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Thus the news came to London and spread. Spread to King Philip at Brussels. Spread to the Hanse towns, and Sweden and Poland. The last to hear it was Russia. The first to hear it was the man for whose sake, because of a prophecy, Francis Crawford was committed to his deliberate and industrious exile.

Richard Crawford, third Baron Culter, was at Dunnottar Castle, sixty miles south of Pitsligo, when the news came of the Edward, sent by Alexander Fraser, seventh Laird of Philorth, the biggest landowner of the Pitsligo area, and the Earl Marischal’s kinsman by marriage.

It arrived late on Wednesday, November 11th, the day after the shipwreck, and the two men read it together; both moderate, middle aged and agreeable: William Keith, fourth Earl Marischal of Scotland and its wealthiest citizen, and Richard Crawford of Midculter, Lanarkshire, whose well-run lands provided him and his widowed mother and young, growing family with a living of comfort and grace, and whose steadfast and unpublicized services to his Queen and to his country had not gone through the years without recognition, though never with the traumas of love or hate, fear or envy which had surrounded the life of his brother.

William Keith read the message in the Upper Hall of the strongest castle in Scotland, and then, because his secretary was in Aberdeen and the script was too small for his spectacles, he handed the page to his guest who had toiled for two months with macers, clerks, Justice Deputes and aggrieved plaintiffs over the aftermath of the Queen Dowager’s Justice Courts up in Elgin, and who, thankfully, had been about to take his leave and ride back to Edinburgh. And so Richard saw the unmistakable writing, clear and even, and straight, line after line, as if ruled by the thread of the mistar. And at the foot of the page, without flourish, the signature: FRANCIS CRAWFORD OF LYMOND AND SEVIGNY.

Nor, making his quick dispositions; taking directions of the tired courier, discussing with the Earl Marischal the steps necessary to warn the Queen Regent in Edinburgh or brushing aside, with grim heartiness, the Earl Marischal’s views on the folly of setting out on a sixty-mile ride without sleep on a wild night in November, did the third Baron Culter dream of the degree of cold, considered thought which had forced the dispatch of that letter.

Instead, smiling, he left his host, and climbed the steep cliff-face path with his servants, and, looking back, saluted the rock of Dunnottar, glossing the sea as it rose from its coarse russet crust, appled with primaeval pebbles. Then he set off, buffeted by the unruly wind under a sky like a pod of grey whales, slowly moving, outlined in apricot.

It was after five of the clock and lamplight showed, here and there, a pale yellow. To the west, you could see a salting of rain, shaken over the marshlands, and a shallow pool by the roadside was full of blurred, running wavelets, fine as bird claws. Soon it would be dark, and all the sea would be dulled by the hammer marks of the rain. He nodded to his men, smiling still, and wondered if he would ever meet his only brother without this groundless turmoil in mind and in body, which was not fear for himself but fear, he knew, for all those dearest to him. And further wondered why, in the midst of relief and thanksgiving, he should have such misgivings at all.

*

For a man who did not wish to be in Scotland to stay in Scotland, and to advertise his presence there, mystified Adam Blacklock, until he thought it through, and realized why Lymond had written the letter which Alec Fraser, as red as a Rosehearty onion, had dispatched with such elation to his son’s guid-brother, the Marischal. Best and Buckland had to go south, to report the loss and set in train all the processes which would extract both their goods and their Muscovite passenger from this alien country of Scotland. Englishmen both, it was something they alone were able to do.

Conversely, someone in