The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [47]
From that interlude, out of much that was bright and shifting and sometimes unintelligible, two people made a deep impression on Philippa. One was Jane Dormer, her future companion, a fair and ethereal sixteen-year-old with a soft voice and an incredible perfection of deportment and manners. The other, visiting his motherless sons who were already part of the great scattered household of relatives, dependants, wards and pensioners of every degree, was Diccon Chancellor.
Philippa’s first view of Chancellor was piecemeal through the segments of a man-high contraption of wood, advancing upon her card-table from the other end of the hall. Arrived before her, the object was placed firmly aside, revealing a short, stocky man in his thirties, with untrirnmed black hair and a beard and round slaty eyes below a brow lined like a wrythen ribbed beaker. By his side, Sir Henry Sidney also came to a halt and addressed Philippa, one hand on the other man’s shoulder.
‘You’ve met his sons,’ said Sir Henry. ‘Richard Chancellor, who grew up here as a schoolboy and learned from Cabot all the tricks of the Seville hydrographical bureau, such as how to find the Great Cham of China in Moscow. Diccon, meet Philippa Somerville, an English lady within the years of innocence who knows more about the Levant than you do, and is at present disowning her husband.’
The confronting parties stared at one another. ‘More than any masterful sorner I know,’ Richard Chancellor said, ‘Henry has to a wonder the art of suffocating conversation and then leaving others to bury it. Christopher tells me the Sultan of Turkey is shortly visiting Hexham.’
‘Your son exaggerates, as does everyone under this roof,’ Philippa said. ‘Is the new quadrant for Moscow or China?’
‘What years of innocence?’ said Diccon Chancellor sourly to Sidney. He gave a passing stroke to the painted wood of his instrument and dropped into the nook of a settle, while Sidney came to rest on its arm. ‘John Dee and I are about to take it to Cabot. Anticipate a long argument, and an abusive lecture on the variations of the magnetic needle and how to measure therefrom one’s travels east or west on the earth’s surface.’ He flung up his hands. ‘How do I know where I shall go with it? The Kingdom of Women? Barinth’s Isle called Delicious? The land of the Cariai, who dry the bodies of princes on hurdles, and so reserve them, involved in the leaves of their forests? Ask my masters.’
‘He means me,’ said Sidney.
‘I mean George Barnes and Tony Hussey and John Dimmock and Will Chester and Edmund Roberts and Will Garrard and all the other comfortable drapers and staplers and skinners and pewterers and haberdashers and grocers who sat back and thought up the Voyage to Cathay, under the direction of the right worshipful Master Sebastian Cabot Esquire, governor of the Mystery and Company of the Merchant Adventurers for the discovery of Regions, Dominions, Islands, and places unknown, in the year of our Lord God 1553. And expected me to sail east of Norway.’
‘You asked to be pilot-general,’ said Sidney calmly. ‘They didn’t know you wanted some riotous living. Think of all the free drink you’ve had as the first man to sail east of North Cape and arrive by the north route in Muscovy.’
‘Think of Hugh Willoughby,’ said Chancellor sharply. ‘They picked him, too.’
Philippa looked at Sir Henry who obliged, undisturbed, with an explanation. ‘Diccon’s was the only one of three ships to get through. They reached the Lofotens, and then ran into heavy weather and fog, just past North Cape. When it lifted, the other two vessels had vanished, with Sir Hugh Willoughby, the captain-general, on one. Diccon waited seven days at Vardȯ, but they didn’t come, then or later. Diccon, who doesn’t like good-looking men, is inclined to blame Willoughby.’
‘Bugg,’ said Chancellor. ‘His name was Bugg, till an ancestor changed it. I’ve nothing against him. He was well born; well connected; an excellent soldier and had a fine manner to parley with princes, and a lofty contempt