The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [206]
His eyes were shut, which meant very little, except that he did not intend to be sociable.
‘Soup,’ said Buckland. Adam followed him to the cauldron, stopping on the way to speak to Nepeja. Solid, bearded and hatless, after weeks of hunger and desperation, when he saw his compatriots drown and went from day to day, more than them all in fear of his life he sat now, his hands on the great silver crucifix which had hung from the day he was born at his neck, and prayed to his God, two thousand miles off in Russia. It had been a Russian, mad with panic, who had overturned the Edward’s small boat. And the man hurt most perhaps by what had then happened was this man, surviving.
So Adam spoke to him reassuringly in his serviceable Russian, and saw him sit down, and went to Buckland and said, ‘A man Fraser has offered us hospitality, and Forbes of the castle up there. They seem well-meaning and responsible: horses are coming, and carts for those who can’t walk. They have room for the seamen.’
There were nineteen men on the beach, out of fifty. Or out of a hundred and thirty-five, if you cared to count the four ships.
Buckland said, ‘Who——?’ and broke off, with the steaming ladle still held in his hand. And Adam understood. Of the seven men of birth who were left, who was to lead them? Robert Best, interpreter for the Muscovy Company, or John Buckland, their hired sailing master? The Ambassador, dumb without his interpreters? The three men, once of St Mary’s? Or …
Buckland looked back, and Adam with him to where Francis Crawford lay still in the brilliant glow of the fire, his lashes parted; and the seawater bright on his skin.
‘The Voevoda,’ said Buckland firmly, and prepared to march with the soup to his patient.
Adam’s hand on his ladle-arm stopped him.
‘Yes,’ said Adam. ‘The Voevoda. But for the mercy of God, not just now.’
*
Although the fishing boats searched, for their own venal reasons, for quite a fair length of time, no man that night or any other laid hands on Richard Chancellor, Grand Pilot of the Muscovy Fleet, or his beloved son Christopher.
Long before then, they had moved out of the bay, at first tangled kindly together, and later alone, out of sight of each other, but with the same broad and harmonious current bearing them east.
Over the lightening sea lay the path Chancellor had discovered, and the door he had opened, expending on it a sovereign order of courage in an element exacting of courage, for he sailed from home, and not towards it.
We commit a little money to the hazard of fortune; he commits his life. Wherefore, Sidney had said, you are to favour and love the man departing thus from us.
The way he had found opened for him, and his long-studied seas with dignity gave him his bier. And in the morning, he was accorded the crown of dead men, to see the sun before they are buried, and he set out with shoes on his feet as do the Muscovites, for he had a long way to go.
Chapter 3
The Edward touched her rock and settled on it, frail as a fly, and the filament of intelligence, from London to Brussels to Fontainebleau, trembled and marked it.
Within three days, the news was in Edinburgh where, freshly back from the North, the Queen Dowager, Regent of Scotland, sat with her lords and examined it. Then, since one English ship was not an invasion and the ambassador of any reigning monarch should not, unseen, be offended, she made her dispositions and sent her heralds north to the Earl Marischal of Scotland in his castle of Dunnottar, to convey the noble refugee