An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Joleta Reid Malett/Philippa Somerville
Characters: Joleta Reid Malett, Philippa Somerville
Additional Tags: Book 5: The Ringed Castle, Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence
Series: Part 2 of Joleta AU
Summary:
Philippa and Joleta go to Court.
-
I wrote a fic for @stripedroseandsketchpads for the Lymond fic exchange! It was so fun! I’m maybe a little obsessed with this ship now. Thank you so much K for running the exchange <3
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Hello Scotswap! ⚔🏹⚔
Hope everyone in Tiny Fandom is having the best day they can have.
Here is my humble offering for @veliseraptor, who gave me the delicious prompts:
6. Prompt for an AU: Marthe lives AU! post-series terrible siblings.
7. Prompt for a non-AU: post-series everyone dealing with their trauma.
As always, posted with huge gratitude to @gawain-in-green for herding us cats and making Scotswap happen <3
Setting: Post-Canon (AU, not everybody dies)
Characters: Marthe, Francis Crawford, Richard Crawford, Kate Somerville, Mariotta Crawford, Sybilla Semple, Kevin Crawford
Relationships: terrible, horrible siblings and general family dynamics
Rating: G (description of injury recovery)
Wordcount: 7,595
Summary: For one who had always had to fight for her place - who knew the ceaseless weariness of justifying her existence - the undemanding love of those around her would only have baffled Marthe. She had been a missile on a course of destruction, driven to deliver her news into the heart of a family that she saw did not want her. There was no sentimentality left in what Marthe had felt about Francis, Philippa, Richard or any of the others. She would not have looked for a kind word in the yard, and yet now she lay, delirious but pliant beneath the many hands that pushed her golden hair back from fever-sticky skin, those that squeezed her knuckles as their owners told her she could come through this, and those that clasped together in prayer over her bedside.
Marthe survives the end of the series and has to come to terms with Francis's choice to destroy the document she brought him. Healing at Midculter, she tries to understand her place in the family that bears her less ill-will than she expected.
It’s on Ao3 but if anyone prefers to read it here, it’s all under the cut.
She was not to know that it ran in the family, this...continuing.
Just as Richard Crawford's strength had been drawn back to capacity after he took an arrow to the shoulder, just as Francis had been guided back - again and again and again - to life, now it was Marthe's turn.
She had no idea of the precariousness of her existence in those weeks following the encounter in the borders. The potential of death was on every breath that emerged from her pale lips; it lay in the worried expressions and words of those who attended her bedside.
Her hands were chill and could not flinch away from the worried grasp of the man she had married, and if her ears detected the sounds of disagreement between him and another, cooler presence, her mind did not discover the meaning of the noise. She was oblivious to the serious care that lay in the brown eyes of her hostess, to the easy way in which Marthe's well-being had been enfolded into the concerns of Flaw Valleys and all of its occupants.
For one who had always had to fight for her place - who knew the ceaseless weariness of justifying her existence - the undemanding love of those around her would only have baffled Marthe. She had been a missile on a course of destruction, driven to deliver her news into the heart of a family that she saw did not want her. There was no sentimentality left in what Marthe had felt about Francis, Philippa, Richard or any of the others. She would not have looked for a kind word in the yard, and yet now she lay, delirious but pliant beneath the many hands that pushed her golden hair back from fever-sticky skin, those that squeezed her knuckles as their owners told her she could come through this, and those that clasped together in prayer over her bedside.
One who did not try to lie to her unmoving form, who did not fuss or try to speak to her through the hard work of recovery, but instead simply sat with her in thoughtful silence, or played the lute softly as she healed, was Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sévigny. Brother to Richard and brother to Marthe.
For a moment, in between opening the document she had brought with her and destroying it, he had been something else, too - but he would leave that to the man who already held that position.
-
When consciousness began to return - drop by drop, ache by ache - she thought she was a little girl at her grandmother's house. No worry had been shown for her in childhood sickness - her stars had been read, and she was ordained to live - or perhaps it had not mattered if she lived or not, because she was not a son. So, she had been taught to lie in stoic silence, to endure what needed to be endured. It had never occurred to Marthe that she might have the luxury of choosing for herself whether to go on or not, and she battled on now, as she was accustomed to do.
Time came and went in shuddering moments of discomfort; to open her eyes was to see the turned wood of bedposts and to smell the herb-scented fire in the hearth; to hear the strains of music in another room, or male laughter outside the building. The latter was curious; it was not a feature of the childhood she thought she had drifted back into.
Her thoughts sluggish with fever, Marthe picked at the tapestry of sound until the continued mirth outside split the well of anger inside her. Anger focussed her: she opened her eyes and looked twice at the bedposts and the brocaded hangings, and she recognised that they were not the property of her grandmother.
The weight on her chest was not the weight of fluid in her lungs, but something with claws, sunk deep in her flesh and bone. Weakly, Marthe's hands pulled at the blankets covering her body, at the neck of her smock, which clung to the sweat on her throat. She caught a glimpse of bandaging beneath it, and the sight seemed to bring the pain associated with it into relief. With a gasp, she let her head fall back and her hands go limp. An involuntary mewl of pain hung on her lips and it was only the repeated shouts of joy outside her window that allowed her to cling, furious, to consciousness.
The journey she had made came back to her: Blois. Dieppe. Dover. A blasted cell, the curiosity and contempt of Englishmen, and then the admission that it had all been a misunderstanding. Free to go, she had ridden to the borders - and then?
Marthe swallowed drily and tasted the fever she had suffered from. Her hands moved carefully across the front of her smock, feeling the edges of the bandaging beneath, and beneath that, the edges of new healing skin, tender and over-sensitive.
The musket blast had hit her just to one side of her sternum, peppering her ribcage and chest with fire and debris. The wound was on the same side of her body that she had carried her trump card, the document that would at last force the Crawfords to acknowledge their sordid past.
Outside the window a child's voice said laughingly, admonishingly: "Richard, no!"
Marthe thought of her grandmother's long plan, of the star charts and the certainties she had been brought up to help achieve. How could it all have failed, a lifetime of effort ruined by a single, unlooked-for, musket ball?
-
The first visitor she was conscious for was a woman she did not recognise: homely like a hedgebird, dressed well but with cuffs edged by flour, not lace. Her face was like Philippa's. She helped Marthe to eat and drink, she cleaned her and tended to her bedding, and in her kindly expression Marthe found a bitter understanding of what Philippa had spoken of in the Topkapi palace: I know what it is to need help.
She did not fight the care, but she did not smile for her carer. She did not drag her limbs but she did not rush to arrange herself into an amenable form. She had intended to deliver her document to any household it concerned, and instead she guessed that it had been her own mangled body that had been delivered into the Somerville nest on the English border. She had been left to rack up debts against their generosity, when the means of payment had presumably been turned to ash beneath the shot of a musket, soaked and dyed in her own blood.
Yet Kate Somerville's kindness was not affected by Marthe's indifference, even as worry trod old paths into her brow.
She spoke in plain, soft tones as she wiped cool water into Marthe's hairline with a cloth. She explained that Marthe was at Flaw Valleys, and how she had come to be there - she had been shot, it had been a mistake, her friends had been there and had acted quickly.
Marthe remembered the little party that had approached her: Richard and Jerott riding ahead and behind them Philippa, Archie and Sybilla. All the audience that Marthe's letter required, bar one.
"Where is Francis?" she asked.
Kate's look turned momentarily sharp, though she hid it well beneath lowered eyelids. "He is not yet up. Shall I tell him you want to see him, when he wakes?"
"He is here?" Marthe swatted weakly at Kate's ministrations and tried to push herself higher up in the bed. The skin on her chest tightened in agony when she moved, and she subsided with gritted teeth and a demand in her eyes.
For a moment Kate studied her, and Marthe disliked the feeling that her health was being weighed against the information she could handle.
"He arrived shortly after you did," Kate said carefully. "Following an uncomfortable, though mercifully brief, residency with the Lady Lennox."
"And Philippa is here?"
Kate's expression judged her anew. "She is. They are reconciled, though I am still ignorant as to what they needed to be reconciled over."
Marthe felt the colour rush to her cheeks. She wanted to ask more, but the speeding of her heart made her wound ache again, deep and persistent. Kate Somerville observed her discomfort and arranged her skirts as she rose from Marthe's bedside. She prescribed rest, and left Marthe alone again.
-
Marthe's belongings had been placed in tidy arrangement on a chest by the window. It was only a few steps from the bedside, and she spent some time assessing her ability to handle the journey.
When she made it, her legs shaking, one hand flat over the agony in her chest, her hair sticky again with sweat, she stood hunched over the saddlebags and clothes. There was no sign of her old shirt or jerkin, and her cloak had been scrupulously cleaned and mended. Marthe checked the bags - just in case someone had put aside the remains of the letter out of respect for its carrier. She recalled sealing it with her husband's crest, and let out a painful, hollow laugh at the thought of him opening it - at the thought of Jerott being the first one to confront his idol with the news therein.
In the orchard outside her window a willowy blond boy was kicking rotten apples and laughing as a dog chased them. Marthe's eyes narrowed as she watched him, and with contempt in her voice, she muttered:
"Mec on þissum dagū deadne ofgeafum
Fæder ond modor ne wæs me feorh þa gen
ealdor in innan þa mec ongon
welhold me gewedum weccan
heold ond freoþode hleosceorpe wrah
snearlice swa hire agen bearn..."
The door opened behind her as she spoke, and a wry, chiding voice jumped ahead to the end of the riddle:
"Siþas asettan heo hæfde swæsra þy læs
Suna ond dohtra þy heo swa dyde."
Marthe tried to draw herself straight as Francis Crawford entered the chamber. Her fingers tightened against her chest, as though she could hold the pain inside, push it down and quell it with the force of her grip. Instead, the movement made her vision pulse with darkness and Francis stepped forwards to steady her as she swayed.
She did not thank him, but she let herself be walked back to the bed.
"You were not, I think, risen like Lazarus because you simply had to appreciate the view." Francis settled on the chair beside her, and Marthe's fingers paled as she gripped the blankets and waited for the pain to fade again. "The Pennines are fine on a fine day, but not worth reopening a wound for. And it is not the season for cuckoos."
Marthe studied him. If he and Philippa were reconciled then some success had come of her grandmother's charts after all. She could still make sure this was finished properly.
"There was a packet in my clothes. I was bringing it to you."
Francis's eyes, blue and clear as a summer sky, narrowed minutely. "It is selfless of you to concern yourself with my correspondence before you ask for the details of your own health." His long fingers, bare but for a single golden fede ring, toyed with the rounded wood at the end of his armrest. Marthe recognised the movements after a while: he was practicing scales.
"I think I know enough," she said sourly. "I am in pain but it will fade. It may not leave me, but it will diminish. I am alive, and I would like to know what play I have missed. It would be unfortunate if I could not complete my task now."
"What you have missed?" Francis shook his head, as he had done in Amiens on their last meeting. "Our peax, our play, our plane felicité. All tasks she set are completed. The board has been reset. You are free."
Marthe gave an incredulous snort but felt her skin tingle with anticipation - out of excitement or fear at what he might mean. "The document?"
His features were unreadable, his tone measured: "I will not insult you by claiming ignorance of its contents."
Through the nausea that has risen with the pain, Marthe made herself speak, her blue eyes hungry for her brother's response. "And? Do I now speak with my Lord Culter?"
Francis's expression barely flickered. His brows lifted lightly as though she had said something gauche and inappropriate at gathering of polite company. He rested his beautiful hands on one silk-stockinged knee, and Marthe noticed, despite the quirk of his mouth, that there were deep shadows beneath his eyes, and he seemed thin and drawn still, as though the experience at Dourlans yet lay heavily on his health.
"No," Francis said firmly. "Lord Culter is returning to his seat, to see his wife and heir and to make ready the guest chamber for the woman he is willing to accept as his sister."
The anticipation she had felt boiled quickly over into rage, avoiding all but one implication in what he said. "Then what did you do with that packet?"
"I read it in the presence of the woman it concerns. She watched me destroy it, as did Philippa."
"You fool," Marthe spat. "How dare you?"
His expression was steady, unflinching as marble. "Would you tell me how to dispose of my own belongings, documents and all?"
"Where they concern more than your own richly privileged life, I would," she said through teeth clamped shut on the growing ache in her wound. Her breathing was heavy, and each movement of her ribcage brought with it the dragging talons of pain across her chest. "Did you stop to think how selfish that was? In order to avoid a single confrontation with the son of a base usurper?"
"It is not your fault that you are ignorant of how such matters play out in a family," his voice was as smooth as silk draped over steel. "The single confrontation that you so blithely imagine would be to ruin more than the one man whom you detest so fully and in such ignorance.”
Her eyes stung and the weight on her chest increased. Exertion and exhaustion made her shake, and Francis marked it all. “Then you fail, at her final task.”
“Beter to faille a litell in the iustice, than to be superflue in crualte.”
“Noble sentiment,” Marthe said bitterly. “At no inconvenience, you may continue to live the life of a second son, while an oaf sits in a seat meant for a great man, and history remembers only the farmer and not the artist.”
If she hoped to rouse him to anger, her disappointment was only to be compounded. Francis looked at her with something uncomfortably near to pity in his heavy-lidded, cool gaze. “I think that, once, you hated me as you now hate Richard. If the price of your admiration was the loss of my first-born, I would save Richard from the same fate. If, however, it came of an increased understanding, through our shared travails, then perhaps there is something for you here, still.”
How could this have happened? Her grandmother was never wrong. Nostradamus had said –
Nostradamus had said nothing of substance. Nothing but – we all die.
When she did not speak, Francis took another breath and told her about Margaret Lennox and the accession of Elizabeth Tudor. He told her everything that had happened on the day she had been shot. He told her what he had heard, of Jerott restraining Richard when they had seen the musket raised towards the blond rider. Marthe listened, her eyelids growing heavy, her mind still wondering what each detail meant for the plans her grandmother had drawn up.
Finally, Francis’s account ceased, and he let the silence stretch until she said: “Is that all? Sir Gawain is not compelled to wear my head around his neck in penitence?”
“Jerott found his place in the pattern,” Francis said shortly. “Your marriage is as it was when he left France. I am telling you this so that you may exercise tact around those who witnessed the final moments of La Dame de Doubtance’s influence on this earth.”
Marthe let herself sink down into the pillows and blankets with a thoughtful sound. “So, Richard’s offer is made out of guilt. He thinks he might have saved me from injury had Jerott not stopped him.” She laughed, dry and mirthless, at the thought: that she had almost been saved from injury by the man she had set out to depose. That she might have been saved in order to present him with the truth instead of the gratitude he probably expected.
Her long mouth crumpled into a mean little smirk as she considered it. “And you would send me there, to Midculter, to be confronted by all that my upbringing lacked? And you would trust that I should remain silent on the matter of its inheritance, all for what? These dregs of kindness?”
The only sign that she was trying his patience was the increased speed of his breath, betrayed in the way the cool winter light glistened in the crystal buttons that decorated his jerkin. “Kindness, for my brother, is not the domestic chore it appears to have been for you, Marthe. I would not send you anywhere – it is long past time you chose for yourself which stars to travel under. But Richard has offered it, unbidden, and you might imagine that my mother and I have struggled to convey the arguments against it.”
“So, you do not trust me.”
“Should I?” Francis blinked slowly.
Like met like in the two pairs of cornflower blue eyes. The mask of confident amusement she had worn was brittle and behind it her regret swelled. What satisfaction could she win now? The pedestal had already been refused. She might shout the truth from the tiles of Edinburgh roofs to the streets of Protestant London, but nothing would be gained by it now, not by her, not, through his own stubborn choice, by Francis. The final moves had been played – after Marthe had been removed from the board.
This culmination of a lifetime of frustration glazed her eyes with tears, and Marthe waited, her proud lip bitten, until she could speak steadily. “Mi cama las duras peñas, mi dormir siempre velar…”
He sighed and his hands moved, his fingers curling around the ends of the armrests.
“Las manidas son escuras, los caminos por usar,
El cielo con sus mudanzas ha por bien de me dañar.”
Francis sat back in his chair, as drained of energy as she had been by the conversation. A wan smile lifted one end of his mouth minutely, and the shadows beneath his eyes darkened as his expression softened.
She was crying silently and did not raise her hand to wipe the tears away, but she did not refuse the embroidered handkerchief he offered.
Francis stood and turned his back to her. He looked out of the window to where Kuzúm played in the orchard and gave her a moment before he moved to leave with a polite smile.
“You may tell them I shall go to Midculter,” Marthe said stiffly.
-
For the final stretch of the journey she was alone with the servants - Francis and Philippa had left her to take the road to St Mary's, where they would begin the work of changing it from a barracks into a family home.
It was a long ride on a cold day, and Marthe was sore and tired when the towers of Midculter came into view. She did not marvel at the sturdy architecture or the colour of the local stone, which was dark against the white hills in the distance. Above the grey wash of frozen bog, the castle sat wreathed in smoke from the village that shared its name. It neither invited nor impressed; to Marthe's eyes it seemed as likely to be cold and damp within its walls as it was without.
When she entered the parlour with its vast stone fireplace, warm wooden furnishings, and bright tapestries, she refused to make a demonstration of delight or surprise.
Sybilla sat enthroned by the fire, her shoulders wrapped in heather-coloured blankets, her jewels like sparks thrown from the hearth. She smiled with her mouth, though her eyes were watchful, and her hands shifted their grip on the book in her lap. Opposite her was a black-haired woman who twisted to greet Marthe with pleasant openness - though her expression did not lack a certain trepidation. The younger Lady Culter did not stand. In her arms a child slept soundly, thumb in mouth, dark lashes curved, as though the Arabic letter tāʾ had been painted above each round cheek.
The child she held was not the Master: he sat with his sister Lucy on stools arrayed close enough to their father's desk to catch the light of his candles.
Richard glanced up with fleeting acknowledgement, raised his pen in greeting, and then continued to finish the sentence he had begun to write as Marthe allowed the servants to take her cloak and outer garments.
There was no family that Marthe recognised in that crowded room: just dark, solid brows and square bodies, square jaws and tawny skin. Mariotta was sharp without the poise of her brother-in-law, and Sybilla, of course, had the same fine-boned grace that Francis did, but to Marthe it was merely a poor echo of the charms his other parent had been said to possess. Her cursory glance about the room did not identify any musical instruments, nor any sign of culture bar the well-worn octavo volume resting on the velvet of Sybilla's skirts.
She sniffed, gathering herself to make a comment, when Richard finished his words with a hasty scribble and stood, apologising.
"That wasn't a very good welcome, I am sorry. I find it best to get the words down quickly when they feel right," he said by way of explanation. He moved around the desk carefully, minding stacks of parchment and inkwells in addition to the stools and children around his feet.
With large, capable hands, he took up a heavy chair and set it between those of his mother and his wife, at a comfortable distance from the fire. "Please," he gestured towards it, and Marthe heard the boyish hope of approval in his voice.
"Of course, it's only our nearest and dearest who get such treatment - if you'd been a courtier or tenant, Richard would have been in attendance since you arrived in the yard," Mariotta added swiftly, with a nervous smile.
Marthe sat, folding the borrowed clothes of Kate Somerville around her chilled legs. For all her exhaustion she felt restless, and her eyes wandered ceaselessly over the walls and the furnishings, seeking out the history of the place.
"It was a long ride for you, I hope it wasn't too uncomfortable," Richard stood by his mother's chair, one hand on the back of the headrest.
"I've had longer rides," she replied.
Richard frowned, and then tried to mask it with a nervous laugh. "Not with an injury like that, one hopes."
"True, being shot was a first for me," Marthe's mouth curved in a sour approximation of a smile. From the corner of her eye she saw Mariotta Crawford's eyes widen as she exchanged a look with her husband - the gist of which, Marthe gathered, was that she reminded the Lady of her brother-in-law to an unsettling extent.
She endured the niceties of introductions and accepted the warm, sweet wine that was brought to her. It was late, and they knew she would be drained from her travels, so at least, she reflected, there would be little in the way of such forced pleasantries that evening.
Retiring when her body had been demanding that she do so for some time already, Marthe asked the servant at her door whether her room had belonged to the previous Master of Culter.
The response was prompt: it had not been his room. That remained unoccupied.
She thanked the maid curtly and closed the door on her offer of assistance. Undressing was a slow and uncomfortable process and Marthe preferred to undertake the task in private, without the need to consider what pain her expression showed as she moved stiff arms to the loosely laced bodice and farthingale.
Delaying the process, she walked around the borders of the room, taper in hand, examining the lightly carved panelling covering the walls, the damp collection of psalms left abandoned in a narrow windowsill, and the carefully arranged vase of seedheads placed as decoration on the sideboard. It was not a room that saw much use, evidently, and when Marthe climbed at last into the bedcovers - warmed with a pan of embers by the servants - and settled among them, she guessed, with haughty certainty, that she was not deemed worthy of Francis's old chamber. She guessed that Richard's father had purged everything of beauty and joy from the house during his reign of terror, and she nurtured a cruel satisfaction that without Francis at Midculter, it would continue its descent into uncultured drabness.
-
She suffered for the journey on the following day. The cold and damp got into the castle during the night, before the servants could rise and replenish the hearths. Marthe's back and legs felt hard and heavy after the long ride. Her shoulder and chest throbbed with a heat that did nothing to warm her extremities when she moved her feet beneath the blankets. Unable to imagine returning to sleep in such discomfort, she made herself leave her bed and wrapped her shoulders in thick wool. She paused by the window as she lit a taper and squinted at the pale reflection of her own face.
The ends of her hair had been trimmed for easier care: tendrils the colour of honeysuckle hung around the thin blade of her jaw and above her tense shoulders. The line of her frown was visible even in the rippled diamonds of glass, but her eyes seemed to take on the twilight colour of the sky outside. Sickness had sharpened her edges and made the shape of her face less like her brother's - though the similarity remained, as it always would.
Supposing that she would have the freedom to roam the halls in peace, she put on her slippers and moved stiffly into the corridor.
Even before the thin blue light of morning had penetrated the castle walls, she discovered that the place was not as bare and featureless as she had feared. She identified the classical tales and continental romances depicted on the tapestries, she examined furnishings and objets d'art and considered their age and origin. She ran her fingers over Eastern silk and Western walrus ivory, pressed her touch against the cold stone of busts and the cold metal of elaborate candle-sticks and concentrated on the texture instead of the dull, thudding pain that resided in her body.
Having been invited into the house, Marthe saw no reason why any of its secrets should be kept from her, and she tried any door that she encountered until she found herself in another parlour-cum-study, this one decorated with heavy, wooden-framed paintings hung over the oak panelling. There were more books in this room, and Marthe approached them eagerly, her forefinger outstretched, poised to lever one of the leather-bound volumes free of its shelf.
Her eyes were travelling hungrily down the page, her lips moving as she tasted the lines of poetry - new, very recently published verses by Ronsard, a volume of which she had left in the Parisian townhouse she had occupied. Yet despite her absorption she repressed nearly every sign of surprise when a smooth, weary-sounding voice addressed her unexpectedly.
"You look so very like him."
Marthe gazed at Sybilla with indifference and did not close the book balanced in her hand. "What an original observation."
The dowager did not respond, but entered smoothly into the room, her own light held high until it brought one of the portraits into view. Painted half a century ago, the first Baron stared down at them from beneath heavy eyelids, his face fresh and youthful. He looked like the man who had inherited his name, but the almond-shaped eyes and tapered jaw were striking. They aligned more with Marthe's features.
Marthe thought of the portrait of her grandmother in the hidden room at Blois. A sentimentality that she did not want to mean prompted her to ask: "Was he like that?"
"It is a fair likeness," Sybilla continued to look up at the Baron. "But where is a man's mind in his portrait? Where is his heart?"
At that, Marthe closed the copy of Ronsard with a snap and looked down, her expression tart with disappointment at this trite line of rhetoric.
The dowager continued to ignore her as she looked for something in the portrait's expression. Eventually, she said: "He loved Richard too, you know. When you think what he was denied - what cause he had for bitterness towards all who should have loved him best - and still he had only love for those in this house."
Sybilla met the cold resistance in Marthe's eyes without flinching. She turned and left, as serene as when she had entered.
When Marthe looked away again from the ground-lapis of the first Baron's stare the day outside had begun. At the window, she peered into a fog as dense and impenetrable as her future now seemed, and murmured, as though for his approval:
"Tu es la Nymphe eternelle
De ma terre paternelle:
Pource en ce pré verdelet
Voy ton Poëte qui t’orne
D’un petit chevreau de laict,
A qui l’une et l’autre corne
Sortent du front nouvelet."
-
Marthe was a woman of many skills, but few of them were suited to quiet convalescence in a remote Scottish village. No instrument in that house needed tuning, no fortunes needed telling, no orders for silk or wine needed negotiating. No purpose revealed itself. She rebuffed all of Mariotta's attempts at conversation and chose, instead, to sit by a window with the copy of Ronsard unheeded at her elbow, staring at the sagging winter branches outside and testing her memory of Arabic poetry - occasionally she murmured a line out loud, frowning as she considered whether she had recalled it correctly. Her answers to Mariotta's questions about the subject of the poems remained monosyllabic.
Even so, she found that her initial disdain for Midculter soon shifted to a burning jealousy of those who had lived their lives there in blissful ignorance of the world's true face. The constant efforts of nursemaids and tutors were bolstered by a personal care and attention that Marthe wanted to find cloying, though it also left her with some other sentiment, like anunexpected aftertaste. She seethed uncharitably at Mariotta's hesitant pronunciation of Latin when she read with her children, and she thought that Sybilla coddled her grandchildren at the virginal and lute, neglecting to pick up on mistakes that should have been remedied. Marthe preferred to sit in the silent parlour, away from the lessons and chatter of the music room, away from Mariotta's stitching and Sybilla's letter-writing, and wait until she felt inspired to read. She saw little of Richard and supposed that he preferred to get his boots muddy and to speak the coarse dialect of his tenants.
Nothing changed in the December gardens Marthe gazed at each day, but eventually Richard ran out of occupations on the land - or wherever he had been, between rising and writing late at his desk - and returned to spend his days in the parlour among correspondence and accounts. Drawn by the sense of activity - of productivity, no matter how prosaic - Marthe turned her chair to face the room and watched Richard work.
He noticed her interest with cautious welcome and talked to her about the business of the estate in the practical, sober terms she would have predicted. He would not be drawn on any other matters, though she now detected an importance beyond the next year’s harvests in the way he pondered his letters. Instead, he asked her how she was enjoying the Hymnes and told her, to her surprise, that he had bought the copy on their last journey to France, not Sybilla.
"If you want more reading, you should ask Kevin to bring some books down from Francis's room."
After Sybilla had interrupted her dawn exploration of the castle the other morning, Marthe had stopped wondering where her brother's belongings were, and has assumed they had been removed or redistributed as the family saw fit.
Now, on realising that the room had existed the whole time, kept from her by the rest of the household, she let her expression turn sardonic. "Am I not permitted to browse the library of Corvinus for myself? Did Jerott tell you I would only loot the place and sell its contents?"
A look of puzzlement passed over Richard's face. "No, if you want to go up there - but it's the tower room, the steps are steep, I thought you might find it an unnecessary effort. It's a miserable little garret, if I'm honest - the room you're in is newly converted, but more comfortable."
Marthe let out an impatient breath that might have held laughter. She looked out of the window. "Of course, you would forget that comfort includes books."
Richard, who was well aware of the implications of her words and noticed the haughty way in which she spoke to him, opened his mouth to correct her before deciding that it was not worth the argument. Speaking with her was like speaking with Francis at his most obtuse and irreverent, but there was an additional, maddening undercurrent of smugness running through all that she said.
"Perhaps you would find that the winter passes more quickly here in shared pursuits," Richard said carefully. "If you were to think of any that would amuse you."
Marthe shook her head at the window.
"What about music? You could give Kevin some lessons - he's outgrowing Sybilla's style of teaching, and from what I've heard, you're more capable than his tutor."
Marthe reddened. "I did not come here to be personal tutor to your children - would you ask the same of Francis?"
"Yes, of course," Richard did not hesitate. "If he wanted to do it, if it might prove diverting to him. Before, ah, before he was at the French court for the first time, we were in perpetual need of activities to keep him occupied. I know that it's more difficult when - "
"When I am not a man?"
"When you are injured," Richard said gently, but his expression showed some measure of horror. "I want you to feel like you can live here, Marthe, not that you are biding your time until something else presents itself."
The fire cackled and spat merrily in the big hearth, and Marthe's cool blue eyes searched Richard's hazel one for signs of mockery or deceit. Finding none, she affected a disinterested snort and turned her gaze back to the barren garden.
-
She did not ask for them, but the following day found a stack of volumes on her chair in the parlour. Hiding her smile in the empty room, Marthe discovered a satisfying variety in their contents: theology and mathematics, Spanish and Greek, literature both secular and devotional. Some she knew well, others she had never wished to read, but she took up a copy of the Chronica Gentis Scotorum and began to learn the history of her ancestors' homeland.
Through it, the hungry, precise part of her mind to which learning came easily was stirred back to life: the Latin was a jigsaw made up of familiar pieces, the format was an established one, and the content was both new to her and as similar as any chronicle was to another.
Richard made no comment when he saw her reading it, and she felt a strange flicker of gratitude as he settled at his desk and proceeded quietly with his work.
Marthe devoured what she wanted of the selection and knew that no more would appear if she did not make the request herself this time. Still, she also knew where the room was now - she would browse it for herself.
To her bitter resignation, she soon found that she had dragged herself up the steep staircase only to meet a locked door. Her legs felt weak and raising one after the other to each high, curving step had left her light-headed, so she sat down outside the tower room to gather herself for the return journey. She decided that, winter or not, she needed to get out of the building, to walk among the grounds and the surrounding area and build up the stamina that had ebbed from her in her period of recovery.
As she waited, her eyes closed, listening to each sinew and tendon in her chest clamour with discomfort, another rhythmic beat joined the sound of her racing pulse.
Shoes slapping on stone: quick, habitual steps taken in solid, flat-footed confidence. Kevin Crawford was six years old and knew each stair like he knew every stone in the house. His breath was quick and his eyes bright when he rounded the curve in the staircase, and in his hand he held a key.
"Hullo!" He grinned. "Mum said you came up here. She asked me to bring the key."
Marthe gazed at this child who was brown-fringed, ruddy-cheeked, round-edged and frank: so distant from the true course of inheritance the estate should have followed. She did not move. "Is it locked to keep me out? Will you tell me what I can and cannot take from there?"
Kevin's quizzical expression was the image of his father's. "No, we lock it because the wind gets in. It comes in the window and the door slams. It's not a very nice room."
Marthe got to her feet and brushed her skirts down as Kevin stepped eagerly forwards to use all of his compact might in turning the heavy lock and pushing open the door. "It was good enough for your uncle, though?"
"It's just where he keeps his things," Kevin shrugged, leading her inside the sanctum and running his fingers unpretentiously over the pages and spines of many a volume. "He travels a lot and can't take his books with him."
Marthe let her gaze wander over the shelves and stacks as Philippa Somerville had done a few years before. The contents held little to surprise her, but there was no doubt that it had always been a carefully curated collection. She leafed through a number of volumes, setting those that appealed aside and laying them on the covers of the unused bed. Kevin mimicked her, picking up books, glancing at their pages with little interest, and then checking what she did with the ones she picked up.
"Oh! I know this one," he said, grabbing a volume she had put on the desk as not of interest. Falteringly, with extravagant pauses, he recited its contents:
"Ní cheil maissi dona mnáib
Temair cen taissi ar tócbáil;
fúair ingen Lugdach 'n a láim,
tul-mag bad líach do lot-báig."
Marthe's head snapped up from the pages she had been perusing and she blinked down at the boy. "You read that well," she said, giving him a searching look.
Kevin chewed his lip for a moment, his cheeks flushed with pride. "Well, I only know some of the words. But I know what the poem is because Mum likes it."
The thought of nervy, domestic Mariotta teaching her children a language forced Marthe to rearrange a number of the impressions she had formed in the past weeks. She took the book when Kevin offered it to her and looked at the unfamiliar words. With a conspiratorial smile, she tossed it onto the bed and told him that perhaps he could tell her more about it later.
-
Mariotta brushed off Marthe's reluctant curiosity with self-deprecating laughter - "Oh, they're just silly rhymes, just fairy stories, really" - but she agreed to recite those that she remembered, bouncing her youngest child on her knee, her voice rising to something that reminded Marthe of birdsong as she chanted the poems in her native tongue.
She harboured no grudge if she remembered Marthe's reluctance to talk to her about Arabic poems previously, and seemed happy to teach Marthe what she had taught Kevin - a mother's lore of hotchpotch and disordered knowledge, alien to the structure of the classroom or the tutor's lesson. It frustrated, but Marthe extracted the information she could from it, nevertheless.
In exchange, she asked Kevin to play the lute for her, and showed him a better way of forming a chord that has been causing him difficulty. Later, Sybilla expressed her astonished delight with the cheerful Andalusian melody Marthe had taught him.
Early in the new year, Marthe allowed the Master to lead her on a tour of the grounds, where he proved enthusiastic and knowledgeable about the dry-stemmed plants lying dormant through the cold. She could not resist asking him whether the prospect of owning all of his surroundings excited him, and held her breath as Kevin turned silent, and his grip on her hand slackened while he gazed, thoughtful, at the castle.
"It's a lot of work. I don't mind that, but Dad's very busy. He used to play music for Mum and read to us more. When I'm the Earl I won't stop doing fun things."
Marthe's lips twisted wryly and she looked across at the distant chimneys of the village and the lilac-grey hills beyond. "I think you'll find that being Earl comes with its own fun things."
"I'll definitely buy a new lute," Kevin said with the decisiveness his position gave him.
Marthe jumped at the sound that emerged from her own lips: a bark of laughter that rang clear in the cold air, a sound of surprise and mirth that was all genuine.
Kevin's laughter bubbled up easily alongside hers and rose to a shriek of joy as he turned his attention to the road coming down from the valley. "Look! It's my uncle!"
The party from St Mary's was small and did not ride with banners unfurled and horns blowing, but the golden hair of the lead rider was unmistakable. It had been agreed many weeks previously that Francis and Philippa should be at Midculter for the end of the Daft Days of Christmastide, and Marthe had watched Mariotta's fastidious preparations for their arrival with a growing, grudging respect for the Lady's role.
On that dreich, black-skied January day, the castle was filled to brimming with more energy and song and music than usual - but the change was not abrupt and did not come as that imposed by a tortuous new regime. Francis and Philippa picked up familiar threads and together with the other Crawfords wove them into a tapestry of languages and art that even Marthe's stubborn, resentful heart could not resist. No one was omitted from the gaiety, no interest was judged unworthy: Philippa played animal noises for Lucy on the rebec as Richard, flushed with laughter, recalled bawdy poetry with his brother. Mariotta, no longer as easily shocked as she once had been, covered Kevin's ears as she supervised his play with the tabby kitten that had been brought from St Mary's for the mastering of Midculter's mice.
Sybilla spotted Marthe's wide-eyed, joyous expression as Philippa invited her down to the Persian carpet to play accompaniment to her toots and whistles, and her smile was a thing of wonderful restraint that only Francis noticed.
Learning that fun could truly be had and not just acted out at Midculter might take time, but between the afternoons of happy noise and the hushed, excited talk of politics around the hearth at night, Marthe took her first steps in this new area of study. She did not know if this life was any more normal, really, than the life she had grown up with - than the family she had grown up with - but she was finally coming to accept that it came without the conditions or restrictions that had ruled her choices before then. She wanted, at last, to stop resenting them, she wanted her interests to be seen as complementary but distinct, and she wanted to trust and be trusted, to be forgiven for what needed no forgiveness, like a cuckoo chick in a strange nest, like Kuzúm at Flaw Valleys.
She saw, in those days, that even without the title and the land, Francis remained the binding force among them all. His mother, brother, sister, wife, nephews and niece looked to him for all that he was capable of providing and - rested and healthy as he had not been in long years - he obliged them with pleasure. Richard asked for and took his advice without feeling threatened, and Francis showed no resentment of his brother's position.
Just as she tried to learn Irish from Mariotta's haphazard teaching, Marthe observed, and sought to learn how to be a Crawford.
"If what brings us together is our common love for you
I wish we would meritoriously share your bounties
Each according to the love he harbors for you
I have been in your presence while rapiers sheathed
And gazed at you when swords blood-stained..."
---
NOTES:
Obligatory list of sources for quotes:
Old English Cuckoo riddle and translation:
[yeah, I know it's unlikely they'd have known it, but let's assume there's a Latin version that they both know]
Translation:
In those first days my father and mother
left me for dead: there was no life yet,
no life within me. Then a kindly kinswoman
faithfully covered me with her own clothing,
held me and cherished, kept me warmly,
even as gently as her own children—
[...]
Because of this now her own dear children,
sons and daughters, were fewer, alas.
"Our peax, our play, our plane felicité", from Dunbar, The Thrissill and the Rois
"Beter to faille a litell in the iustice, than to be superflue in crualte," from a translation of de Flores' Histoire de Aurelio & Isabelle, technically only just works as it was published in 1556, but I didn't have time to find the quote in the original version.
Quote from one of the poems Marthe and Francis recite together at Volos in PiF, from Romance della Constancia, translated by DD in the Morrison Dunnett companion:
My mattress is of bitter pain, my time of sleep is wakeful...
My shelter is a public way, My road unbending ranges,
The sky instead of gentle climes afflicts me with its changes.
Ronsard's Ode to Fontaine Bellerie (earlier than the Hymnes Marthe's taken off the shelf):
Translation:
Eternal Nymph, you’re the grace
Of my ancestral place:
So, in this fresh, green view,
See your Poet, who brings
An un-weaned kid to you,
Whose horns, in offering,
Bud from its brow in youth.
Mariotta's favourite Dindshenchas (place-name lore), about the strength of the women of Tara:
Translation:
Temair free from feebleness hides not
the glory due to women for its building;
the daughter of Lugaid obtained in her possession
an open plain that it were pity to pillage.
And the final quote at the end is from a poem by Abu at-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi, who composed the lines Marthe speaks to Francis at Amiens ('Lord, is there nothing in the cup for me?').
Recipient: Jo (@notasapleasure). I hope I’ve done Jerott justice. It’s been absolute torture not talking to you about writing this <3
Prompt: Philippa and anyone as a BroTP, ‘Take the words 'sharp' 'alone' 'close[near]' 'missed' and give me some Pain :’)’ - it’s mainly alone and pain really, although Jerott has had some close encounters with sharp objects in the recent past. I hope it’s still delicious angst, even if it has wandered a bit off topic.
Setting: St. Mary’s, early autumn 1560.
Characters: Jerott Blyth, Philippa Crawford, Francis Crawford.
Relationships: Philippa + Jerott, Francis + Jerott, Philippa/Francis.
Rating: I’m not sure? References to things that happen to Khaireddin, but nothing explicit.
Summary: Sleep is not kind to Jerott Blyth.
Word Count: 2986.
Note: This is broadly compliant with this and this, mainly so I could squeeze Astraea the cat in there.
Spoilers: Non-specific spoilers for stuff that happens in Checkmate.
The pain rose up to meet Jerott Blyth, mingled with the waters of the Middle Sea, and he drowned in the scent of spikenard and jasmine, in roiling fumes and obscene kisses and all the stench and horror of battle. Even as he fell, half-blind from the blow to his temple that had swept him overboard and the haze of gunpowder that hung, cloying, over the churning blue-green waters of the Mediterranean, he heard behind him the low, animal noises of the foundering ship.
The pain at shoulder and temple and thigh howled in awful harmony with the tortured screaming of overstressed timber and the crack of snapping lines. Flashes of light filled his failing vision, amber and gold and cornsilk-fair, yet, through them all, he could see glimpses of palm and pomegranate beneath a blistering African sun; the smell of storax and benzoin clung to the aching tissues of his throat and curdled in the saltwater filling his burning nostrils.
Although Mehedia lay more than a hundred and fifty miles distant, set on its strangling neck of land in the shining sea, passing vistas reached him through the sheet of blue water and yellow fire. He thought he could see flashes of gnarled grey-green olive groves and fields touched with the blush of new barley and smell the sun-warmed earth and the fetor of bombyx mori. Even as the roiling waters of the Middle Sea saturated his padded gambeson, drawing him down and down into the currents that eddied and swirled around him, down into the vortex of the foundering ship, he thought he could feel the splintering wood of a burning hut beneath the tips of his blistered fingers. Even as his useless arm hung wavering and limp as storm-wracked kelp and a ribbon of blood like scarlet silk wound through the water around him, he touched the soft, pliant curve of a child’s back and the damp weight of of amber hair tacky with cooling blood.
İpec böceǧi, called the dry, whispery voice of the old woman, and Jerott Blyth flinched. For this wast thou born? What lack is there in Scotland that her sons grow so feeble?
The saltwater again burned in Jerott Blyth’s nostrils and, with the sudden clarity of the sleeper and the man nearing death, he knew that the sea battle and the olive groves alike were the mere conjurings of a mind caught in a drugged stupor. Slitting open stinging eyes against the fetid, poisonous fumes of burning silk cocoons, tasting bitter almonds like charnel flesh on the back of his tongue, he saw with little surprise that he lay beside the discarded body of a fair-haired child on the rough floor of the warehouse belonging to the silk-farmer’s sister in Mehedia. The marks left by the mutes were livid on a face touched also by the griefs of a short life twisted and warped against itself.
The great impulse to live that dwelt within Jerott Blyth’s sturdy flesh took fresh flame, and, even against the will that cringed against it, he drew a dragging, acrid breath and smelt the cloying, indecent reek of the perfume that clung to the boy-child’s cooling flesh.
The cornflower-blue eyes were open and far-seeing beneath their heavy, slack lids as they had not been beneath the merciful bindings of Amiens or in the wreckage of a shattered face on a Northumbrian hillside. The soft, kitten’s mouth, still bearing the last, revolting brush of paint, formed words without breath, as parched as the desert air. İpec böceǧi, for this wast thou born? Is there no failure thou hast not encompassed?
The gasping breath that woke Jerott Blyth was his own, rasping like poison in his chest, and his outflung arm howled with pain. For a moment, he thought he could feel the raw burns of Mehedia licking its length and he was back in Djerba - the Djerba of some seven years past - with Onophrion Zitwitz’s jellies melting on his tongue and the golden warmth of the North African sun spilling through the latticed windows of his convalescent room. For a moment, he burned again with fever on the boat fleeing the carnage of Djerba with Giovanni Andrea Doria fretting and fuming at the prow and Danny’s hand clasping his own and the utter failure of the Knights of St. John sour in a mouth that cracked and bled. With a blink against the enveloping darkness that admitted neither sunlight nor the deadly fire of an overturned brazier, he recognised the shadow of the bed curtains and the dim glow from the last embers of the fire dying in the hearth. A dint on the pillow by his head suggested the recent warmth of a cat, but he was utterly alone, neither prisoner nor knight.
With a hollow, awful noise, half sob, half laugh, Jerott buried his head in his shaking hands, feeling the trembling weakness in the injured arm and the aching memory of the old burns. It seemed to him that, like the silk moth which has no organs by which it can nourish itself, he lacked in that moment any means to sustain himself, and could merely exist in the labouring of his lungs and the eddying horror of the dream. Khaireddin, who he had failed to save; Marthe, whose death he had caused, however unwitting; Francis, who might have died by that same act of mercy; the boy Diccon, weeping before a father who turned an implacable face to him, the warm light of the afternoon gilding both their pale heads.
Although he had regretted his hasty words as soon as they were spoken - Damn it, Francis, he’s not one of your men to browbeat. Can you not show him half the pity you gave the other? - he felt the previous day’s anger kindle again at the memory of the cool displeasure in Francis’s eyes and the flat, uncompromising line of his mouth, even as his infant son tugged at his silken hose and begged to be held.
Mo cridh is a good little boy now, said the voice of that other child with the pitiless clarity of memory.
With no more conscious thought than the doomed silk moth, Jerott swung his legs over the edge of the bed, groping with chilled toes for the slippers that had been set out for him. Although the day had been warm for Scotland on the cusp of autumn, a decided chill hung in the night air and he shrugged into the borrowed robe, feeling it pull across the shoulders where it was cut for a slighter man.
In the near total darkness, he let his feet and memory guide him through the corridors of St. Mary’s, grateful at least that although the house no longer maintained its martial aspect, Francis’s taste did not yet run to endless trinkets and furbelows to trip the unwary. At the head of the stairs, something sleek and pale regarded him curiously from a ribbon of pale moonlight where a shutter stood ajar, but, before he could do more than peer blearily back, it disappeared into the recesses of a court cupboard made monstrous by the shadows.
Once, on a night such as this, Jerott Blyth might have sought the wine cellar and all its bottled comforts; once, Lymond might have locked it against just such an eventuality. Tonight, however, Jerott wandered through the silent house with no goal in his mind save to put as much space as the night permitted between himself and the fading echoes of his dream. His slippered feet padded softly across the expensive carpets and he recalled with a shudder the carpet painted with red and white in the in the selamlìk like a terrible exchequer counting out life and death - say goodnight to the dark.
Despite his meandering path, Jerott was not overly surprised when he lifted his eyes and found himself in the passageway leading to the great, vaulted kitchen. There would be fresh water there to wash the taste of bitter almonds and smoke from his mouth, thanks to some mechanical contrivance of Lancelot Plummer’s, and the cool of the Scots night under cloud-veiled stars through the door beyond.
He had already stepped through the door when he realised that long room was not empty; the faint glow from the banked hearth was matched by a candle flame and in its light a slim figure moved briskly from table to cupboard. Jerott froze, for a startled moment half-fearing some apparition from his dream, or, worse yet, an encounter with Lymond for which he was ill-prepared, but as the figure turned to greet him, he saw the fall of dark, unbound hair swing out around slender shoulders and recognised his hostess in a robe de chambre belonging, like Jerott’s own borrowed garment, no doubt, to her husband.
‘Jerott!’ Philippa came more fully into the light, her smile warming with more pleasure in the encounter than Jerott thought strictly reasonable for some time after two in the morning. ‘Couldn’t you sleep either?’
‘No,’ Jerott said shortly, and wondered what else he could say, but Philippa seemed unperturbed.
‘She gaue him milke, the slepe fell in his hede,’ she pronounced cheerfully. ‘I was making myself a posset, guaranteed by Kate to knock out half the county - of course, that’s in England. Would you like some?’
About to demur, Jerott was shepherded without delay to a seat at the well-scrubbed board and had an equally well-scrubbed lemon deposited in his nerveless hands. Half-hysterically, he found himself thinking that Djerba might have gone better with Philippa Crawford and not Giovanni Andrea Doria commanding the massed forces of Christendom. Taking the knife presented to him, he set to paring dutiful curls of zest and listened to the surprisingly comforting sounds as Philippa clattered around the kitchen, collecting the milk and cream from the cool slate and the sugar and nutmeg from the spice chest. As she worked, she hummed to herself, a fragment of Salve intemerata virgo, a snatch of a filthy ditty that he had heard on the docks at Leith. In short order, he found himself in possession of a steaming goblet of spiced posset aromatic with lemon and nutmeg and the Crawfords’ good French eau de vie, and being appraised frankly by the appallingly candid brown eyes of Francis’s child-bride.
A child no longer, he conceded with a shade of reluctance, although he could see the ghost of the scrubby and dishevelled adolescent alongside the the elegant courtier in the lines of her face as he squinted against the flickering warmth of the candlelight. A single lock of brown hair fell in disarray across her high brow, but, even in the dim light, it was glossy and well-trimmed, and the thin-fingered hands cupping the second goblet no longer showed the effects of diligent adolescent gnawing.
‘So,’ Philippa said conversationally, pushing a plate of sweetmeats towards him. ‘You saw Diccon’s argument with Francis.’
The posset soured in Jerott’s mouth. ‘Argument? He’s a child. He was crying. God, Philippa!’ Francis’s retort had, as ever, raised an angry and impotent resentment within him only made worse by the recognition that he was over-matched.
‘He’s Francis’s child,’ Philippa corrected gently. ‘He could pick a fight with a fencepost and is as highly strung as a papingo at a fair.’
Jerott subsided sulkily into his chair and eyed a sticky square of something dripping with honey and jewelled with candied nuts.
‘Baklava has many curative properties, but the banishment of nightmares is not one of them.’
As so often with Lymond, the softly spoken words left Jerott feeling as if he had been flensed and scoured raw, but there was a kindness in Philippa’s face that Lymond rarely permitted himself to display, and Jerott consciously relaxed the fingers clenched bitingly tight around the goblet until the ache of the healing wound in his shoulder subsided.
‘What, then? What possible reason could Francis have to treat his own son like that after… after…’
‘After losing Khaireddin? But if Diccon’s offence was no grave matter, neither was Francis’s.’ And in quick, amused words, Philippa sketched the outlines of a scene quite different to that which Jerott had seen - or thought he had seen: the tired, overexcited child; the hand tangled in the cat’s inviting fur until she awarded the barest scratch to her tormentor for this impertinent ambuscade; Francis’s insistence that Diccon should render his apologies to his feline friend before any consoling cuddle; child and cat alike falling asleep in Lymond’s lap even as he himself drowsed in the late sunlight. The light in the cornflower-blue eyes that had been not cold anger but a carefully corralled excess of emotion.
Philippa licked a crumb of honey-soaked semolina from her fingers and continued in a quieter voice, recalling the outspoken, stalwart child that Jerott remembered from the long-ago voyage, the terror and exhilaration alike of playing for Roxelana Sultàn, the dawning fear she had felt in the sultana’s gilded and grilled listening post above the Divan as she saw Jubrael Pasha for the first time. Kuzúm’s whipping and the despair of her wedding night in the French ambassador’s residence and the long journey home.
As if it were drawn out of him like a skein of silk unravelling, Jerott found himself responding in kind, telling the story of his ill-fated foray to Mehedia, the horror that he had found there and the coming horror that he had been unable to prevent. Just a quarter-hour’s difference, just a little more wit to see the danger surrounding him, just a little more strength in his arm… Remembering the obscene travesty of the kiss pressed into the crook of his neck, Jerott looked away, into the shadows that crowded the corners of the kitchen, but Philippa’s fingertips pressed lightly against his own, a benediction of a kind, as cleansing as any priestly absolution. In a flash, he remembered the calm of Francis’s face set against the crispness of his pillow in Amiens, the blind, blank eyes and bloodless visage and quick, expressive features shorn of all emotion.
İpec böceǧi, for this wast thou born?
And - no; they had stood as well as they might against a malicious and terrible will and had found beyond its bounds some place of refuge, though it had driven them over distant lands and wide seas. It had made of them something which none of them had been able to contemplate, both for good and for ill, and, as storm-wrack, they lay upon its farthest shore. If there was grief here in plenty and a lifetime of Graham Reid Malett’s ill works to be unravelled in Scotland, there was no shame in that.
Perhaps he was not formed as the horned worm of India, unable to sustain life even in others.
With a start, Jerott realised that the goblet was empty and cool beneath his fingers, the plate reduced to a scattering of crumbs and the first faint glow of dawn spilling through the high, narrow windows. The cat perched on one end of the long table, glowering at them through narrow green eyes and batting at a scrap of honeyed pastry with a desultory paw. Blinking against the sting of tears, as caustic as any poison, Jerott saw that Philippa’s lids were drooping, her chin propped on one hand and the other laid lightly on the curve of her belly suddenly revealed beneath the fine lawn of her shift where the embroidered silk of her gown had dropped away. ‘You must forgive Francis, you see,’ she said in a voice warm and soft with sleep. ‘It is difficult for him at the moment.’
‘I - yes - there is nothing to forgive,’ Jerott said, and found that he meant it. Perhaps, like the pelican, Francis would sustain these children with the last of his own heart’s blood, as he might have sustained his firstborn, were it not for Gabriel’s schemes, but the stubborn light in Philippa’s drowsy dark eyes suggested that she had decided opinions on the matter. And, with abrupt solicitude, ‘You should go to bed.’
‘A moment longer. Goo to Morpheus; thou knowist hym well.’
Rising to his feet against the protesting ache of his own muscles, he was surprised to find himself swept into a hug comprised half of peacock-embroidered silk and half of flying dark hair that filled his nose with the scent of chypre. Cautiously, he let his own arms close around Philippa and felt a great flood tide of weariness sweep over him, as if all barriers to sleep had been swept away and that welcoming sea rushed in, bearing all before it.
Disentangling himself with only a little difficult involving Philippa’s hair and the carved horn buttons fastening the sleeves of his robe, Jerott padded sleepily from the kitchen, the cat weaving lazy patterns around his bare calves.
‘Well, yunitsa?’ asked the figure lounging in the entrance to the larder, a sleepy, sardonic smile crooking one corner of his long mouth and pale linen sleeves falling back from his sinewy arms as he brought his hands up to frame her face.
‘Well,’ Philippa confirmed, and pressed a kiss to the scarred wrist. ‘He’ll sleep tonight, at least. And you?’
‘I see Astraea has absented herself, so I suppose we will find ourselves the next targets of the infant’s hair-pulling fervour in far too short a time, but for now my sleep, like justice, requires a witness.’
‘Then let me be witness by sight and by sign.’ Philippa smiled up into his face, smoothing the fingers of one hand through the disordered silk of his yellow hair. ‘Come to bed, Francis. There is nothing more to put right in the world tonight.’
The first three paragraphs draw heavily on the description of Jerott’s approach to Mehedia in Pawn in Frankincense, pp. 111-112.
İpec böceǧi - ‘silkworm’ in Turkish (I hope).
‘Like the silk moth which has no organs by which it can nourish itself’ - some version of this is repeated at various places in Pawn in Frankincense and also in Checkmate.
‘Mo cridh is a good little boy now’ - Pawn in Frankincense, p. 445, aka the most distressing line in the entirety of canon (and, let’s face it, there’s plenty of competition).
‘She gaue him milke, the slepe fell in his hede’ - John Lydgate, The Fall of Princes.
‘Goo to Morpheus; thou knowist hym well’ - Geoffrey Chaucer, Book of the Duchess.
mending fences (1/3) | written for @niniblack for the 2018 Scotswap | prompt: all the shenanigans Lymond got up to after GoK but before QP that made his mother so grateful he was getting out of the house when he finally left for France.
this is very late and I’m so sorry, i felt so bad sitting on this for as long as I did that I decided to post it in parts. two more parts to come, but here’s the first. also thank you @gawain-in-green for organizing this! also, yikes, hello, this is a fic.
Sybilla remembers her younger son on the night of their reunion, propping his dropping head up on one of his damaged hands and insisting that she continue talking to him despite his inability to keep his eyes open. Every other minute or so, he would have to catch himself to stop from virtually falling over. Exhaustion, and whatever the jailer had drugged him with after the trial, won out eventually. He was profoundly unconscious when Sybilla reached out to stroke his golden hair, and so he was in no position to pull away.
He woke in a strange and vigorous mood the following morning, and had been pulling back from Sybilla’s touch ever since.
Sybilla was glad, she reminded herself, that her younger son was happy; that he no longer in need of proving his innocence or running for his life or playacting as a hateful criminal.
She had to remind herself on occasion, as her younger son’s actions seemed to be in constant opposition with that which was good for him. She would ask her son if he was well and he’d reply in affirmation, despite the visibly strained way he was holding himself. Despite the servants having already informed Sybilla that her younger son had been without sleep for nearly three whole days now.
She was grateful, she reminded herself, that he was alive. He seemed so negligent of the requirements that perpetuated his own existence, skipping food and sleep to focus on a number of things that did not require his attention, such as the exact output from every working family living on Crawford land.
“Your brother has recorded of all of these things already, Francis,” Sybilla had said on the morning of the third day, keeping her voice gentle and free of judgment as she addressed her younger son by his given name rather than the name he had taken for himself. “You can rest easy knowing our home and our lands have been well cared for in your absence.”
Her younger son replied not with malice, but with a roll of his eyes. “You and I well know that Richard’s strength does not lie in ledgers and accounts. He’s had time enough to run our estate into ruin. Plus this past year, he had me running about distracting him.”
“We haven’t gone bankrupt yet,” Sybilla said, again, being gentle.
Her younger son only hummed under his breath, as if he knew better.
He disappeared soon after, and made himself scarce for the entire day. He was so late in returning that Sybilla eventually conceded to start dinner without him. When he finally did show up, most of him was caked in mud and smelling of dung.
“I’ve been mending fences,” he announced, seating himself, as none of the servants would come near him. There was an air of confidence about him, which Sybilla reminded herself to be happy for.
“I don’t recall any of our fences being in need of mending,” Richard said.
If Sybilla’s younger son was blushing underneath the dried mud, no one would have been able to tell.
“It’s your own fault,” he said. “Letting a dangerous and destructive outlaw into your home.”
“What can I say? I find myself of late possessed by a strong desire to rehabilitate the sorry wretches of Scotland,” Sybilla said, doing her best to cut him off before he veered off into the depths of self-revulsion. Though he spoke with a smile, Sybilla knew her younger son well. She could recognize the signs through any disguise he tried to hide behind, be it mud and a vigorous smile or a whole night’s worth of drinking.
“Regardless of the state of our fences, one hardly seems necessary for you,” Richard noted, “considering how you appear to have taken up residence in a pond. The smell should be sufficient in keeping people away.”
“My time spent living outdoors with you has inspired me, Richard,” he replied. “I’m a changed man, and am in the process of cultivating such an atmosphere for myself again. You’re more than welcome to join me. Such a life seemed to agree with you.”
Richard looked conflicted for a moment before allowing himself to move past whatever it was he was feeling. “I mean… if you enjoyed sleeping outside so much, just think how much more pleasant it will be now that you’ve replenished all the blood you’d lost. We certainly won’t be letting you upstairs before you’ve had a wash. Shouldn’t have let you in at all.”
“You’ll be by yourself this time, of course. Due to the smell,” Mariotta chimed in. She had profoundly failed to match the tone of the brothers’ light ribbing, but Sybilla appreciated that she had tried.
Later, Sybilla caught her younger son lean over and speak to his brother in a quieter voice.
“I do hope you’ll come, despite the smell. I’ve, er... done rather a bad job with the fence, actually.”
“Still,” Richard conceded. “You seem to be doing well enough.”
“You haven’t seen the fence.”
“Still,” Richard said again before turning back to his meal.
Sybilla kept silent, content to watch her two sons working to mend something far more complicated, and broken for far longer, than any fence to be found at Midculter.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Lymond Chronicles - Dorothy Dunnett, Stormlight Archive - Brandon Sanderson
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Characters: Francis Crawford, Sylphrena (Stormlight Archive)
Additional Tags: AU - Lymond in Stormlight Archive
Summary:
Scotswap for @bellaroles
“Prompt for an AU Lymond as Kaladin from the stormlight's archive. For one day. Well they both have survivor guilt so why not? I don't know how to do this since I can't write a fic coherently if I try.”
----
Here’s my scotswap gift, I can’t believe I made the deadline! Thank you @bellaroles for the great prompts, I still want to draw your art suggestion because it is fabulous! However, I decided to write the fic to push myself out of my comfort zone, and I was intrigued by the idea of a lymond/stormlight crossover :)
Hello! I was your person for scot swap and here is my story! It's not very good at all (and sort of late), for which I'm sorry, but I hope you like it!! :P I decided to use your camping prompt, although tbh I’m not sure exactly what is going on, I just went with it. Enjoy <33
Much thanks to @kerowyn-ankh for organizing this whole thing!<3
Thanks to @penguins-united for editing!
September 2016 A.D.
Virginia
It was, Jerrot thought, an insipidly delightful trip. The weather was glorious, the food decent, and everyone was sort of getting along. The only bad thing about the entire adventure was that it was so short. Despite his best efforts and intentions, Jerrot was rather enjoying himself.
He was even beginning to forget why he was so gloomy in the first place. It had been one of the vicious arguments he was always having with Lymond, probably about Marthe or Gabriel or Philippa or politics or religion or whatever stupid comment one of them had made. Afterwards Jerrot always felt a little mixed up, as though a hurricane had swept through all his carefully organized thoughts and principles and left them in disarray.
He sighed, resigned to cheerfulness, and went off smiling to look for Archie.
In his subsequent search he found himself looking all around camp. Adam had also mysteriously disappeared, but Fergie Hoddim and Randy Bell were passionately arguing about the proper way to make s'mores. Or, at least, that was how the argument had started; at some point it had shifted to the Mexican-American war and then to the affect oil prices had on the economy. Either way, they were neglecting their one task, which was to build the fire.. Lancelot Plummer (Jerrot had tried to think of him simply as Lancelot once, and it was just wrong. He was the sort of person who needed two names) had taken over, which was lucky, because he actually knew how to build a fire.
Lymond, who had organized their expedition into the terrifying world of northern Virginia camping grounds, was supposed to be getting out the ingredients for s'mores. Or building tents. Jerrot was positive he was supposed to be doing something. Instead, he was sitting on a big blue cooler Hercules brought, plucking away beautifully and maddeningly at a guitar and humming Neil Young songs under his breath. Lymond was consistently the most beautiful and maddening person in a group, Jerrot thought. It did not help that Jerrot was positive Lymond wasn't really as unthinking as he seemed. He probably had a great scheme in his head for the rest of them to carry out.
Meanwhile..
Archie and Adam had been gathering firewood by the little creek. "Had been" because Archie had declared that it was pointless to gather firewood and had tried to convince Adam to wade in the stream and catch minnows. Archie knew a lot about minnows. Adam let himself be distracted, reluctantly at first, and then enthusisastically, as he felt the sun beam down and the lovely weather whittled away at his resolve, until he was happily picturing landscapes to sketch and listening to Archie prattle on about squirrels.
The sun sank resolutely behind the trees as they wandered along the path. Adam realized suddenly that it was quite dark, his bad leg was aching, and he had no idea where they were.
“Archie? We aren’t lost, are we?” he said.
“Ohh” said Archie. He was probably the only person in the world who could say ‘oh’ in such a disapproving and decidedly Scottish tone of voice. “Oh. No. Not really. Just a wee bit, maybe,”
“Glad to hear it,” said Adam flatly.
Later…
“Has anyone laid eyes on Fergie or Adam?” said Lymond commandingly. He was standing on the cooler now, like a politician on a soapbox.
Jerrot was trying very hard not to roll his eyes.
Fergie coughed discreetly. “I believe they were looking for firewood,”
“That was an hour ago,” said Lymond coldly. “And neither brought a cell phone. Well. Everybody grab flashlights. We’ll meet back here in half an hour. Fergie and Randy, you go to the creek, I’ll go to the path, Lancelot, watch the camp. Jerrot, you head south to the lake,”
He sprung down from the cooler like a cat, and ran off to get flashlights. There was a brief silence, all too familiar an experience after some of Lymond’s declarations.
Jerrot scoffed, loudly. “It’s like he thinks we’re at war, or something,” he said. “The woods aren’t even that big,”
The others nodded sympathetically and agreed with him, but went about their respective tasks anyway. He was half-tempted to simply declare he was going to stay at camp, but it was getting sort of dark. And perhaps he wasn’t ready to face Lymond’s verbal whiplash again...
It took an hour or so of stumbling about in the woods until Jerrot found Archie and Adam. Adam was sitting on a rock, bored out of his mind, his leg aching. Archie, on the other hand,was extremely energetic. After realizing they were lost, he had apparently chugged a few powerful energy drinks he had packed. He said it always pays to be prepared. He didn’t respond when Jerrot asked why he didn’t bring a cell phone.
“What’s going on, then?” he had asked instead, pretending not to hear.
“Lymond’s been organizing search parties,” said Jerrot, resigned. “I think he’s rather enjoying himself,”
Another hour or so later, and the stars were out and ridiculously bright. Archie and Adam had prepared to face a lecture by Lymond, but he had taken pity on them- probably because Adam looked pathetic as a kicked puppy and Archie was still bouncing around like a monkey on steroids. Fergie was carefully toasting marshmallows and Archie was eating them amid his bouts of spontaneous dancing. Randy and Lancelot Plummer were listening to Adam tell a ghost story. Jerrot, bored by the idea of dead people and phantoms, and spurred on by some alien self-destructive impulse, sat down cross-legged by the fire next to Lymond, who was staring at it darkly.
He had been going to say something to provoke a fight, or to apologize, but all he managed was a rather lame comment on how nice and useful the fire was.
“For the night is dark and full of terrors..” said Lymond.
Jerrot blinked. “Was that a game of thrones reference?”
“Yes, Jerrot, it was,” said Lymond lightly. “Now how can I help you?”
“I’m not always trying to start a fight, you know!” said Jerrot. “Maybe I just wanted to make conversation!”
“I don’t know,” said Jerrot. “Camping is nice, but don’t you ever feel small, looking at the stars?”
“Bright star, would I were as steadfast as thou art, not in lone splendour hung aloft the night…” said Lymond. “Not really. I’ve always felt a little too important, frankly,”
Jerrot turned to him with something bitter on his lips about arrogance, but Lymond was, for once, laughing, and without reason, Jerrot was suddenly laughing too.
He was still planning on being melancholy and sulky, but then Fergie caught a marshmallow ablaze, and nearly burned an outraged Archie, and Adam very nearly had to stop a brawl, while Lancelot Plummer was laughing so hard he could hardly speak. Lymond sprang up from his seat, eyes sparkling, and Jerrot wondered with a sinking feeling if he was going to make some speech about taking themselves seriously and ruin their fun. But instead, Lymond picked up his ridiculous guitar once more, and began to strum. Archie, high on the twin pagan gods of caffeine and gatorade, began to sing in a surprisingly operatic voice.
Yes, thought Jerrot with a strange feeling he thought might be contentment, he was enjoying himself.
@aproposthessaly You wanted to know what Sybilla is thinking. Honestly, for most of canon, I also have no idea, but I gave it my best shot. No, I couldn’t think of a title.
“Seconde! You have to block that in seconde, Francis, or your side is open to his dagger!” Francis moved his blade to the left quickly, as if fixing it fast enough would make the mistake not have happened.
“But not everything is seconde, or why did I have to learn prime and tirce and the others?” Francis demanded, keeping his blades up. Richard, teaching as he had been taught, was not above smacking his brother’s inattentive limbs. Sybilla, watching her older son, almost grown into himself, and her fair one just starting, wondered if it was unavoidable, this growing into your teachers. Would her small Francis, so cherubic and clever, teach boys with the flat of his sword in ten years? She wouldn’t have thought Richard would, with all his babyish kindness, when Gavin first put a sword in his hand.
“Because they’re all useful sometimes,” Richard said patiently, and Sybilla felt a sudden rush of happiness that her kind boy was still a kind man in his own way. "But seconde is the most useful, so you have to learn to be good at it first.“
Francis frowned, and it was Richard’s exact frown when he went out to the archery butts with Gavin watching. Sybilla sighed softly to herself and wondered if she could teach Francis to hide his heart. With Richard, she’d barely thought of it, too taken up with joy and sadness and surprise, but with Francis and Eloise perhaps she could help them more, make them more ready for the world.
"A-boo!” Eloise exclaimed, starfishing one fat hand on Sybilla’s skirt and waving the other, messy with huckleberries, in the air. "A-boo. I found a-boo!“
"Is it blue?” Sybilla asked asked, smiling as she intercepted the waving hand before it transferred its stain-filled burden to her girdle. Some things you learned very quickly, after the first baby. "It looks rather more purple to me, don’t you think?“
Francis blocked Richard’s next attack, and twice more, before he opened his mouth to ask another question. Richard, beginning to look strained, cast his mother an awkward glance, too proud to ask for rescue, but too kind to tell his small brother to be quiet. Sybilla smiled on her boys, beckoning them over to her.
Francis came eagerly, and Richard self-consciously, pretending as he liked to these days that his mother’s bower had no appeal.
Eloise, immediate efforts in mess-making temporarily thwarted, stared at the mashed berries in her hand. "Purple. Hurble-purple!” Staring at the single surviving whole huckleberry, she added, “Girdle! Hurble-purple girdle!”
Lightly touching the berry, Sybilla smiled at her. "Indeed. Hurble-purple hath a red girldle.“
Richard sat by Sybilla on the blanket, offering her his handkerchief as he smiled at Eloise. Francis immediately sat by Richard, leaning into his side. “Make a rhyme, Mama! Make a huckleberry riddle!”
“Hurble girdle!” Eloise laughed, trying to clap her hands, but letting Sybilla extract the huckleberry and wipe her palms clean.
“Hurble purple hath a red girdle,” Sybilla started again, pausing to think. “A stone in his belly…“ She reached out to tickle Eloise’s stomach, as she thought about the next line.
"And a stake through his arse!” Francis exclaimed, overcome with giggles. Richard snorted, temporarily forgetting his dignity, and Sybilla shook her head an let it stand.
“And yet hurble purple is never the worse,” Sybilla concluded, holding up the huckleberry, still in one piece. "Shall we have hurble purple jam with our bread?“
"Mother?”
Sybilla turned slowly, knowing from Richard’s tone, even if she hadn’t seen from the party riding in the gates, that he was alone. Eloise, less perceptive than her mother, was across the room and hugging him tightly before Sybilla finally met her eldest son’s eyes, and she made sure to smile for him. They had heard, of course, about Solway, about the king. They had heard it was bad. It was worse, though, to see it in Richard’s eyes. For the first time, she thought he looked like Francis, his grandfather, rather than her son, and she found herself wishing for the over-enthusiastic eyes, a boy’s eyes still, that had rode off for glory months before.
“Richard! You were gone so long!“ Eloise was wrapped around Richard still, golden head buried in his waist.
Sybilla kept smiling. She had lost one Francis, and it had nearly ruined Gavin and Richard’s lives. She would do better if – "You’re well?” she asked.
“Yes,” Richard said absently. If it weren’t for his eyes, and the arm wrapped tight around Eloise, he would almost seem calm. “Father had a bayonet in his thigh, but it’s heeling. He’s still in Stirling. Mother, I’m sorry. They took Francis.“
Sybilla couldn’t help the tiny sigh that escaped her. "He’s alive?”
Richard nodded quickly, as if only now seeing what it was that she’d feared. "Yes, Erskine saw him, his brother sent word – but the English are taking him to London with the rest of the prisoners.“
Sybilla nodded, unable to look away from her boy. Did Francis have eyes like that now? Was he too staring at the world through battlefield visions. He had had such horrible nightmares when he was small, nightmares that only she and Richard could soothe.
Eloise pulled away, looking at Richard in horror. "Francis isn’t coming home?”
“Of course he is!” Sybilla said briskly. It was surprising how similar they looked suddenly, he battleworn boy and her golden girl, eyes pleading for reassurance. "Richard, you will want to talk to Gilbert about the ransom, but the English won’t hurt him, any more than they do other hostages. We must hope he was taken by someone poor and apolitical, and he will be home in a few months. Think what stories Francis will tell us about London! You know he’ll bring us back the newest music and riddles.“
When Tom Erskine first babbled the new, Sybilla almost couldn’t believe it. She had sent Richard and Mariotta to bed and had been sitting at a window, schooling herself into the knowledge that Francis would be dead by the end of the week, and she would have to watch and not break. She hoped Mariotta bore girls. Eloise might have been taken from her too soon, but Eloise had never ridden off into the great world and never come back. Richard was probably the only Crawford man who did come back, and perhaps that was because he rarely left.
She had not seen Lymond. He had not asked for her, and when she tried to think of any conversation they might have, the visits and the manners and living life even for another week seemed unsupportable. Sybilla had been sure, all that week, that Lymond would feel the same and not wish to see her. Sitting my the window and watching the stillness of the Firth, she wondered if she had been wrong. Did he still have nightmares? There was a lute in the room and Sybilla wondered if Lymond still played, if his life left him any space for the music and silliness that had delighted them both before he’s gone off to war.
The pounding at her door was a surprise – no one could do anything, and sympathy was difficult in such a case. When she opened it, Tom Erskine gasping about tarots and Will Scott and proof, quite unlike his usual responsible self, was almost more than she could believe. In the oak doorway, heavy door half ajar, Tom Erskine gripped Sybilla’s limp hands and finally managed to form a sentence. "Samuel Harvey confessed, Sybilla. The case against him is gone.“ Sybilla’s small hands gripped Tom Erskine’s wrists so hard he thought he might have bruises in the morning.
"Take me to him,” she said.
Tom took her to the Queen Dowager, but to her Sybilla did not even need to ask. The Queen Dowager’s eyes were kind. "Your son shall live, as my daughter does in France. You wish to see him?“
Sybilla let the pure relief wash over her before following the Queen Dowager. The delirious surprise she was feeling could be nothing compared to Francis, so young himself, and so alone for so long. When the door opened, she saw Francis. In that a moment he seemed like his father Francis, sure and worn and world-wise and then she saw his eyes, and they were eyes of a little boy waking up from a nightmare, and realizing that he’s still safe in bed after all. And Sybilla opened her arms for that boy.
