The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [210]
But Best did not break down again. Nor did anyone else.
So, in private and derisive challenge to the unmannerly fates, Lymond wrote the letter the Laird of Philorth was to dispatch, notifying the world of the end of the third Muscovy voyage, and in the same temper signed it. And thus on the second dawn after the wreck, riding on an uneven road through a night black with wind and arched with a glittering frenzy of stars came Richard Crawford of Culter, and saw the forty-foot grey castle of Philorth, with its new keep and round tower rising from its green mound, and the white running light of its stream, spilling through the short marshy grass to the dunes and between the rocks to be lost in the sea.
What made him look to the sea, he never afterwards knew, unless his eye was drawn by that trickle of sweet running water, and the noise it made in the silence of sunrise, against the spaced hiss of the waves and the wind sound, never wholly expended, as of a man whistling absently now and then, high and low, soft and loud, through his teeth with a muffled orchestration behind it like kettledrums beating dried out by distance.
He looked to the beach and saw, far off, a man standing there; and without knowing why, stopped his servants, turned his horse and, alone, set out towards him.
The grass was bright yellow-green and caulked underfoot with brown mud, from other horses and Philorth’s black cattle. Behind it the rain-wet beach was the colour of pastry, with the sea beyond, white against grey, and a paler grey sky flat and heavy above.
It had been, until now, a mild autumn. There were still, here and there, the tall white heads of angelica, and starry fool’s parsley, as well as club rush and deer’s grass and the wide leaves of plantain. There was, somewhere, a small budding of gorse and he had seen, coming, a single harebell and some soiled, green-eyed daisies. The wind still blew, sending light leapfrogging through the short grass, and the bearded dune grasses ahead stood combed, like a fine Arab’s mane. But it was not the wind of two nights ago, bemusing the nostrils with its uneven force, exposing the thin pain of face nerves, the icy ache of cheek flesh and the flanks of the nose, the aching seizure, like cramp, in the fingers. A crow passed, planing, like a still, triangular rag and he thought, suddenly, that the man on the beach had moved also, and vanished.
Then he saw, rounding a bluff, that this was not so. He was still there, far across the grainy dark peach-coloured sand, resting in a coign of dune and grey rock, his hands round his knees, his face quite still, turned to the sea. An oyster-catcher, which had risen, piping, settled again at the water’s edge in a flash of black and scarlet and white and began its angular walk. Richard, dismounting, tied his reins to a gorse bush and walked also, across the heavy sand, to that unreal figure.
Half-way there, a touch of his normal common sense returned to him and he slowed down, wondering what exchange of courtesies he was going to offer a vagabond, an Abram man, or an idiot. Then the man turned his head and Richard saw that he was none of these things. That the frieze cloak he wore was rich, and fell back from the silk of a high-collared tunic; that his hair, flicked by the wind, was yellow as mustard and the shadowless face, faintly engraved upon and tired as cered linen, was indeed that of Francis his brother.
Lymond did not move. His head lifted, watching, showed no conventional welcome; his brows, cloudily drawn, suggested the weight of something so firmly extinguished that nothing was left, in thought or expression, save a curious air, part of resignation, part of defiance which had to do, perhaps, with his stillness. Only the edge of his cloak