The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [209]
What was left of the cargo of the Edward Bonaventure was transferring itself, swiftly and effectively, into the pockets of Buchan, and Alec Fraser seventh Laird of Philorth, four miles to the south-west of Pitsligo and forty from Aberdeen, of which city his wife’s father was Provost, was doing little to stop it.
Nor was Lymond, but for, Adam suspected, quite different reasons. Whatever strange bargain had been struck out there in the dark and the wind, fishing boats had quartered the bay long after the fire on the shore had died down and the last exhausted man from the Edward was sleeping. By dawn half of the Edward’s cargo had gone, farther than any Pitsligo fisherman would locate it. And the rest had been worked for.
That act of Lymond’s alone would have marked him. His name was known, his authority obvious; soon they would discover his station. To abandon his charge and disappear like a tinker over the Border; to be found lurking under an alias would discredit his mission and turn Nepeja’s despair to hysterical fury. Only now, in the peace of dry land, was there leisure to study how storm and sea and mistrust of the unknown had changed Osep Nepeja, the wealthy Vologda merchant, with the pearl-collared dress and the fine house and the invisible, obedient wife. His colleagues Grigorjeff and Makaroff had disappeared, with eight of their fellows, on the foundered Confidentia. Two days before, he had seen seven other Russians die and all his wealth sink into the cold Scottish waters. The Muscovites who served him now were Lymond’s servants, but for two whom the Voevoda had kept at his side. Accustomed to Lymond and accustomed, as well, to unquestioned obedience the men had settled first, and, though quieter than usual and frankly wolvish at mealtimes, they showed no permanent harm save exhaustion.
Nepeja was different. Through all the rescue he had prayed, his voice rising and falling, his hands working on the great silver crucifix, his forehead beating the sand. Now, in the little stone room given him in Alec Fraser’s brave manor, he took to his bed and only clambered out of it to peer at the weather, and rub his hands at the fire and attack Lymond, whenever he opened the door, with questions and anxieties, accusations and complaints.
It was understandable enough. He had been told he was coming to London; he had expected to arrive, richly dressed and primed with gifts, with his merchandise in chest and barrel behind him. What was he to understand, knowing nothing of the sea, of a nation which, far from achieving these things, cast him naked on the shores of a different country and made of him, it seemed, not an ambassador but a beggar?
And to all these outbursts, Lymond was patient. Patient as he was not when the night before, wandering half-slept up and down their big room, Robert Best had stopped and said, stupidly, ‘I am the only one left. All the freighting of those bloody cargoes. The lists and the invoices, the account books and ciphers, the notes and charts and letters of privilege. All the stuff that we bought in Pskov and Novgorod and Moscow and Lampozhnya; the furs we worried about, the tallow we thought had too great a foot, the honey we haggled over … even Brook’s cargo we took on at Vardȯ … all of them gone. The seamen gone to the bottom, with all they could teach of the coast. The new compass, the new astrolabe, the man the Tsar knows and trusts, lost and gone. Lost and lost and lost and lost … and no one to tell of it. No one knows it but me. My God, I’m the only one left!…’
And his voice, rising and rising, had snapped