The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [84]
And the language came, creakingly, to the tongue again. Often as they had practised it, one forgot the abrupt, vehement cadences. Chancellor talked, haltingly, to the Abbot about his journey, about the weather here at St Nicholas, about the news from Kholmogory, the nearest trading town up the river; about, with difficulty, the health and affairs of the Tsar. It was only half-way through all this, applying to Sedgewick and Johnson and Edwards for missing nouns and incompetent verbs and delinquent adjectives, that he realized what the Abbot, in turn, was trying to tell him. They had found Sir Hugh Willoughby.
He said, ‘By your leave?’ and fought off the chorusing voices of his companions, like a nest of competing and baritone birds, and the beautiful Russian of Robert Best, the most successful grammarian of them all, confident in delivery and despairing of understanding the tongue he had barely heard except from Chancellor before.
‘By your leave, sir. Sir Hugh Willoughby and his two ships are safe?’
‘My son, how could such news be?’ said the Abbot. ‘The ships are safe. You will find them here in the roads of St Nicholas, with their stores intact as on the day the storm divided you, two years ago. They were discovered last spring by the Lapps in Nokuyef Bay, on the Frozen Sea, at the mouth of the River Arzina, and word was brought to the Governor. They were drawn here with great pains, sailing from harbour to harbour, and when the sun rises, you will see their masts, over the bay.’
‘But the men?’ Chancellor said. ‘Where are the men?’ And this time no one spoke but the Abbot.
The men were aboard, every one, from the least of the seamen to your lord, the Captain General himself. And dead, every one: frozen and dead, with ice for their shrouds.’
They took the pinnace next morning to where, lodged quietly at anchor, the Bona Esperanza and the Bona Confidentia lay, the flag of St George still flying in the clear Russian air. It was silent on board: their feet on the rungs of the ladders echoed through the crowded chambers, and a footfall on the deck above sounded out of place: hesitant and stealthy instead of light, uneven, purposeful; the footsteps of men at sea, about their business of sailing.
It was all as the Abbot had said. The cargo stood still in the holds; uncrated, so that the kerseys were white with mould and the copper spurs sweating and green. There were unwashed bowls where men had eaten at random, long after the rusted ovens were cold; and the surgeons’ jars stood in rows clouded with dust, with their corroded blades and their books. The pilots’ instruments were intact, and the charts, settled like cloth in the tube. And there was powder still, like cement, and slow matches stored by the cannon.
But in neither ship was there a rag or a blanket, or any item of clothing, from the Captain General’s ceremonial doublets to the ship’s store of blue watchet livery. Nor was there anywhere a ledge or a stool or a table, a door or a panel, a box or a crate or a chest which could be hauled out and burned. Only, emptied by the Muscovites, were the barrels which had held their food, and the makeshift bows and shafts they had used in their hunting. And one table and one chair, in Willoughby’s cabin.
Willoughby was there too, that tall and fashionable man, with his long nose and high forehead and dark, pointed beard in a finely carpentered coffin, dust covered, which gave no offence. And by the coffin, laid there by the Russians, were the possessions