The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [27]
They were not dusty, although the air smelt unused and the thin woollen stuff of the bedding felt damp to the touch. There was no fireplace and no means of heating. She took down a volume at random.
The round, unformed script on the fly-leaf said, Francis Crawford of Lymond. She stared at it; then put it down and picked up another. The writing in this one was older; the neat level hand she had seen once before, in Stamboul. This time it said only, The Master of Culter.
That dated it after the death of his father, when until the birth of Richard’s son Kevin, the heir’s rank and title were Lymond’s. And all the books were his, too. She scanned them: some works in English; others in Latin and Greek, French, Italian and Spanish.… Prose and verse. The classics, pressed together with folios on the sciences, theology, history; bawdy epistles and dramas; books on war and philosophy; the great legends. Sheets and volumes and manuscripts of unprinted music. Erasmus and St Augustine, Cicero, Terence and Ptolemy, Froissart and Barbour and Dunbar; Machiavelli and Rabelais, Bude and Bellenden, Aristotle and Copernicus, Duns Scotus and Seneca.
Gathered over the years; added to on infrequent visits; the evidence of one man’s eclectic taste. And if one studied it, the private labyrinth, book upon book, from which the child Francis Crawford had emerged, contained, formidable, decorative as his deliberate writing, as the Master of Culter. The Master of Culter who had been outlawed from church and from state, accused once of murder and treason. Who had forced his way into Flaw Valleys and questioned her, a child of ten, while Kate begged for her, weeping. To whom she was married.
There were more books in an aumbry, let flush in the wainscoting, and something else Philippa drew out and looked at. A lute, the strings long since gone or decayed, and a great splintered scar on the pearwood.
She touched it, compassionately, and was reminded of chipped and gouged timber she had noticed elsewhere, on the lowest panels of the nail-studded door, as if a boot had struck them, again and again. She shivered, as the bleak cold of the room struck through her lightly gowned body, and lifting the books, slid them back in their place.
A voice said, ‘Take them, Philippa, if you have a fancy to read them. They were acquired with great pains, and it seems a pity to see them spoil now.’ White-haired, blue-eyed; unblemished as fine fragile porcelain, the Dowager stood in the doorway and watched her, her face unclouded by anger or any kind of distress.
Philippa said plainly, ‘I didn’t mean to intrude. I thought Mr Crawford’s room was downstairs.’
‘It is,’ said Sybilla. ‘But before his father died, he slept here. And even after he moved, he liked to keep it. But it is cold.’
‘I should like to read them,’ said Philippa.’ She ran her hand softly along the stiff leather bindings. ‘I haven’t Latin.’
‘You could learn, if you want to,’ said Sybilla. ‘Wisdom is considered a durable asset. Did your governess address you like this?’
‘She addressed Kate like that,’ Philippa answered. ‘And Kate said wisdom took many forms and she preferred the less expensive variety. We hadn’t much money.’
‘But a great deal of wisdom,’ said Sybilla. Her glance fell on the lute and she fingered it, slowly, as Philippa had done. ‘I’m glad the books are here for you. Some of the damage has been beyond me to mend.’
So began Philippa’s second education, guided by the ancient priest who long before had first taught Sybilla’s own two sons and her dead daughter. And, although no more was said, on that day was born her determination to write somehow to Mr Crawford her husband.
It was not an easy letter to frame. Kate had left, taking Kuzúm to Flaw Valleys with the Scots girl who, these past weeks, had tended him. It had relieved, subtly, the strain they all saw in Sybilla, and at first