The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [297]
She had seen him look like that before once, at Volos, and she made no move to stop him. Only, ‘Yunitsa?’ she said.
He smiled, a glimmer in his darkened blue eyes. ‘What, after all Best’s Russian teaching? It means heifer,’ he said. ‘Good night. And thank you, wise Philippa.’
The maid came soon after that, with the food and the potion for headaches. Philippa sent the meal back, and, rather desperately, took the mixture herself.
*
The idle fellow from Dover, aghast at his ill-timed sleep by the roadside, set off in the dawn light to Gardington and was fortunate enough to find an inn called the Chicken just short of it, where Mr Crawford had ordered beds for the night. He and the lady, it seemed, had failed to occupy them. The innkeeper, discussing the matter, began to have hopes of compensation. When none was forthcoming the innkeeper, disgruntled, recalled something else. A reward, Mr Bailey had said, for every soldier of Crawford’s whom he managed to detain on the way.
There had been no soldiers so far. But this was a powerful fellow: not the kind of man an old gentleman would like for a visitor. The inn host, switching the talk to refreshment, showed his unwanted visitor into a chamber and, slamming the door, turned the key on him briskly.
*
Waking next morning wan, limp, but full of persevering good sense, Philippa Somerville was surprised to find, passing Mr Crawford’s neighbouring bedroom that the door was standing ajar, and inside there was no sign of an occupant. From the innkeeper she heard what she might already have guessed. Mr Crawford had ridden out early, having paid for them both and having arranged for two trustworthy grooms to accompany the lady to London. He had also left her his apologies.
Considering this, she came only slowly to realize what the innkeeper was also explaining. ‘It’ll be the news, mistress. Everyone is going to London. They say it will be war, within days.’
‘What news?’ said Philippa hardily. And listened in silence to the account of Thomas Stafford’s ill-timed Scarborough raid.
‘They say,’ said the innkeeper, ‘that the French have already been warned to fly from the country. And the Scots will declare war soon, so they expect. All the high officers are called back to London. War.… It’s a dreadful thing, Mistress.’
He sounded pleased, Philippa thought. A longing for novelty, peculiar to this nation. Or so the Venetians said.
She didn’t want breakfast. She left the inn while he was still exclaiming and rode with her two grooms to London with a premonition, and a fear, in the back of her sensible mind.
Chapter 12
There was rumour of war at every halting-place between Gardington and London. By the time he reached Fenchurch Street, it occupied Francis Crawford’s mind to the exclusion of almost everything else: the French had sent five hundred Gascon foot soldiers to Scotland and were to dispatch three thousand more; Scotland had been asked by France to raise fifteen thousand French-paid Scots infantry. The Queen Dowager had been voted sixty thousand pounds by the Scots Parliament. On the Border, the English were planting fifteen hundred reinforcements at Berwick and Carlisle, Norham and Wark.… When war came, Richard Crawford, who was not his brother, would be fighting for Scotland.
But he, the Voevoda Bolshoia, would be in Russia. He had reached Dimmock’s house before he was reminded, by the bustle outside, of the thing he had contrived to lose sight of: that today, Thursday April 29th, he was to attend the great banquet to be held by the Muscovy Company to mark the departure of the first Muscovite Ambassador. His coat for it, already chosen, was Russian, and made by Güzel’s staff: it was so heavily jewelled that Dimmock’s servants, terrified, had offered a special case with three locks to keep it in.
Güzel had made no such provision. It is only the poor man, said Güzel, who counts his belongings. The rich man guards himself, and lets