while keeping a firm control on an intricately twisting narrative. She has another more unusual quality … an ability to check her imagination with irony, to mix high romance with wit.”
—Sunday Times
(London)
“A very stylish blend of high romance and high camp. Her hero, the enigmatic Lymond, [is] Byron crossed with Lawrence of Arabia.… He moves in an aura of intrigue, hidden menace and sheer physical daring.”
—Times Literary Supplement
(London)
“First-rate … suspenseful.… Her hero, in his rococo fashion, is as polished and perceptive as Lord Peter Wimsey and as resourceful as James Bond.”
—The New York Times Book Review
“A masterpiece of historical fiction, a pyrotechnic blend of passionate scholarship and high-speed storytelling soaked with the scents and colors and sounds and combustible emotions of 16th-century feudal Scotland.”
—Washington Post Book World
“Splendidly colored scenes … always exciting, dangerous, fascinating.”
—Boston Globe
“Detailed research, baroque imagination, staggering dramatic twists, multilingual literary allusion and scenes that can be very funny.”
—The Times
(London)
“Ingenious and exceptional … its effect brilliant, its pace swift and colorful and its multi-linear plot spirited and absorbing.”
—Boston Herald
F
IRST
V
INTAGE
B
OOKS
E
DITION
, S
EPTEMBER
1997
Copyright © 1971 by Dorothy Dunnett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Cassell & Company, Ltd., London, in 1971. First published in hardcover in the United States by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, in 1972.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Dunnett, Dorothy.
The ringed castle / Dorothy Dunnett.
p. cm.
Sequel to Pawn in frankincense.
eISBN: 978-0-307-76239-9
1. Crawford, Francis (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Courts and courtiers—Fiction. 3. Russia—History—1533-1584—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6054.U56R56 1997
823’.914—dc21 97-6674
Random House Web address:
http://www.randomhouse.com/
v3.1_r1
With love, for
Dorothy Eveline Millard Halliday
to whom both Francis Crawford and the author
owe their present delightful existence
F
OREWORD BY
Dorothy Dunnett
When, a generation ago, I sat down before an old Olivetti typewriter, ran through a sheet of paper, and typed a title,
The Game of Kings
, I had no notion of changing the course of my life. I wished to explore, within several books, the nature and experiences of a classical hero: a gifted leader whose star-crossed career, disturbing, hilarious, dangerous, I could follow in finest detail for ten years. And I wished to set him in the age of the Renaissance.
Francis Crawford of Lymond in reality did not exist, and his family, his enemies and his lovers are merely fictitious. The countries in which he practices his arts, and for whom he fights, are, however, real enough. In pursuit of a personal quest, he finds his way—or is driven—across the known world, from the palaces of the Tudor kings and queens of England to the brilliant court of Henry II and Catherine de Medici in France.
His home, however, is Scotland, where Mary Queen of Scots is a vulnerable child in a country ruled by her mother. It becomes apparent in the course of the story that Lymond, the most articulate and charismatic of men, is vulnerable too, not least because of his feeling for Scotland, and for his estranged family.
The Game of Kings
was my first novel. As Lymond developed in wisdom, so did I. We introduced one another to the world of sixteenth-century Europe, and while he cannot change history, the wars and events which embroil him are real. After the last book of the six had been published, it was hard to accept that nothing more about Francis Crawford could be written, without disturbing the shape and theme of his story. But there was, as it happened, something that could be done: a little manicuring to repair the defects of the original edition as it was rushed out on both sides of the Atlantic. And so here is Lymond returned, in a freshened text which presents him as I first envisaged him, to a different world.
No one could write of the remarkable events leading up to the visit of Osep Nepeja without mentioning a profound debt to the published studies of Professor T. S. Willan of the University of Manchester.
Apart from Lymond himself, his family and his immediate associates, all the characters in this novel are historical, as are all the principal events.
The verses of the Song of Baida have been translated from the Ukrainian for this book by Yaroslav Baran.
1
Not to every young girl is it given to enter the harem of the Sultan of Turkey and return to her homeland a virgin.
The most prosaic schoolgirl in England, Philippa Somerville arrived home from Stamboul in the summer, having travelled stoically through Volos, Malta and Venice where she received, with mild distaste, the unexpected bequest of a fortune. From Venice, she crossed Europe to Calais, and at Calais she took ship for Tynemouth, whence she set off for her home in Flaw Valleys.
With her rode her henchman, guide and protector, a Scotsman called Abernethy. And on Archie Abernethy’s stout arm, complaining, was a two-year-old boy named Kuzúm.
Sir Thomas Wharton and his company came across them all just outside Newcastle, and since there seemed to be a great many sumpter mules and a large number of hired soldiers guarding them, he gave himself the trouble of investigating. The sight of the Somerville child, returning after two years’ absence on unexplained orgies abroad, was the reward of exemplary vigilance. His companion, a fledgling nobleman from Northumberland, was inclined to be more sentimental, but Sir Thomas quite rightly ignored him. Sir Thomas halted Philippa dead in her tracks, and made her vivaciously welcome.
It was a chaste encounter, conducted with grim efficiency by Archie Abernethy, with Philippa brazenly helping him. Yes, she remembered the Whartons, beside whom her late father had often fought. And yes, she remembered Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale, although from a viewpoint four feet high, to a target not very much higher.
