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By Root 2838 0

Philippa thought that she herself would be better, too, out of the way, but it was not so: in overseeing her work Sybilla, it seemed, found a pleasure remembered from the distant days of her own young family. So, without her mother’s good sense and guidance, Philippa wrote her laborious letter to Francis Crawford, mentioning the weather, the harvest and what Kevin had done to Lucy and Lucy had done back. She referred, casually, to Kuzúm and then found, blowing her nose that she had devoted four close-written pages to him. She added, hastily, an item of gossip about Jenny Fleming and then concluded with a paragraph which was intended to convey, skilfully, the unspoken need of his mother. She then signed it, Your obedient servant, PHILIPPA SOMERVILLE before she realized what she had said, and decided, on hasty reflection to leave it.

He could take it, if he noticed the wording at all, as an affirmation that Philippa Somerville, at any rate, would provide no impediment to his marriage plans. Assuming he wanted to marry. She read the letter through, looked up three words, and sealed and addressed it in French and Turkish and Latin, with all his various titles. Then she waited for Austin Grey to call, which he did every Tuesday, and put it into his care to be transmitted to London, and thence to a certain monastery in Volos, Greece, addressed to a wandering child of the road named Míkál. Whether it would reach him, and whether, receiving it, he would trouble to find Mr Crawford, was in the lap of the same gods who had taken her to Volos in the first place. About her other, personal intentions towards solving Mr Crawford’s undoubted and most pressing problems, she said nothing whatever to anyone.

Doggedly embroiled in Latin and Greek, and reading her way privately through Aretino, she remained, helping Sybilla with her entertaining and twice, on Sybilla’s shrewd insistence, making her appearance at the Edinburgh court of the Queen Dowager Mary of Lorraine. Since Lymond had induced her to marry him, she was to be seen, decreed Sybilla, to have the dignities of marriage. She was introduced therefore to the remotest members of Lymond’s family in her extraordinary persona of Philippa Crawford of Lymond, Countess of Sevigny, and learned to keep a straight face while being so addressed.

Indeed, from the family tree she cajoled out of Richard, it seemed that only two senior members escaped the privilege of meeting the absent Lymond’s well-educated bride. One of these was Sybilla’s only surviving sister, a Semple from Ayrshire, who had entered religion thirty years before and was now Abbess of an opulent foundation in that county. The other was a great-uncle of Lymond’s on his grandmother’s side, about whom Philippa questioned her brother-in-law narrowly.

Richard, 3rd Baron Culter, was much amused. ‘He’s about a hundred and ten.’

‘I don’t see,’ said Philippa, ‘what’s so funny. He’s still your great-uncle. You mean he’s senile?’

‘I dare say he is,’ Richard said. ‘But I wouldn’t know. We don’t correspond.’

‘I don’t know who you do correspond with,’ said Philippa acidly. ‘It seems to me that you have no family feeling whatever for anyone outside the walls of this house.’

Richard agreed. ‘You ought to know by now that everyone in Scotland is related to everyone else. It doesn’t necessarily mean that we like one another.’

‘And what’s wrong with your great-uncle?’ asked Philippa, who was not easily removed from a point.

Richard sighed. ‘Nothing, apart from a brief lapse in judgement. He accepted English money from the late King Henry’s Privy Council in return for some detailed information about King James’s affairs, and was found out. He decided life would be safer and pleasanter if he made his home henceforward in England.’

‘Dear me,’ said Philippa after a pause. ‘I’m sorry.’

‘It happens in the best families,’ said Richard cheerfully. Sobering a little under his sister-in-law’s thoughtful brown eye, he said, ‘It perhaps explains why my father was quite so hard on Francis. Although he always maintained his uncle was ill done by,