Disorderly Knights - Dorothy Dunnett [20]
Then the matter was taken out of his hands, for the fine weather broke, the wind rose, Madame Donati took to her bed, and the next day the child Joleta, unaffected by storms, who had stayed on deck as the gale blew and chanted Arab ballads until her dancing shadow crept up the sail, fell herself suddenly and inexplicably ill.
They were then off the north-east English coast, opposite Blyth. The captain needed little persuasion to land; and Richard, using all his authority, commandeered food, medicine and horses, and on being assured that the girl could manage a brief journey with safety, carried Joleta and her wan duenna to the nearest family he knew: the Somervilles of Flaw Valleys.
*
The Tyneside manor of Flaw Valleys lay on the English side of the Border, a mile or two north of Hexham. Since the war between England and Scotland had ended, Flaw Valleys and its owner Kate Somerville had welcomed many Scottish visitors, of whom Tom Erskine and the brothers Crawford of Culter were the most frequent. It was a strange friendship, grown out of fear and outrage during the war, when her husband Gideon was alive and these men had invaded her home. Long since she had grown to understand and forgive what they had done; but to her daughter Philippa, now a thin, brown-haired thirteen, Kate had never been able to explain the attraction of these two various-minded brothers. Since she was a child of ten, Philippa had been frightened of Richard Crawford and had hated his brother Lymond.
Nevertheless it was to Flaw Valleys, the kindly, unpretentious big house with its tidy farms and kept woodlands, that Lord Culter on a hot day in May brought Joleta Reid Malett and her governess to claim Mistress Somerville’s charity. Mistress Somerville saw them come.
Since her husband’s death two years before, Kate with her man of business and her excellent farm steward had run her own property. Not that the Somervilles were rich; but up and down Tyneside were farms and mills and cottages paying dues to Flaw Valleys, and in return receiving from Kate the services of her roadmakers, her wheelwrights and her smiths, her granaries in time of need and her shelter in time of war. No more than turned thirty yet, small, sharp-tongued and plain as a brown hen, Kate Somerville was priestess and nanny at once to her people, and a legend to her friends.
At the approach of the most beautiful creature in Europe, the mistress of Flaw Valleys was straddling her farmhouse wall, whither she had climbed to address a passer-by, a weeding-fork in one fist and a hog’s yoke, on its way to the yard to be returned condemned to the maker, round her sun-browned neck.
Observing the Crawford colours through the trees, she waved the weeding-fork, called to Philippa to warn the cooks and hopped down, dragging off the hog yoke. Her hair mostly unfolded with it, so she stuck the fork in the ground and was packing her coiffure into its snood again, elbows akimbo, as the group of travellers trotted up.
It was Richard. She smiled widely none the less and held up her face for his kiss; then turned warmly to the two women whose presence he was explaining so earnestly. The older, a cool, Italian noblewoman labouring under some slight stress, offered a cold hand, The other, wrapped in Richard’s cloak from head to foot, was being carried with great caution by Richard’s mammoth manservant as if she were about to brim over.
This one, according to Richard, was suffering merely from the changed food and climate. ‘Would you take her, Kate, just for a little—and Madame Donati? I have to go on to Midculter, but I’ll send for them as soon as she’s well. Joleta!’ He raised his voice a little, and Kate thought,