The Ringed Castle (9 page)

Plummer said,
‘Four thousand roubles!’

‘Quite,’ said Danny Hislop with a terrible brightness. ‘It makes quite a difference, Maeve, doesn’t it?’

In October Philippa Somerville, a stickler for the more remote social graces, decided to write to her husband from Scotland.

It was to be a long, newsy letter, effective in spelling and conveying inexplicitly in its latter pages an explicit injunction from his mother to come home at once.

The fact that Francis Crawford’s mother had made no such request and before she did so would bleed in her coffin like pie-meat was a matter of minor importance. So also was the truth that, having written the letter, Francis Crawford’s child-bride had no idea in the world where to send it. For the one thing made clear to Philippa during her long stay that year at Midculter was that Lymond’s return was needed and quickly, for the sake of Sybilla.

She never spoke of her son. It was noticeable, too, how seldom she allowed herself close to her grandson Kuzúm, now briskly tolerated by a concourse of violent black-headed cousins, and cared for in nurseries full of smiling, soft-handed women. Philippa, who had thought Kuzúm all her own but for the birth-pangs, saw with loving resignation the ties being loosed as his need for her now became less, and Kate saw more of the child now than she did.

But it was in pursuit of a straying Kuzúm that Philippa one day unlocked the door of a tower and climbing up, abruptly diverted, found herself in a round, airy room looking on to the moat, with a low bed, and a chest, and a desk, and shelf upon shelf of worn papers and books.

They were not dusty, although the air smelt unused and the thin woollen stuff of the bedding felt damp to the touch. There was no fireplace and no means of heating. She took down a volume at random.

The round, unformed script on the fly-leaf said,
Francis Crawford of Lymond
. She stared at it; then put it down and picked up another. The writing in this one was older; the neat level hand she had seen once before, in Stamboul. This time it said only,
The Master of Culter
.

That dated it after the death of his father, when until the birth of Richard’s son Kevin, the heir’s rank and title were Lymond’s. And all the books were his, too. She scanned them: some works in English; others in Latin and Greek, French, Italian and Spanish.… Prose and verse. The classics, pressed together with folios on the sciences, theology, history; bawdy epistles and dramas; books on war and philosophy; the great legends. Sheets and volumes and manuscripts of unprinted music. Erasmus and St Augustine, Cicero, Terence
and Ptolemy, Froissart and Barbour and Dunbar; Machiavelli and Rabelais, Bude and Bellenden, Aristotle and Copernicus, Duns Scotus and Seneca.

Gathered over the years; added to on infrequent visits; the evidence of one man’s eclectic taste. And if one studied it, the private labyrinth, book upon book, from which the child Francis Crawford had emerged, contained, formidable, decorative as his deliberate writing, as the Master of Culter. The Master of Culter who had been outlawed from church and from state, accused once of murder and treason. Who had forced his way into Flaw Valleys and questioned her, a child of ten, while Kate begged for her, weeping. To whom she was married.

There were more books in an aumbry, let flush in the wainscoting, and something else Philippa drew out and looked at. A lute, the strings long since gone or decayed, and a great splintered scar on the pearwood.

She touched it, compassionately, and was reminded of chipped and gouged timber she had noticed elsewhere, on the lowest panels of the nail-studded door, as if a boot had struck them, again and again. She shivered, as the bleak cold of the room struck through her lightly gowned body, and lifting the books, slid them back in their place.

A voice said, ‘Take them, Philippa, if you have a fancy to read them. They were acquired with great pains, and it seems a pity to see them spoil now.’ White-haired, blue-eyed; unblemished as fine fragile porcelain, the Dowager stood in the doorway and watched her, her face unclouded by anger or any kind of distress.

Philippa said plainly, ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. I thought Mr Crawford’s room was downstairs.’

‘It is,’ said Sybilla. ‘But before his father died, he slept here. And even after he moved, he liked to keep it. But it is cold.’

‘I should like to read them,’ said Philippa.’ She ran her hand softly along the stiff leather bindings. ‘I haven’t Latin.’

‘You could learn, if you want to,’ said Sybilla. ‘Wisdom is considered a durable asset. Did your governess address you like this?’

‘She addressed Kate like that,’ Philippa answered. ‘And Kate said wisdom took many forms and she preferred the less expensive variety. We hadn’t much money.’

‘But a great deal of wisdom,’ said Sybilla. Her glance fell on the lute and she fingered it, slowly, as Philippa had done. ‘I’m glad the books are here for you. Some of the damage has been beyond me to mend.’

So began Philippa’s second education, guided by the ancient priest who long before had first taught Sybilla’s own two sons and her dead daughter. And, although no more was said, on that day was born her determination to write somehow to Mr Crawford her husband.

It was not an easy letter to frame. Kate had left, taking Kuzúm to Flaw Valleys with the Scots girl who, these past weeks, had tended him. It had relieved, subtly, the strain they all saw in Sybilla, and at first Philippa thought that she herself would be better, too, out of the way, but it was not so: in overseeing her work Sybilla, it seemed, found a pleasure remembered from the distant days of her own young family. So, without her mother’s good sense and guidance, Philippa wrote her laborious letter to Francis Crawford, mentioning the weather, the harvest and what Kevin had done to Lucy and Lucy had done back. She referred, casually, to Kuzúm and then found, blowing her nose that she had devoted four close-written pages to him. She added, hastily, an item of gossip about Jenny Fleming and then concluded with a paragraph which was intended to convey, skilfully, the unspoken need of his mother. She then signed it,
Your obedient servant
,
PHILIPPA SOMERVILLE
before she realized what she had said, and decided, on hasty reflection to leave it.

He could take it, if he noticed the wording at all, as an affirmation that Philippa Somerville, at any rate, would provide no impediment to his marriage plans. Assuming he wanted to marry. She read the letter through, looked up three words, and sealed and addressed it in French and Turkish and Latin, with all his various titles. Then she waited for Austin Grey to call, which he did every Tuesday, and put it into his care to be transmitted to London, and thence to a certain monastery in Volos, Greece, addressed to a wandering child of the road named Míkál. Whether it would reach him, and whether, receiving it, he would trouble to find Mr Crawford, was in the lap of the same gods who had taken her to Volos in the first place. About her other, personal intentions towards solving Mr Crawford’s undoubted and most pressing problems, she said nothing whatever to anyone.

Doggedly embroiled in Latin and Greek, and reading her way privately through Aretino, she remained, helping Sybilla with her entertaining and twice, on Sybilla’s shrewd insistence, making her appearance at the Edinburgh court of the Queen Dowager Mary of Lorraine. Since Lymond had induced her to marry him, she was to be seen, decreed Sybilla, to have the dignities of marriage. She was introduced therefore to the remotest members of Lymond’s family in her extraordinary persona of Philippa Crawford of Lymond, Countess of Sevigny, and learned to keep a straight face while being so addressed.

Indeed, from the family tree she cajoled out of Richard, it seemed that only two senior members escaped the privilege of meeting the absent Lymond’s well-educated bride. One of these was Sybilla’s only surviving sister, a Semple from Ayrshire, who had entered religion thirty years before and was now Abbess of an opulent foundation in
that county. The other was a great-uncle of Lymond’s on his grandmother’s side, about whom Philippa questioned her brother-in-law narrowly.

Richard, 3rd Baron Culter, was much amused. ‘He’s about a hundred and ten.’

‘I don’t see,’ said Philippa, ‘what’s so funny. He’s still your great-uncle. You mean he’s senile?’

‘I dare say he is,’ Richard said. ‘But I wouldn’t know. We don’t correspond.’

‘I don’t know who you do correspond with,’ said Philippa acidly. ‘It seems to me that you have no family feeling whatever for anyone outside the walls of this house.’

Richard agreed. ‘You ought to know by now that everyone in Scotland is related to everyone else. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we like one another.’

‘And what’s wrong with your great-uncle?’ asked Philippa, who was not easily removed from a point.

Richard sighed. ‘Nothing, apart from a brief lapse in judgement. He accepted English money from the late King Henry’s Privy Council in return for some detailed information about King James’s affairs, and was found out. He decided life would be safer and pleasanter if he made his home henceforward in England.’

‘Dear me,’ said Philippa after a pause. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It happens in the best families,’ said Richard cheerfully. Sobering a little under his sister-in-law’s thoughtful brown eye, he said, ‘It perhaps explains why my father was quite so hard on Francis. Although he always maintained his uncle was ill done by, and used to send him money, I believe, up to the time that he died. His name is Bailey. Leonard Bailey.’

‘I know. Where does he stay?’ Philippa asked.

But that Richard could not tell her. Sensibly relegating it therefore to the foot of her list of priorities, Philippa found occasion instead to visit her friend Agnes Herries and her seven children at Terregles, calling on her way back at the convent of SS Winning and Mary.

The Abbess, a tall pallid woman, turned out to be catastrophically lacking in her sister’s nimbleness and delicacy both of body and wit. After keeping Philippa waiting for some considerable time, she sent for her and surveyed her without particular favour. ‘To what do I owe the honour of this unheralded visit? Sybilla, I see, has not seen fit to accompany you.’

‘She didn’t know I was coming. Forgive me,’ said Philippa humbly, her sharp brown eyes winsomely pleading. ‘I should have known how busy a person of standing must be. We speak of you a great deal at Midculter.’

‘I beg leave to doubt it,’ the Abbess said, sitting down and indicating at last that Philippa also might take a chair at her desk. ‘The Dowager Lady Culter seems to find it convenient to overlook the nearer members of her family. I doubt if she has been here in five years.’

Philippa did not doubt it at all, from Sybilla’s rare references to her sister. She also knew, although she did not mention it, exactly how much in goods and endowments Lord Culter and his mother had paid and were paying annually into the foundation’s treasury. She said, ‘You knew Mr Crawford, I think, as a boy.’

‘A gaudy child,’ the Abbess said, ‘with an insolent tongue. I have heard the tale of your marriage. You have come, I would gather, to question me?’

Proving, thought Philippa, paling, that one does not become an Abbess for nothing. She said, ‘Then there is something to tell?’

The shrewd old eyes openly studied her. ‘It is usual, I believe, for a husband’s circumstances to be known to his bride before marriage?’

Time was too short,’ Philippa said.

‘Then my sister has surely informed you?’

‘She has said nothing,’ Philippa said. ‘And I have no right to question her. The marriage was purely a formal one, and will be dissolved shortly.’

‘In that case,’ said the Abbess, ‘by what right are you questioning me? And why, indeed, should there be anything in your husband’s life which is not all too blatantly public already?’

‘Because,’ said Philippa, ‘when I returned to Midculter from Turkey, I didn’t give a full account of what happened. There was a Frenchwoman as well on that journey, one who joined us in Lyons and stayed with us most of the time until we parted at Volos. Her name was Marthe.’

‘I see,’ said the Abbess of SS Winning and Mary.

‘And,’ said Philippa, ‘she called herself Lymond’s sister.’

There was a silence. Then, ‘And did Francis accept that?’ said the Abbess.

‘He could do nothing else,’ said Philippa bluntly. ‘If they had been twins, they couldn’t have looked more like each other.’

‘And you said nothing of this to Sybilla?’

‘No,’ said Philippa. ‘That is why I am here. It is two years, reverend mother, since Mr Crawford left Scotland, and there is no sign so far that he intends to return. Lady Culter is not in good health. She depends on this son, and his absence is trying her badly. I think the root of the absence may be his meeting with Marthe.’

‘Such revulsion over a by-blow? How did Marthe account for her birth, then?’

‘She knew nothing,’ Philippa said. ‘Except that she had been
brought up in Blois by a woman called the Dame de Doubtance.’

‘Who died in the winter, leaving Francis a fortune? That I heard also,’ the Abbess said. ‘And what story do you think would comfort your husband’s fears and bring him home to Midculter?’

She had known it was going to be difficult. She had not known how hurtful it could be as well. ‘That his mother is all he thought her to be,’ Philippa said.

True or not, it was the right answer to give Sybilla’s own sister. The Abbess leaned back, and although she said, ‘A child’s view!’ she was not displeased. She said, ‘You realize that if his mother is chaste, he himself must then have been born outside marriage?’

‘Yes,’ said Philippa.

‘And you think that knowing that, he will return all the sooner?’

‘It won’t be public,’ said Philippa. ‘And in other ways, I doubt if it would weigh with him. He has his own life.’

‘And you? You do not object to the stigma?’

‘You are what you are,’ Philippa said. ‘Birth can hardly change it. I want to see Lady Culter content. The rest is no business of mine.’

There followed a long pause. But before it was over she knew what the Abbess was going to say.