The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [226]
Roberts raised his voice a little. ‘Buckland took it to London. Well, they found a letter in it. A sealed letter, addressed to you. It must have come straight to Kholmogory. Buckland brought it back, and then left it with half his clothes here in Berwick. He told me to find it and give it to you. Have you time after the dinner?’
‘I am going out,’ Lymond said. ‘I shall call for it on my way. Do you leave in the morning?’
Roberts and Lewis, having seen the Ambassador safely in England, were to return to Scotland forthwith, to their sorrow, to throw themselves yet once again into the contentious legal fray. The talk, begun in this vein, became general. And later, when the meal had long finished but the convivial uproar was reaching its height, Edmund Roberts joined Lymond and Allendale when they made their excuses to Wharton, and set off down the steps of the castle to obey that formal summons from Kate.
Outside, there had been a fresh fall of snow and the house lamps laid their squares of light, sparkling, on the still virgin coat of the roadway, flat as white worsted. Lips of snow hung from the rooftops: with soft, unseen collisions, pills and tablets and showers of snow fell from thatch and bracket and shutter and settled like footpads behind them.
The air, cold and sweet, had no trace in it of the black air of Lampozhnya, which suffocated a man with its ice, and left his eyelashes hoar, and his breath like silver sarsanet on his neck-furs. Three men maudlin drunk back at the castle had known it like that, and one man treading here in the white, silent street, immune to the thin, meaningless chatter of the two others walking beside him.
Lymond and the Marquis of Allendale climbed the stairs of the lodging Edmund Roberts shared with his fellows, and stood in the empty parlour while Roberts found and brought out the letter which Buckland had mentioned. ‘There you are. It’s never been opened. You’ll likely have all the news in it already, in ten other ways. But you might as well have it.’ He paused. ‘What beats all of us, is why Diccon never gave it you in the first place.’
‘He must have forgotten,’ Lymond said. It had been put in fresh wrappers and sealed, as Roberts said. He wondered if it was Chancellor’s seal, and held it out to the candle to see, just before he put the letter away.
The seal was Chancellor’s. And dim under the wrapper, he could see the original cover, much over-written. Beneath it all, his own name and direction were here and there dimly visible. The handwriting, he recognized in a moment, was Philippa’s.
Lymond looked up. ‘Do you mind if I glance at this? It has to do with the meeting I’m going to.’
Roberts, jovial and relaxed with good food and malmsey, made him free of the candle. ‘I’ll be sorry to lose your company. We had some good chats, back in Edinburgh. You know a good lot about iron, for a man who says he’s a soldier. I told the Company that you’re interested. Henry Sidney will tell you. Have you finished?’
‘Yes,’ said Lymond. ‘Yes … thank you.’
It was, if you considered it, a remarkably legible letter, in view of the tour it had made. From Philippa’s round hand in London by some means on shipboard to Emden, and from there to Bremen and Hamburg, Lübeck and Rostock, Stettin and Danzig, Königsberg and Memel, Riga and Novgorod, Tver and Moscow. From Moscow to Kholmogory. And there, it must have been read by Richard Chancellor, who had resealed it and put it into his chest where it remained, through the wreck at Pitsligo and after, to finish here, in an anonymous parlour in an English garrison town, being read by the man it was written to.
And it was obvious, now, why Chancellor had not handed it over. The misguided schoolgirl you married had written carefully to inform you that you were born out of wedlock: an idea by no means new; one so well-supported that already one was more than half-way towards accepting it. So, as Richard had so coincidentally said, one was a bastard. But …
He read it through twice, trying to memorize it, for he supposed it was