The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [169]
What he held was a letter from Philippa Somerville to Francis Crawford of Lymond, her husband. And what it contained was the unequivocal proof of his bastardy.
After the birth of Richard, Sybilla had no more children.… You and your sister were born to your father in France, of mother or mothers unknown.…
And swiftly as he had read it, he could see still the words of its ending. This is an affair of yours on which I embarked perhaps childishly, since it seemed to me that by ignoring it, you were doing yourself and your folk a disservice.… The people among whom you grew up are your dearest charge, and ought to remain so.… I am sure you know this without being told by a schoolgirl.…
Honest, sensible Philippa. Who was giving benevolent thought to the middle-aged man she was shackled to. And who had no notion of the public holocaust which might be touched off by the private one contained in these words.
He read it again that night and thought about it for several days before reaching a considered conclusion. Then he took Philippa’s letter and placed a new wrapper, sealed and signed, over the old water-stained one. He did not send it to Lymond. Instead he put it among his own things in his sea chest, closed and ready to take back to England.
He was not sure for whose sake he did it. If he sent it to Lymond, he felt, without knowing why, that only the blameless would suffer. And the only time in his long deliberations when, for a moment, he wavered was when he remembered that clear, icy journey to Lampozhnya, and the sledges arching and hissing across the glittering axle tree of world.
For a few days, what he had felt was pure happiness. And what Lymond had known, he now saw, was freedom.
Chapter 12
The spring engagement between the Muscovite army and the Crimean Tartars was witnessed in every absorbing detail by Robert Best, the burly London draper who had so nearly become the Company’s champion with Danny Hislop and Fergie Hoddim at Novgorod.
He was there, invested in borrowed helmet and cuirass, when the Tsar and his nobles issued with ikons, trumpets and drums from the Kremlin and took their place, a bobbing procession, plumed and tasselled and surcoated in gold cloth and ermine, at the head of the troops drawn up in files in the market place, the banner of Joshua at his side.
The Tsar and his princes accompanied the army as far as Tula, and there remained, a bulwark protecting the capital from raid, recoil, or counter-attack. The rest of the army, led by its foreign commander, and under him all the officers of St Mary’s, set off to cross the seven hundred miles of steppeland which lay between Moscow and the ravaging hosts of the Tartars of Krim. There, in the peninsula breasting the Euxinian Sea, lay the strongholds of the last fragment of the Golden Horde, and of its master, the Turk. From Perekov and Ochakov rode the Tartar armies, dressed and armed like the Turks, sometimes in hordes two hundred thousand strong, sometimes in small raiding companies, running about the list of the border, they said, as wild geese fly.
They lived by raiding. They swept into the small towns of Lithuania and up to the walls of Moscow itself, burning and stealing and seeking above all captives to drive south to Caffa and sell for shipment to Turkey or Egypt, the adults lashed to the saddle, the children in reed baskets like bakers’ panniers. Or so Best had heard. And if a child fell ill on the way, they would dash out its brains on a tree, and leave it for the wolves.
The Golden Horde had gone, but Russia still bled from the Tartars. In the Tartar wars under the Grand Duke Dmitri, they said, the ground for thirteen miles was covered with dead. When the Khan of the Tartars took Moscow, the dead were redeemed for burial at eighty bodies a rouble. Kazan had been overthrown, Astrakhan was almost subjugated: only the Crimean Tartars remained, vassals of the Turks and supported by them, selling them their Christian children, and depending on their Janissaries to defend them from Lithuanian and Russian alike.