Checkmate - Dorothy Dunnett [325]
To Philippa, nearing the end of her voyage to Berwick, the change of weather made little difference. The night before her arrival she had been seized by a terror of such a nature that, unable at last to contain it, she had hammered on the door of Adam’s cabin and had spent the rest of the hours of darkness dressed, with Adam sitting beside her and all the tapers in the room blazing and swaying with the heave of the vessel.
Adam, himself terrified by the look on her face, could find nothing to comfort her and finally stayed quiet, giving her the support of his repose and his silence until, in the small hours of the morning, she suddenly said, ‘Oh put out the candles! Put out the candles! They are burning me,’ and burst into stormy sobbing.
He put them out, and gathered her in his arms and held her, until the dawn showed green through the spray-filmed glass. In the morning, he told Austin that Philippa was unwell, and wished to be alone. Then returning to his own cabin he sat for a long time unseeing; but whatever it was she had received, nothing of it came to him.
For the Scottish Commissioners sailing out of Dieppe, the change of weather came three days too late. The wind which had brought the English fleet to St Valery confronted the small Scottish fleet in mid-channel, both with an enemy and with an adversity of weather they could not circumvent. Already one day out on their long-delayed journey home, they were forced to turn tail and run back to Dieppe, there to hope for such lodgings as the governor could find them until conditions for their departure improved.
The two vessels carrying the nine commissioners and their immediate suite entered harbour first, followed by the other ships with their remaining servants, baggage and the horses, and lastly the Governor’s escorting squadron. Stepping ashore with her son Culter’s hand under her arm, Sybilla observed that the five Commissioners on the other ship had not been so ready to disembark; and then, with growing attention, that the traffic to the La Barbe seemed at this moment to be more ingoing than otherwise. She pressed Richard’s arm, and with John Erskine, also curious, following them, walked past the tangle of ropes and stacked fish creels to the other ship.
They had just reached her when M. de Fors himself appeared at the top of the gangplank, his short cloak swinging about him, and striding down, put each hand on an arm.
‘You are to go to your lodging. Don’t go up, I beg you. I have no wish to alarm you, but there is a sickness aboard, and we do not yet know what it is. We shall tell you all we can discover shortly.’
‘A sickness? In twenty-four hours?’ Richard said sharply. ‘Who is ill?’
‘Who is not ill?’ said the Governor grimly. ‘Half the servants who came aboard and all your friends. There are physicians with them now, and once we know what we have to deal with, we shall have them taken ashore. Meantime no one is leaving the ship.’
‘If it is the plague,’ Sybilla said, ‘then we are all a danger to you. We have spent every day of the last weeks together with the others.’
‘That I should recognize,’ de Fors said. ‘It is nothing anyone here has seen before. But Dieppe is a seaport. Who knows what sick air travels from the New World and abides in her wharfs and her timbers? I shall give you what news I can, as soon as I can.’
He would perhaps, have turned away then, but his path was blocked by Lord Seton, newly disembarked from the Culter’s ship, the Archbishop behind him. Seton said, ‘What’s this? Illness? A slight affair?’
‘A slight affair, Lord Seton? No,’ said M. de Fors soberly. ‘I am sorry to tell you that there is not a man among your colleagues there who can rely, as you may, on seeing his homeland again.’
*
Sick men are rarely lodged in great houses. This time, the Scottish Commissioners were not invited to sleep in the House of