The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [71]
And the fascination of that, she was now aware, far surpassed anything else one could imagine. The search for the child, which she had thought so important, had been made at a cost which the death of one evil, powerful man, Graham Malett, had only just merited—the cost of months spent in limbo, away from the world of affairs. She had once thought Lymond’s life could be blighted by some accident of birth which had left his origins in some mystery. She knew that because of it he was unlikely to come home. But beyond that she could not imagine, now, that it would make any difference whatever to the career he elected to follow.
She knew now that Lymond had no need of her, or of Kuzúm, the child she had rescued. Her inclination and her duty lay here in London, with this small, unhappy, violent woman and the tragedy of her marriage. But before that, she had another duty: to Lymond’s family who did not understand, as she did, and who saw themselves as spurned and discarded. And to her mother Kate, whom her marriage had so bewildered. Who had known Lymond first, as Margaret Lennox had so brutally pointed out, when she, a child of ten, had disliked and betrayed him.
So, for all these reasons, and quite unknown to any person at Court; to Jane or old Lady Dormer; to Henry Sidney her benefactor; to Diccon Chancellor, who would have put her in irons, or his son Christopher, who would have betrayed her with his approving exuberance, Philippa Somerville was going to Russia.
Her modest cloth bag was packed. Her letters to Kate and Sybilla were written. Her formal apology to the Queen was prepared and her arrangement was at last firmly made, with the reluctant Robert Best, to put her on one Will Whiskyn’s hoy, lying between Tilbury and Gravesend, and thence smuggle her on board the Edward Bonaventure.
Two days before she was due at Tilbury, she obtained leave from the Queen to make a short visit. It was her excuse to leave Court but the visit, as it chanced, was genuine enough. Before leaving for Russia, Philippa had determined to pay her first and last call on Leonard Bailey, brother of the late Honoria Bailey and great-uncle of her husband Francis Crawford, at the manor of Gardington, Bucks.
She took with her one groom, lent her by Sir Henry Sidney, and her own maidservant Fogge. Through Sir Henry, she had received Garrard’s directions on reaching the manor: from old Lady Dormer, she had learned a little more of this elderly man, whose sister had married into an eminent Scottish family and who, disillusioned, had left Scotland as a young man and settled, on a small English pension, to become a minor landowner of no great skill or resources, known largely for his liking for law and his constant embroilment in petty disputes.
It was not an appealing prospect, but Philippa, having sent off a letter announcing herself, made the journey with what stoicism she could muster, and found her virtue rewarded by the gift of a warm summer’s day, which turned the Vale into a broad wooded meadow below the blue heights of the Chilterns, and drove free air through her lungs, stuffed with the sick intriguings of Court.
She found Gardington a modest white house with three gables and a central door flanked by crenellated bay windows, their casements open to the soft garden air. A thread of smoke rose from the tall, red-brick chimneys, and she could hear someone whistling in the big ivy-clad barn which adjoined the house on the left, but there was no sign of life from the house. Leaving her groom and her maid, Philippa dismounted and marching up to the door, rapped with the closing-ring.
No one answered. At the second series of knocks, a dog began barking, and, after a moment, was joined by another. The whistling in the barn stopped. Philippa waited, gave another unavailing bang on the door, and then