With their funds, their possessions, their lives threatened by the forthcoming war, the merchants of London decided as a measure of trust, a measure of pride and a measure of long-headed commerce to give to Osep Grigorievich Nepeja the finest reception ever received by foreign envoy to the capital city of England. And the Crown, for intricate reasons of its own, elected to support them.
Come in stately progress; escorted from county to county by sheriffs, the Ambassador’s party was met within twelve miles of London by a company of eighty Muscovite merchants riding in velvet coats and gold chains. By them he was taken to spend the last night of his journey in the house of one of their number, where he was given gold, velvet and silk to make a riding coat for his processional entry. The following day, after an apprehensive night, he was received by an even large number of representatives of the Muscovy Company with even more horses and liveried servants, and taken foxhunting.
To a man accustomed to hunting bear and seeing three hundred hares slaughtered in one afternoon, it may have seemed a strenuous and not over-productive occupation. But after two weeks of travelling through the rich English countryside and being entertained in commodious English mansions, Osep Nepeja was not the voluble traveller he once had been. He kept his mouth shut, except for smiling, and allowed himself to be led among the fields and commons of the northern suburbs of London, witnessing hawking and archery, and admiring the manors and gardens of the wealthy and the religious houses, ruined or privately bestowed, which gave to the countryside so much of the general appearance of his own suffering land under the Tartars.
Then, after sufficient time had been wasted, he was led to meet the Queen’s representative the Right Honourable Viscount Montague with three hundred knights, squires, gentlemen and yeomen, all warmly and expensively dressed, and attended a brief open-air ceremony where he received from four richly dressed merchants a large gelding finely trapped, with a footcloth of Orient crimson velvet enriched with gold laces. Mounted on this, he was taken to Smithfield, the first limits of the liberties of the City of London.
There, translated by Robert Best, the City welcomed him in the person of Sir Thomas Offley, Lord Mayor of London, with his Aldermen all in scarlet, and the procession of Entry formed up. It was, considering the penurious state of the Ambassador and the months of privation which had preceded it, a praiseworthy production. Dressed in his own style (by the Company) in a gown of tissue, embroidered with jewels and pearls, and with a long stiff cap, also jewelled, set upon his massive brow, the Muscovite Ambassador rode between the Lord Mayor and Anthony Browne, Viscount Montague, with his servants in golden robes following. Behind them, brightly dressed, came the servants and apprentices of both English parties: ahead, in spectacular ranks, rode the knights and merchants, with the other Muscovite guest and his three companions discreetly among them.
From Buckland and Best, the Muscovy Company knew who Lymond was, and had a very good idea what he was doing there. To their relief, discreetly approached, he had proved last night to be a man of good sense and reason. Nepeja was the Ambassador. Mr Crawford’s rôle, out of the public eye, should appear quite subsidiary. The Company, used to refugees of their own through several reigns, found nothing unusual in dealing with a foreign-born Russian, and in the ease of communication a positive blessing. Riding as it happened beside Sir William Chester, Alderman and merchant, Lymond talked about sugar all the way through Aldersgate and Cheapside and Lombard Street and into the opening of Fenchurch Street, while the London crowds, shouting and struggling, packed the network of streets all about them, and hung out of windows and dropped things, on occasion, on their heads.
No one fell to their knees and abased their brows to the Queen’s representative, or to the Voevoda Bolshoia, or to the first Ambassador of the lordly Prince Ivan, Tsar of all the Russians, but Master Nepeja had grown used to that. In spite of its money, it was an unruly and barbarous nation. But what would you expect, under the ignorant rule of a woman?
Lodged under the eaves of the extravagant Fenchurch Street mansion which was to house Nepeja during his sojourn in London, Blacklock, d’Harcourt and Hislop were not the only men of his party that night to throw themselves on their beds with groans of relief and exhaustion. Prone, with his hands over his face, Danny Hislop said, ‘My God. Do you realize there is going to be two months of it? Who is Master John Dimmock?’
‘A lion-hunter,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt, his eyes closed. ‘The man with the biggest house and the most money and a penchant for entertaining Russian Governors. I approve of the house. Did you see Nepeja’s rooms?’
‘Yes. It isn’t all Dimmock’s. Rob says the Queen supplied the bed and the hangings and the furniture. They’ve got some silver out of the Jewel-house as well. Rob says there’s a guard with pikes round the house twenty-four hours a day and they can’t sleep at night in case the old man draws a thread in the hangings. The Voevoda’s room is almost as good.’
‘Do you think he will notice?’ Danny said. ‘I sometimes feel if I placed myself nude on the floor between the Voevoda and one of his meetings, he wouldn’t even walk round me.’
‘Dedication is the word,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt. ‘He has more patience with Nepeja than I have.’
‘Power is the word,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘If you control a large slice of Russia and are anticipating controlling the rest of it, that is how you behave.’
‘I think there’s something else,’ Adam said. ‘I think something happened at Berwick.’
‘We know what happened,’ Danny said agreeably. ‘He celebrated his return to English soil by hiring in one of——’
‘Not that,’ Adam said. ‘Or before that. I suppose being pushed in the face by your brother may be said to loosen the family ties.’
‘Adam!’ said Danny. ‘You mustn’t drop out of the choir. We have too much to do. What do we have to do?’
‘Wait about for three weeks,’ d’Harcourt said. ‘Tomorrow’s the first day of March: King Philip hasn’t set out yet from Brussels. And the Queen won’t receive Nepeja officially until King Philip arrives. The Privy Council won’t go near him either. He’ll have to kick his heels, and content himself with long talks with the merchants.’
‘In this house? What about us?’ Danny said.
D’Harcourt said, ‘I thought you were tired of the baubles of ceremony? Lymond won’t be received anywhere either; not until Nepeja is formally recognized. That means he can’t do his business. The Muscovy Company can talk about arms as much as they like but they can’t promise anything: only the Queen and Council can provide or withhold all the licences. All he can do is clear the air with the merchants by telling them what the Tsar wants and why. And Nepeja can do the same, on the trade side. My guess is that all our time will be spent with the Muscovy Company. Remember, all their records have been destroyed, and Chancellor’s eye-witness account. They know all Best can tell them. They’re bound to want our help as well.’
Adam said, ‘In full, deathless detail? How George Killingworth’s beard conquered Novgorod?’
‘What happened to the Emperor’s sugar?’ d’Harcourt said.
‘Who got carried out of the Emperor’s banquets?’ Danny said. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing, comparing England and Russia——’
‘No!’ howled Adam and d’Harcourt together.
‘No. We’ve had a lot of that. I was only going to say,’ Danny said, ‘how chastely agreeable it is to sit next to a woman again.’
Which only went to show, as the other two, exchanging glances agreed, that the sweet panacea of England was lancing the carbuncles of Russia already.
*
With Best and Nepeja, Gilpin and Hussey, Lymond and his three officers, it took the Muscovy Company three days to work through the obvious agenda: the progress on the wreck; the social news about the company’s officers still remaining in Russia: word of his son Richard for Sir Andrew Judde, of Richard Grey for his wife and daughter, of Charles Hudson for Sir George Barnes’s grand-daughter; of Thomas Hawtrey for William, his brother.
For the Company, it became slowly clear to all the outsiders, was one close-knit in friendship as well as commerce, and linked by intermarriage as well as by kinship of blood. And wealthy as these men were who inflicted on them, with such disarming apologies, long aching forenoons recalling the price of train oil and the terms of long, vanished documents, they were, many of them, Londoners of the first generation and merchants of the first generation, who had come to the city in their youth, and stayed, showing industry and initiative and imagination, and had prospered.
They commanded respect. In spite of their boredom, the three officers of St Mary’s found themselves spending long hours, willingly, round the table; combining with Best and Nepeja in an attempt to define markets and explain officialdom; detailing the concessions made by the Tsar and interpreting those demanded in return by Nepeja. Lymond, mercifully, seemed equally ready to offer help and to exercise restraint through all the discussions which had nothing to do with munitions—that aspect, it could only be guessed, was being negotiated through firmly closed doors. On occasion, he relieved Best as interpreter, and it was noticeable then how their progress improved, as he steered Nepeja, and clarified for him.
Nepeja was already dependent on him. As time went on the three, cynical pairs of eyes from St Mary’s could see that the merchants also, little by little, were beginning to lean on his advice. They had Buckland’s notes of the probable lading of the three vanished ships. They knew now the total losses, including the fragments being recovered from Pitsligo, hardly worth the total cost of the rescue. And, facing reality, they included in these the pinnace Searchthrift, sent out to Vardȯ with the Edward, and never heard of since the Edward’s last call there. So there came the day when Sir George Barnes threw his quill on the paper before him and said, ‘Gentlemen, we have lost six thousand pounds in two years. What is this Russian trade worth to us?’
It was an argument which would be thrashed out in the end, with the Company’s powerful Goverment members, and far from the Muscovite Ambassador’s hearing. No one had to be told that war might be coming; that to buy and refit and victual a fresh fleet of ships the Company would have to raise capital by calling once again on its members. It was Lymond who said, ‘But it seems to me that your trade with Russia on both sides is perfectly secure, whatever happens in the Narrow Seas or the Baltic. This indeed is your lifeline, and perhaps Russia’s. Your object should be to improve your ships, and foster any research which will improve your navigation. And then to look beyond Russia.’
‘Chancellor is dead,’ Garrard said.
‘There are others,’ Lymond said.
‘Burroughs. Vanished on Searchthrift. Wyndham’s dead, and so is Pinteado. Roger Bodenham’s too old, and settled in Spain. No one at Penshurst, and Sir Henry’s off with his map-drawing secretary and his tract-writing chaplain to write the topography of Ireland. Buckland——?’
‘No,’ Lymond said. ‘I am told there is a man called Tony Jenkinson.’
Garrard said, ‘You hear a great deal in Russia. Or—you were friendly with Chancellor?’
‘We talked a little about this,’ said Lymond. ‘Could Jenkinson take a fleet of four ships to St Nicholas?’
‘Perhaps,’ Garrard said. ‘If Buckland and the rest of you advised him. The charts would have to be redrawn.’
‘Adam here could help with that,’ Lymond said. ‘As for the rest, we can supply what we know for a rutter, whether Jenkinson is the man to use it or not. Who could meet us and draw the notes up?’
There was a short silence, during which d’Harcourt met Adam’s eye and Adam in turn avoided looking at Danny. Then Sir George Barnes said with a sigh, ‘There really only is one man. But he’s living quietly. I suspect … I think I had better find out if he can see you. But he’s the man. By the name of John Dee.’
The meeting broke up soon afterwards.
‘We deceived you there,’ Danny said to Ludovic d’Harcourt, watching all the black gowns and fur collars sweeping down the oak stairs. ‘You thought we were interested in trading with Russia.’
‘I did,’ said d’Harcourt obediently.
‘And we’re not,’ Danny said. ‘We want an excuse to call on a caster of horoscopes and a heretic. Maybe he wants his future read? I hear it’s all done with a crystal of coal.’
‘In that case,’ said his colleague briefly, ‘I hope they keep sousing the damned thing with water.’
*
On foot and unattended, with the blessing of the Muscovy Company, Francis Crawford of Lymond next morning walked to the market in Gracechurch Street, and turning north, crossed the cobbles of Bishopsgate to the house in Threadneedle Street of John Dee.
It was not easy to find, being one of a group of houses belonging to a former religious foundation and occupying, with its gardens and courtyards, the triangle between Broad and Threadneedle Streets. The servant who opened the door was of the kind one might expect to find in a scholarly bachelor’s household, and the room she took him to, dark and crowded, was as sluttish as herself, with a vague smell of sulphur and horseradish. The dust lay on the woodwork like rock flour. There she left, and Lymond waited.
It was very quiet. Outside it had begun to rain: the creak of it against the small, obscured panes of the windows was the only sound in the room once the maid’s footsteps had receded and vanished; louder than all the far-off London noises: the chatter, the cries and the barking, the rumble and squeak of cart wheels; the perpetual landslide of horses’ hooves between the leaning canyons of wood and plaster and stone. In the room itself there was nothing to see: it was a parlour for receiving unwanted guests and held not even a book which would have identified the interests of the occupier. Lymond glanced round once and then stood perfectly still with his back to a rent table, his cloak thrown beside him, his face serene, as the silence stretched on.
There was no sound of movement to break it. Only a voice, suddenly, light and dry, which spoke from the shadows. It said, ‘You are observant. But there is no need to defend your mind against me.’ And a tall man, moving from the dark inner doorway where he had been standing stepped into the room. A lean man with a long nose and high, ruddy cheekbones, who wore a dusty gown over his black, shabby doublet, and a black cap on his light, glossy hair; whose eyes were ageless but whose hands, loose at his sides, were capable and broad-fingered and young. He came to a halt a pace away from Francis Crawford and said, ‘I have certain foibles, which you must forgive me. Perhaps you think this meeting unimportant. It is not. I am John Dee.’
Lymond said, ‘We have met, at Rheims.’
The pupils in the large eyes moved back and forth, studying him. ‘You heard my lectures on Euclid? Ah. You were in France with the Scottish Queen Dowager, and it was fashionable. What did you learn from them?’
‘That you find lecturing tiresome,’ Lymond said.
‘So you find me patronizing,’ the other man said. ‘And I am rightly reminded that you are the master of armies. Shall we proceed on a basis of mutual respect until we find out whether we may endure something closer? Come. My study is warmer.’ And moving ahead of his guest, he walked along a dark passage and standing aside, opened a door. Lymond entered.
The dazzle of light inside was so great that at first he shielded his eyes, blinded after the shadows. Then, dropping his hand, he traced the cause, and, angry as he was, his lips relaxed.
Mirrors lined the walls of John Dee’s sanctuary. Mirrors subtly aligned and invisibly misshapen, placed on frieze and wainscoting and ceiling so that every aspect of the crowded room was repeated to cheating infinity: the piled books and crossed scrolls, the racks of instruments and shelves of pots, jars and alembics, the pinned maps and charts, the iron clock and the magnifying glass, the great Mercator globe on the floor, and the bunches of dried herbs, slowly swinging from the beamed ceiling. It was less a study than a workshop, with standish and quills competing with auger and handsaw and file: sawdust and filings were gathered everywhere and only the mirrors opposite the door, wilfully distorting, had been kept deliberately clean.
Lymond studied himself, by turns squat and undulating, and suddenly laughed. ‘I am duly deflated. May I look?’ And finding his way across, examined them. He said, ‘You are severe with your visitors, Master Dee. You know why I am here?’
John Dee shut the door. ‘Because Courtenay is dead,’ he replied. ‘Or does the merchants’ business come first? I may not taint Master Dimmock’s house, as perhaps you have gathered, since the recent unpleasantness. I have been acquitted of treason and absolved, with reluctance, from the charges of heresy: they sent poor Philpot through to examine me, and he became quite upset. Master Dee, you are too young in divinity to teach me in the matter of my faith, though ye be more learned in other things. You are right. I lack intellectual humility. A good thing to be without. But Cheke is broken and Eden dismissed and the Merchant Adventurers being scanned, one by one, for their faith. If I am to pursue my work I must do it quietly, living on horoscopes for frightened men and avaricious women. And my advice to the Muscovy Company is not publicly proffered. They mean to send out another adventure?’
‘They have four ships fitting, and the cargo already half gathered. We need charts. Better ones, including what was learned on this voyage.’
‘We?’ John Dee said. He lifted some books and revealed a stool, on which Lymond sat himself. ‘You are sailing with them to Russia? Scotland offered you no blandishments?’
‘I am sailing to Russia,’ Lymond said. ‘Even if the Queen of England changes her religion and dissolves her marriage tomorrow.’
‘Or dies?’ said John Dee.
‘Or dies. You have been gathering information for one purpose, I for another. We began to correspond because we appear to use the same sources. That is all.’
‘It is more than that,’ Dee said. ‘You helped me pass letters between Madam Elizabeth and Edward Courtenay. She is entitled to think of you as not unsympathetic. She hoped you would be more.’
Lymond said, ‘I thought they had purged her household. Are you still able to exchange messages?’
‘My cousin Blanche is still there. They don’t know the relationship with James Parry either. My good lady Elizabeth’s grace knows you are here. When Buckland and Best first arrived in London she was at Somerset Place with a lavish retinue of two hundred in red and black velvet, much admired by the populace. The business was to offer her marriage with Philip’s cousin, the Duke of Savoy, any heir to be educated and brought up in England, while the Duke and his wife live abroad. With Philip returning, the Queen’s anxiety to see her sister abroad is quite intense.’
‘And King Philip?’ Lymond said.
‘Would further the marriage. After all,’ John Dee said, ‘he is not likely to stay in England long. He has a war to pursue. And Brussels is a gay court, with King Ruy Gomez reigning. However, the Duke of Savoy was refused, which upset the Queen considerably. It is said she was hardly dissuaded from calling parliament and debarring the lady Elizabeth from the succession formally as a bastard. She certainly turned her out of London forthwith and back to Hatfield.’
‘An over-vehement refusal perhaps?’ Lymond said.
‘My lady Elizabeth? You haven’t met her, have you?’ said Dee. ‘She informed her sister that her afflictions were such as to rid her of any wish for a husband, but rather to induce her to desire nothing but death. I am told the Queen wept at the time, but not afterwards. The Privy Council don’t want the Queen’s sister abroad, and neither do the people. With no heir as yet, and the conflict over religion and over King Philip’s demands, the Queen dare not go too far against public opinion. As she always does, my lady had judged it exactly.’
‘You have great hopes of her,’ Lymond said quietly.
Dee sat at his desk, an hour glass turning and turning between his big palms. ‘I have great hopes of this nation and someone must lead it. I look to whatever will serve. You cannot be unaware that that is why I have been writing to you. What in Russia can compare with the prospects which lie before England? You will have power and wealth, but what are these to a scholar? You will end your life an oasis in a desert of ignorance. You have thought of all that.’
‘Obviously,’ Lymond said.
‘Therefore there are other considerations.…’ John Dee broke off, exasperation on the lean, bearded face. ‘We cannot talk. You are behind bulwarks and entrenchments massive enough to protect a city from capture. The mistake is mine, to have angered you. Where did you have experience of this before?’
The effect of the mirrors was prismatic. Wherever Lymond looked he could see himself, his hair, his hands, his body, and the bright repeated blaze of the candles, over and over. ‘In France,’ he said. ‘I know when my mind is being attacked.’
‘Do you think I stand here as your enemy?’ said Master Dee. ‘Mr Crawford, was your horoscope drawn up in France?’
‘No,’ said Lymond curtly; and then in the blaze of the mirrors saw a picture long since sunk from his conscious mind: of the house called Doubtance in the Rue de Papegaults, Blois, and a strange and feverish awakening with a woman bending over him.… What was the date and hour of your birth? He said, ‘It may have been done, once. With what results, I don’t know.’
‘If it were to be done again,’ John Dee said, ‘what could you fear? What would you lose?’
‘My privacy,’ Lymond said. ‘And would that speed our business?’
Dee sighed. ‘No,’ he said. ‘You are right. Let us persevere. The Courtenay matter. There must be letters. Many of them appear, as you know, to concern the problems of navigation in which he was interested, but it is not difficult to read behind the lines. He died in Padua, and from what I can learn, all his papers were sealed in a casket and locked up by the Bailiff for safety. Rumour has it that Peter Vannes the English Ambassador has been told to get them and bring them with him to London. He has certainly left for London.’
‘That much I have heard,’ Lymond said. ‘With a thousand Venetian crowns and the commendation of the Council of Ten, Ayes 19, Noes 0, Neutral 0. And he left with the casket. Whether he arrives with the casket is another matter. I think you should leave it to me. Lychpole should have letters for me from Hercules Tait.’
‘Lychpole has no letters for you,’ John Dee said. ‘It is one of the small mysteries I was hoping you would resolve.’
Lymond stared at him thoughtfully. ‘Yes. That certainly calls for attention,’ he said. ‘So does another small matter. How does Philippa Somerville happen to be on visiting terms with the lady Elizabeth?’
John Dee’s pale lashes blinked, once. ‘It was brought about, I believe, by the Lennox family,’ he said. ‘The pretext was the sending of some volumes from Ascham. I believe Madam Elizabeth warned the young lady.’
‘She may have done. She also embroiled the young lady in a matter with which the young lady had nothing to do. I really do not relish the idea,’ Lymond said, ‘of being the medium through which Margaret Lennox and Elizabeth Tudor are assailing each other. And still less do I like the role of stalking-horse allotted to Philippa. If you will convey as much to the proper quarters you will do both of us a service.’
‘But it brought you to England,’ John Dee said. ‘That, or the threat to Richard Chancellor?’
‘I didn’t know about Chancellor,’ said Lymond shortly. ‘I came here on a mission for the Tsar because the Tsar left me no option. Both now and on subsequent journeys I shall willingly give what help I can to Chancellor’s successor, which is the other reason why I am here.’
‘To be sure,’ Dee said. ‘The housewifely purpose of trade.’
‘Slightly higher than that,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘So that the fleet shall in good order and conduct sail, pass and travail together in one flote, ging and conserve of society, to be kept indissolubly and not to be severed. You have the makings of a school of cosmography, financed directly or indirectly by the Muscovy Company, which presumably is what the more speculative minds among you have always intended. Charting information Buckland can no doubt supply partly from memory, and we shall help him. On the navigational side, you know what you discussed with Chancellor and what tests you wanted him to carry out. He did use the Tables and instruments. We made some new ones for him in Russia. He also used the paradoxal compass. If you wish, I can tell you a little of that.’
The shining globe of Mercator was standing, ruffed with papers, on the uncarpeted floor. John Dee, sinking slowly, sat on his hunkers before it, and with his big hands began to turn it, slowly, gazing on the uneven marks as they passed. He said, ‘He explained it to you?’
‘He explained how one might use it to get something close to great circle sailing. A class with one ill-informed student. But he used it to lay a course coming home, and there were some notes taken which were rescued with my chests—these.’
He carried the packet at his belt. He withdrew it now and laid it on Dee’s desk. Dee, rising slowly took them and said, ‘I thought we should hear nothing …’
Lymond said, ‘I think they will ask you to approve the appointment of Jenkinson.’
Dee said, ‘This is not Diccon’s writing.’ He looked up. ‘It is not the comprehension of a student, either. Chancellor knew I favoured Jenkinson after himself.’
‘Yes. He told me,’ said Lymond. And as Dee went on staring at him he said, ‘I said that you clearly found lecturing tedious. Not that you were less than a brilliant teacher. On the same note of guarded ambivalence.…’
‘You are a mathematician,’ John Dee said.
‘I am a musician,’ said Lymond. ‘Or was. I believe the cast of mind is the same. Orontius opened another door, but I had never been through it, except with books, until Chancellor taught me to assemble what I knew. It doesn’t matter, except to explain that there might be some profit in conference, with yourself, Digges—anyone else who might care to know how his thought was developing. I should like to see these journeys extended, and bettered. If you like, Chancellor deserves that sort of monument.’
Dee did not answer. He stood, looking at the stained packet held tight in his hands, then turned abruptly and went out of the room, leaving Lymond alone, with the globe and the clock and the mirrors.
When he returned, he bore a pair of beakers in one capable hand, and in the other a large flask, unstoppered. ‘I wish to drink,’ said John Dee. ‘You will come back to this house and meet the men you have been told about, and we shall hear what you have to say, and question you, and in turn you will hear what is happening in our world. I wish to drink to celebrate another proof of something I hold to be true: that what is mathematical is divine, and what is divine is mathematical, and that a transfusion of both creates the flame which is known as beauty.’
He poured the wine and handed it, patches of wet standing unashamedly under his eyes. Lymond said, ‘I believe I should like prior warning of that statement, or a little more leisure. I think neither of us, in spite of the logical spirit, has displayed a great deal of percipience this morning.’
‘I do not ask,’ said Dee. ‘You note I do not ask—but I would swear, by all I have learned, that you are Scorpio.’
‘With the sting in the tail?’ Lymond said. ‘You are probably right.’
‘Then since you have given me this mark of confidence,’ said John Dee, refilling his glass, ‘I shall ask you for another. I am bidden to dinner, where I am welcome and my affairs are well known. I have been asked to bring my guest with me. The house is not far—you see it across the yard there, and the postern by which we shall enter. It belongs to the Sidneys, and the bidding is from Lady Mary. What is your answer?’
It promised interest, and it seemed, then, innocuous enough. So his answer was in the affirmative.
*
Master Dee had, it appeared, a gown of superior appearance with a velvet cap, which he placed on top of the other, collecting at the same time a number of manuscripts which he tucked under one arm before taking Lymond with the other to lead him out of the house in Threadneedle Street and across the crowded courtyard with its pump, its straw and its barrels to the gardens and the low back entrance to the Sidneys’ big gabled house in Broad Street, once part of the religious foundation of St Anthony’s.
There they were obviously expected. A pretty maid in a blue cloth gown and an apron led them through kitchen and passage and up the twisting steps of a carved wooden staircase to a long room lit on one side by bright latticed windows and decorated from ceiling to the low panelled wainscoting by a design of floral and geometric paintings, done in white and dark green and rose to blend with the tapestry on the long table and the velvet upholstery of the cushions and tall chairs and stools.
The salt was on the table, and the covers set with covered bowls and gilt standing cups, all with the porcupine crest or the bear and ragged staff of the Dudleys. And Lady Mary herself, a soft, fair-skinned woman with a light voice, came forward smiling and said, ‘You are just in time. I am being taken to task by my kitchen. Come to table. And this is Mr Crawford? Or do I call you M. le Comte de Sevigny, since there are no Spaniards present?’
Lymond smiled at Sir Henry Sidney’s wife and made, automatically, the right impression in the right kind of way while he glanced at the rest of the company. There were no more than a dozen all told. Some of them, he guessed, were members of the Sidney household; companion, secretary, chaplain. The others, handsomely dressed, must be either relatives or close friends: the Sidneys were far too wise to expose Dee or himself to risk or discomfort.
Then he saw that he was wrong, and that there were in the room two people who were neither kinsfolk of the house nor inclined to be well disposed to himself, whether called Crawford or Sevigny.
One, standing by the window with his hands firmly clasped behind his well-cut doublet, was Austin Grey, Marquis of Allendale, whom he had last left standing trembling in the snow outside the inn where he had met … where he had spoken to Kate when in Berwick.
And the other was his wife, Philippa Somerville.