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erinaceina · 5 years

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Lymond Fanfic: Febricity

Massive thanks to @notasapleasure for encouragement and help with this.

Spoilers for Checkmate.

Fever came to Midculter as 1558 wound itself to a dreary, a sodden, a lightless close, clad in blowing fog and gusts of leaden rain. Throughout that momentous year, the rheum had blustered and wheezed across Europe, una grande influenza di lunghe e mortali infermità, and now it crept on swift feet through the kitchens and the door-yard, and sank with a biting chill into the bones of Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny. Running before it as herald and handmaid, it brought an exquisite, drumming pain that swelled and battered in all the echoing chambers of his skull.

No stranger to hemicrania and the diverse pains of body and mind, febrile, high-strung and worn to new delicacy, Lymond paid it no mind. Lately Voivoda of all Russia, lately Marshal of France, former outlaw and former galley slave, accustomed to ignoring the exigencies of the body, he threw himself into the counsels of Scotland with all the vigour that France and Russia had commanded. If a tremor that he could not quite master shook the slender, elegant hands and an unusual degree of pallor deepened the purple shadows beneath the vivid blue eyes, they were well concealed by the gloom of the winter’s day and the brisk, spare grace of his every movement.

Islanded amidst a welter of papers in the Earl of Culter’s wood-panelled cabinet, attended at every moment by the fuss and hurry of secretaries and messengers, the brothers laboured over the business of the realm of Scotland, fair head and dark bent together in refutation of the years that had separated them. Exhilarated by this new and fragile accord, Richard Crawford did not perhaps notice as he might have done that his brother’s acidulous commentary came more rarely as the day wore on, or that a rasping burr sounded occasionally in that light, melodious voice. The untouched goblet of wine at Francis’s elbow told no strange tale, and it was with a start that Richard realised that even the dim light beyond the many-paned windows had faded to night and the candles were guttering and his own gut was gnawed with hunger.

‘Come on, Francis.’ Richard stood, stretching against the ache in his back with a monstrous yawn, and disentangled his younger brother from a teetering pile of maps. The hand that he touched so briefly was chill and clammy, but the fire had burnt low in the hearth and the heavy brocade curtains hung open against the bitter night. ‘Philippa will have my head if we don’t go down to dine.’

A brief, enchanting smile lit Lymond’s face and lifted for a moment the pall of weariness that hung about him. ‘Should we not be like the Artotyrites, enlumined by bread and cheese alone?’

‘Not unless you want your wife to serve my eyes on a plate like Lucia as garnish to your cheese,’ Richard retorted, crossing the room. ‘And I’m afraid the bread is gone and the cheese is fit only for the mice.’

‘For shame, Richard! Is there no Pangur Bán to haunt your castle and prey fiendlike on your vermin?’

‘None as fiendlike as the vermin.’ Richard grinned. ‘And anyway, I’m afraid Philippa has been teaching the cats to eat cheese.’

Swinging the cabinet door open, Francis let out a shout of laughter that dissolved into a hoarse, hacking cough. ‘A poison enemy of all cheese,’ he gasped, regaining control of his breath with an effort of pure will, even as the band of fire drew tight around him, shearing pain along the spaces between every rib.

Richard started, finding his own heart suddenly hammering in his chest as the raw blood suffused his brother’s face. He reached for Francis, one hand closing over a shoulder that felt suddenly, terrifyingly fragile through the thick cloth, the old resilience a gossamer-spun illusion that he had learnt too late, but Francis waved him off with a sharp gesture. ‘The Cornecraik in the croft, Richard. Count it as long-overdue penance for my damnable tongue, if you will.’

Richard retreated reluctantly, tucking his hands into the waist of his breech hose, and, seeing the ferocious expression on Francis’s face that he could, at long last, diagnose as wounded dignity and desperate pride, he spoke no further, but contented himself with a sceptical frown to match Francis's. But there was no recurrence of the coughing fit as they made their way through the corridors of Midculter, speaking desultorily of the business of the day, and the high, fierce colour ebbed slowly from Francis's face.

As they settled themselves at the board, charm and wit were alike in full flower in Francis's voice and in the swift, eloquent movements of his hands. If Richard found himself distrusting their intensity, he dismissed it as an old, rotten kernel of fear buried deep by the second Baron Crawford, his father. And if he caught Philippa's eyes lingering more often than not on Lymond's face, there was no novelty there.

Francis ate little that meal, the ornate Italian fork lying idle under one ringed hand, but touched the bright linen to his lips with fastidious frequency and drank sparingly from a goblet of well-watered wine. The marks of long strain and grief and captivity were perhaps stamped more deeply on his face than they had been for some weeks, but they were overlaid nonetheless by a patina of new joy that blurred them to insignificance. As the courses came and went and the wine and conversation flowed as freely around him as the waters of Saturnia, his voice, light, amused, only a little hoarse, rose from time to time above the chatter and burble, recalling some incident or joining Philippa's in scurrilous verse that painted Mariotta's cheeks with colour and made the dowager snicker into her shawl.

It was no surprise, then, when Kevin and the other children, wheedling, begged for music and would hear no demur, or when Francis, yielding, set down his wine. 'Enough, brat. A pype thou shalte haue also, In true musyke it shall go.'

He made to rise, but the enduring will that had sustained him throughout the long day as so often before faltered at last. Flesh, tested this year beyond the brink of endurance and snared now in webs of pain and the grip of a rising fever, betrayed him utterly. His soft-shod feet stumbling on the polished floor, Francis Crawford fainted, and slithered, quietly and unobtrusively, under the long table.

The dowager made a soft noise of distress. Kevin Crawford, eight and sturdy, froze, rebec clutched in one slightly grubby hand. Richard sat stock still at the head of the table, his mind filled with a soundless clamour no, no, no and the blood draining from his face until his pallor matched his brother's. For a heartbeat, nothing moved in the hall save for the dancing echoes of the firelight and the overturned goblet rocking gently in the dregs of spilt Bordeaux wine. Then, with a screech that set all the tableware jingling in sympathy, Philippa thrust back her chair and sank down beside the prone figure, her rich skirts unspooling around her. Her fingers, finding the bright gold of Francis's hair, trembled slightly, and she compressed her lips into a severe line. 'Oh, Francis,' she complained. 'What have you done now?'

The napkin that had fallen from his uncoiled hand was lightly but unmistakably stained with blood.

*****************************************

The faint was not, after all, a deep one, and Lymond awoke to the hazy echo of Amiens, and a blur of familiar faces ringed like the nodding heads of summer flowers about him, and the realisation that he no longer possessed the strength to stifle the outward manifestations of the fever that gathered force within. The cat lapping hopefully at the spilled wine was not, perhaps, the stuff of high tragedy, but Lord Culter, steadying his brother's slight, listing form with one broad shoulder and hoisting him unceremoniously to his feet, began to panic in earnest, feeling the concatenation of tremors rattling through the chest braced so close to his own despite the intervening layers of silk and linen and lace. For a moment, the golden head lolled slackly against the neat ruff encircling Lymond's throat before the dazed blue eyes snapped wide and the slender, elegant frame straightened in a fair imitation of insouciance. A sudden, shocking memory of the spring warmth of the Loire valley nearly eight years before and his brother vomiting helplessly behind a curtain in a stinking chamber in Blois arrived like a cuckoo in Richard’s mind. He could recognise now, as he had not at first then, the vulnerability and sheer stubborn will stamped in every line of Francis's body, and see it echoed over and over in the depths of Philippa's solemn dark eyes. With the inner shrug of a habitually sensible man confronting the inevitable, Richard released his brother and stepped away. Lymond favoured him with a slight nod that he would once have seen as cool, mocking condescension, and in which he now read a depth of relief that still held the power to shock him.

They stood for a moment, simply regarding one another, and Richard felt the weight of all the words unspoken bear down upon the air between them like Master Dee’s angels. Then, with a flutter of movement that scarcely disturbed the exquisite lace at his wrists and the fall of his yellow hair in the candlelight, Francis wilted like pot herbs in a stew. This time, at least, Richard caught him, the panic swelling now to uncontrollable proportions as he saw all his brother’s vaunted control stripped away. Philippa’s face was very pale, but the painted crescents of her brows were undisturbed, and Richard wondered at it until he saw that the hand cupping Francis’s elbow trembled over and over with the finely honed anguish of the caged songbirds of Constantinople.

‘Right, my lad,’ Richard said in the no-nonsense tone he had used so often with children and livestock alike. ‘It’s to bed with you.’ For a moment, it seemed that Francis would surely argue, would shrug off concern and command alike with some familiar, acidulous retort, but he merely acquiesced with the same slightly damp, boneless meekness as Kevin after a dose of physick.

They departed the great hall trailing a wake of dogs and servants and children, Lymond supported limply between a bride with worry in her eyes and a brother preoccupied with alternating visions of poison and a fatal decline. Between these staunch bulwarks, Lymond himself swayed with each achingly slow step like an overladen carrack caught in a crosswind, his head drooping, his feet dragging, and the blood ebbing and flowing fitfully beneath the fine skin of his face. Progress ground to an irresolute halt, however, at the foot of the tower stair, when the tangle of onlookers proved too great for the width of the passage. Richard, momentarily distracted by the demands of a small child in petticoats and jam stains, loosed his grip upon his brother, and Lymond, staggering between the competing forces buffeting him within and without, slipped his anchor completely, and fell hard into the window embrasure, dragging Philippa with him and sending a majolica statue of dubious artistic value shattering to the floor.

Silence fell like a cloudburst around them and even the dogs and the children quieted as the last glazed splinter shuddered to rest. Sprawling crook-legged against the bruising stonework with Philippa’s fingers laced in the disordered silk of his hair, Francis Crawford looked up at the Dowager with beseeching blue eyes. ‘Mea culpa, mother, mea maxima culpa…’

‘It’s only poor Leda and her appalling swan, darling.’ Sibylla, who had found herself relegated rather unceremoniously to the back of the Crawford gaggle, moved forward with brisk decisiveness that belied her age. ‘I never understood what Gavin saw in the wretched thing and I can’t imagine anyone will miss it. I’ve been hoping that the cats would dispose of the thing these past five years, but they will do as they wish, no matter how much one asks.’

She made to place her hand on his forehead, but he wrenched away with an effort that nearly tumbled him to the floor, and she realised that he did not quite see her and that whatever the shockingly blue eyes beheld was no comfort to him. ‘I’ll keep my promise, mother. I swear, I’ll keep my promise, whatever you ask of me. Mea culpa…’

Sibylla recoiled in horror and saw Philippa fingers clench reflexively in the golden hair. Gathering her composure about her like the thinnest of veils, she smiled down at the dazed face of her youngest living child. ‘No need for promises now, Francis, I’m sure. Just rest and sleep, my darling.’ But the tears were standing in her eyes and she could move neither forwards nor back, leaning instead into Mariotta’s comforting embrace as Richard once again scooped up his younger brother and, stooping a little to avoid the concussive potential of the winding stair, began to climb. It was not, all told, the most graceful progress that the Earl of Culter and the Comte of Lymond and Sevigny ever made together, accompanied as it was by a ceaseless volley of bruises and glancing blows on walls and stair as Lymond fought again and again to regain some control of limbs as leaden and unresponsive as cold pudding. Nor would he release Philippa’s hand, even as his sweating fingers slipped against hers. Once, as they took the turn to the final landing and Philippa sidled to avoid an elbow to the eye, her hand slipped completely free of his and a low sound of utter despair escaped his bloodless lips.

‘My dear, my dear.’ Philippa caught up his hand again and pressed it to her lips. ‘I am here.’ They stood, the three of them braced together and breathing hard, while the rain lashed at the windows and a half-muffled sob died in Lymond’s throat.

The last steps to the tower room were the worst, for Philippa dared not release Francis’s hand, and the moved together like some many-legged creature from a bestiary of nightmare. Nor was the clammy and uncooperative figure of Francis Crawford, deposited at last on the high bed, a helpful partner in his own divestiture. The boots presented little enough of a problem, but anxiously twisting fingers tangled themselves in points and lacings and the prone figure exhibited the distressing tendency to flinch at any but the lightest touch. The strings fastening the neat ruff tangled in the golden hair and had to be cut; silk and linen clung damply to sweating skin; paned hose tore under the force of injudicious tugging; and every inch of skin seemed blotched with fresh bruises or burning with fever. Richard, working methodically to unlace his brother’s tight cuffs, froze, looking down at the limp hand laid gently in his own, at the livid scar that bisected the pale flesh of his brother’s wrist. With shaking fingers, he unlaced the other cuff and laid bare the matching scar. Philippa, hearing a change in his breathing, glanced up, and caught the look of incandescent horror burning in his eyes. ‘When?’ He swallowed and tried again. ‘Jerott told me but I didn’t know this…’ A helpless gesture at the jagged, slowly healing flesh that his brother had once laid open in the depths of despair, while he himself had been so far away and unknowing.

‘In Lyon, when he was blind,’ Philippa said, in a calm, quiet voice, but the bones of her hand, resting on the warm, tensile flesh over her husband’s heart, shone yellow-white through the skin.

‘And if he is blind now?’ Richard gave voice to the fear that had been growing within, that Francis had bought a scant few months of health with the blow at Dourlans, that it was starting again, the blindness and the despair, and, for all who loved Francis in Scotland and beyond, the helpless, unending loss.

Philippa’s dark eyes snapped with sudden fire and when she spoke it was in a tone that rang with decision. ‘He won’t be blind; this is no megrim.’

Unreassured, Richard felt no unkind impulse to disillusion the brown-haired girl whom his brother had married. Together, they stripped Francis and bundled him between blankets and quilt, and drooped, exhausted and speechless, in the chairs that stood sentinel beside his bed.

*****************************************

The guttering candlelight lying on Philippa's hair like hoarfrost, trembling in the jewels set at wrist and ear and neck, was the first thing that Francis Crawford saw when he woke, muzzy and unpleasantly clammy, in the great bed. There was little else to see in the confined circle of light, and the ache behind his eyes only hardened into bands of ringing steel when he tried. Taking swift catalogue of his body - or as swift as his numbed and muzzy thoughts would permit - provided little reassurance. His head screamed, his throat burned, and his chest was ringed with Aeolian fire; every limb felt as it was trying with all its might to disjoint itself from the next. What little in his body did not pain him felt stuffed with buckram and sawdust, and when he answered the question in Philippa's eyes, he heard his own voice as if from a great distance.

'So sair the magryme dois me menyie,

Perseing my brow as ony ganyie,

That scant I luik may on the lich.'

He broke off, coughing, and did not speak again until Philippa had lifted a cup of water to his lips and he was sweating profusely, his face the colour of fresh-dyed cramoisie. 'I thought it was a return of the old malady, yunitsa.' And was afraid to contemplate it went unspoken.

'And the cough? And the fever? Did you think that they were some novel aspect of your megrims?' Philippa enquired tartly, but there was real fear glittering in her brown eyes.

'The cough?' Another voice. Richard's. His brother's somber doublet and hose had concealed him against the dark panelling beyond the candlelight, but now he sat forward, his elbows braced on his knees. Tiredness bracketed his serious grey eyes, and something that looked horribly like grief. 'What cough, Francis?'

'The cough that kept him awake half last night,' Philippa said, fixing a stern and unbending glare on her lord and master. 'Francis thinks that I am quite deaf. I should imagine that he has been wheezing like the bellows of Hephaestus all day, every time you left him alone.'

Francis contrived to look sheepish, even as the runnels of sweat crept through the tangles of his hair like worms and his vision swam with a sudden surge of appalling heat.

'Francis!' Richard expostulated, looking so confounded that his brother would have laughed if he could. But the fever that had come upon Francis in dizzying waves as he sat at table was worsening now. He could not concentrate, nor could be find the words to reassure Richard, but could only clasp Philippa's hand and mumble something contrite into the pillow. And when sleep came once more, he was glad to escape for a while the prison and confine of his body.

*****************************************

It was not, of course, a restful sleep. In the carmine darkness between the world of sleep and the waking world, the hydra-headed horrors of past and future writhed together before a transfixed mind that could neither blink nor flinch. As so often before, the serried ranks of his dead rose before Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny like dragon's teeth in the green grass of summer. The ghastly parade of grim, dear faces loured before him as he sweated and twisted in the entangling sheets - Will, Christian, Strozzi, Oonagh, Eloise, Khaireddin, always Khaireddin... Then the living and dead twined together, hopelessly entangled, each with the other, until he could not tell who was living and who dead and the scent of the grave and the poppy rose up around him in a cloud of heat. Philippa fled from him through the traboules of Lyon, horror engraved in every line of her face and the soft, brown eyes huge and cold, and when he looked down at himself, he saw that he wore the heavy, reeking clothing of Leonard Bailey and there was a sword in his hand.

Graham Reid Mallett raged at him, dressed in the robes of a lord of the court of session and so close that he could not avoid the touch of his breath upon his face, and became the Cardinal of Lorraine and Margaret Douglas and Ivan of Russia with eagle's wings rising behind him. A tide of blood swelled around him, flowing like the four rivers of paradise from the wounds of the slain and the lost, from Salablanca and Güzel, from Will’s lost arm and Marthe’s shattered face beneath the ruined cap of amber hair. He screamed and cursed and begged as he had not in waking life, until every breath he forced through his wrecked and bleeding throat was an agony of effort and despair.

Philippa had gone; she could not stay; she must not stay, or the fire would consume her and the mutes would smother her and his arrow would pierce her through and through. Again and again, she turned from him and he knew that this was fitting and proper, even as the Russian winter burnt in his bones and the very marrow of his being sang with pain.

Reaching for his sword, fumbling for boots and spurs, he felt soft, firm hands press him down and something cool and wet against his brow. The trickling of iced water followed him once more into sleep, and he was drowning, drowning in the roads outside Calais as Richard and Sibylla and Diccon Chancellor gasped and flailed in the roiling sea beside him. Again, he reached for his sword, and again was pushed back against the sheets that tried to swallow him whole. This time there were hard hands marked by sword calluses, hands that drew his mind back and back to childhood, weeping in the tower over some childhood sorrow while his brother held him against a worn jerkin that smelt of sweat and horses. And then he struggled through mire in the house on the rue de la Cerisaye, and his horse foundered under him, and an eagle screamed and a child whispered, 'Say goodnight to the dark' in a voice that made him cry out in horror.

Throughout it all, he knew that if only he could get up, if only he could finish this, then he could make amends, could save Philippa and Will, Joleta and Christian, Eloise and Oonagh, Robin Stewart and Turkey Mat, could save his son, his only son. If only the sick heat and chill would leave him; if only he could breathe properly without sawing pain in his throat and nose; if only he could settle and finally sleep.

At some point - although he could not say whether it was deep night or the wan light of the winter's day - Francis Crawford felt Philippa's hand slip from his own, and knew that she was gone forever, although he could not have said why. The bright tears pressed at his eyelids, but he could not let them fall, surrendering instead to the desert dryness that filled his mouth and the raging torrent running through him like the falls of Engedi - my beloved is unto me as a cluster of camphire in the vineyards of Engedi - and let the fever sweep him away from the clammy, suffering body set amidst the damp, twisted sheets like a jewel of no price.

*****************************************

Philippa woke with her head resting on the edge of the high bed, her neck a jangle of nerves and stretched muscles and her nose pressed crookedly into the goose down. The lute had half slipped from her lap and hung precariously from the stiff fingers curled around its neck. Her toes were cold in their embroidered slippers and her head radiantly hot where it had been veiled like an idol in the bedcovers. Stretching, she settled the lute more firmly in her lap and ignored the percussive click in her aching neck, but her hands remained still on the strings, too tired even for music. A quick glance at the occupant of the bed revealed that he was sleeping, breathing in great, fretful gasps but not crying out as he had when the delirium had shaken him like a ragged poppet of flesh and blood and he had not seemed able to bear even the touch of her hand against his flesh. Throughout the long watches, night and day commixed in noxious alchemy and every sense reduced to this man, she had sat here, listening and watching, hoping only for the fever to pass and the brief moments of lucidity to return.

The dowager, banished to fretful safety, had reappeared again and again with a pottle of chicken broth or a peck of willowbark and a child or a cat or a viol in tow. Relieved of her burdens, Sibylla was swiftly repelled by Richard, who said that Francis was quite enough of a handful as an invalid and that the Crawford family had no need of a second. Richard himself would scarcely leave even to sleep and Philippa could not be moved even by the wildest of imprecations. Looking across at Richard now, Philippa could see her own weariness and fear graven in his face and she tried again. ‘You don’t need to stay here, Richard. Go and sleep and I’ll wake you when the fever breaks.’

‘No.’ He turned away. ‘I cannot…’ He trailed off, but Philippa knew the thought the he could not speak aloud: that he could not sleep in case Francis did not wake; that fever had killed enough men in Europe this year who had not endured all that Francis had endured; that, although vitality had returned in full measure, Francis was not yet as strong as he had once been. And that, once again, he had driven his body beyond the limits of endurance, a tool to be used until it bent or broke. ‘I should have seen that he was ill. I should not have expected him so soon. I knew the state that he was in at Amiens…’

Philippa flinched, an almost imperceptible flicker, but said briskly. ‘Nonsense. Francis is like a cat with a sore foot when he’s ill, and we all know it.’ She paused, glancing down and letting one finger tap against the lute’s strings until they hummed softly. ‘And he was so glad to come here again – at last.’

Even in the scarce light, Philippa could see the high colour climb in Richard’s cheeks and he smiled a sweet smile so like Francis’s that she could have cried. ‘Well then,’ Richard said in a voice marked by strong emotion. ‘If neither you nor I will sleep and Francis will not wake, at least permit me a turn with the lute.’

Philippa blinked and, surprised, yielded up the instrument without the least hint of resistance. The strong, brown swordsman’s hands gripped the lute, perhaps not with Francis’s innate grace, but with a skill and dexterity that had no shame in it, and he began to play, slowly and quietly, a rollicking, filthy drinking song from the stews of Glasgow.

And, sometime in the grizzled half-light between day and night, the fever ebbed like the long, broken sigh of sea on shingle, and, although still wracked by a cough like the voice of the cù-sìth and assailed by an excess of phlegm, Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny settled into a dreamless sleep.

*****************************************

Philippa, in a fresh kirtle miraculously free of both creases and the stale odour of the sickroom, smothered a yawn against the back of her hand and nudged the door of the tower chamber open with her hip, a brimming bowl of chicken broth balanced in her other hand.

‘Washe them with his owne broth till whit he become,’ she sang out cheerfully. ‘Hepsibah’s recipe, although sadly lacking in cumin, I’m afraid… Francis?’

Through the part-drawn curtains of the bed and the scented steam curling up from the bowl, Philippa looked in alarm at the huddled figure of her husband. Far from the content and sleepy invalid that she had left to wash and dress herself, propped up on an extravagant mound of pillows with the Decameron at hand, an embroidered cap tugged primly over yellow hair and a fresh nightshirt tied with a neat knot at the hollow of his throat, the figure of the bed was coiled snail-like around his bent knees. His head had been buried in the crook of his arm beneath a tangle of sheets; at the sound of her voice, he raised it with aching slowness. The pallid afternoon light revealed blue lips set in pale face whose only other spots of colour were shadowed eyes and a reddened nose like a beacon in fresh snow. The book lay discarded on the floor, pages spraddled and bent, half-hidden under the slide of the richly embroidered coverlet, mute testament to a patient who was rather more ill than she had imagined.

‘Like the common escargot unshelled,’ Francis said, in a voice like something living at the bottom of a well, and essayed a faint smile.

With exaggerated care, Philippa set the bowl of broth aside and settled herself on the high bed by Francis’s shoulder. ‘Francis, my dear, what’s happened?’ She brushed the tangled hair back from his face, and felt the deep, waxen chill of his skin.

The smile took on a rueful tilt that did nothing to assuage the worry gathering in a hard lump behind Philippa’s breastbone. ‘Like the men of Vardø, I seem to dwell in eternal winter.’

‘Awake, O north wind; and come, thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let us see if we may banish the winter perpetual.’ With her mother’s customary brisk competence and no small measure of forced cheer, Philippa set to, stirring the fire up to a roaring blaze, procuring hot bricks and caudle from her brother-in-law’s hurrying servants, chivvying the cat from Francis’s discarded nightcap, and unearthing blankets and woolly socks from kist and wardrobe. In the heat of the room, the sweat soon began to prickle at the nape of her neck and dampen the loose strands of hair straying from her braid, but even as she worked and chattered, tucking the bricks snugly at the foot of the bed and rearranging blankets and pillows, Francis’s replies grew softer and more abrupt. Nor did the shivers that wracked him abate, and, as the flow of inconsequential nonsense dried up, she could hear his teeth chattering in the stillness of the room.

Her heart beating a fast counterpart to the crackle of the fire, Philippa arranged herself cross-legged on the bed, a spare featherbed overflowing her lap, and looked down at Francis’s prone form from under severely lowered brows.

‘Francis, what’s the matter? Should I find Richard?’ She availed herself of one long-fingered, beautiful hand, the nail beds still cold and grey-blue, her thumbs stroking the sensitive flesh of his palm. ‘You’re still like a block of ice, and if I put any more bricks in the bed you’ll have all the castle cats in there with you.’

‘Her hat and ceald hwilum mencgað.’ Francis made to withdraw his hand, but she would not release it. ‘I shall be well again presently. You need not concern yourself.’

Once, perhaps, that would have been sufficient to make her recoil as he intended, to shut the gates of her mind against him, but that had been before Sevigny and before these last glorious weeks at Flaw Valleys and here at Midculter. She clasped his hand more tightly, tracing her fingers over the thin, faded lines of the old scars, and saw the shudder of tension run through him. ‘There is nothing about you that does not concern me, Francis, my dear. And when my husband looks as though he has been wandering through a Russian snowstorm, I find myself very concerned indeed, will it or no. What do you need? If you will not tell me, I will find all the dogs in the castle and they can bounce it out of you, or I will tell your mother.’

For a long moment, Francis did not answer, merely sat looking at their clasped hands. When at last he spoke, he did not raise his eyes, keeping his gaze fixed on the gentle movements of her fingers. The fall of his hair, less clean than was its wont beneath the linen of the cap, nonetheless shone dully against the line of cheek and brow, and his voice was very quiet.

‘Disordinat desiryng for to kissen and embrace,’ he said in a voice that was almost soundless, and, looking up at last, saw the flash of surprise and relief in her face. ‘A cold is upon me whose only cure lies in the compass your arms, but I should not ask it of you. In the fever… in the fever, you fled from me and I lost you beyond recall; I am content that you are here in the waking world. That is a sufficiency beyond price.’

Philippa felt her face crumple with an excess of emotion and schooled it into a tremulous smile. ‘Why should you not ask what may be gladly be given? There can be neither debt nor sufficiency here, for I will never grow weary in this touch.’ Watching his face carefully, she saw the startled joy flare in his blue eyes, suddenly wide and shy and very young in the face of the man who had been Voivoida of Russia and Marshal of France. Laying his hand down on the coverlet, she arranged the spare featherbed over him, tucking in the edges until he was safely nested like a cat in a basket of fresh linen. Toeing off her slippers, she slid in facing him, her kirtle rucked up and her stockinged legs twining around his. For a moment, he was still and silent as some ancient monument in her arms, but then he melted into the warmth of her touch, his head resting on her shoulder and a sound that was almost a sigh escaping him as his arms drew her close in turn. He was very cold, still, but as she held him, the shivers faded and the face so close to her own grew flushed and rosy and his breaths deepened on the edge of sleep. Remembering his fears, she let the quiet words flow from her, words of love and desire and longing, of loss and discovery, and of her joy in his presence.

‘Douce playsence est d’amer loyalment,

Quar autrement ne porroit bonement

Amans suffrir cele dolour ardant,

Qui d’amors naist.’

The sleep that finally claimed him was shallow but content; Philippa held him close, his skin warm against her own and a smile lingering on his lips, and it was enough and more than enough.

*****************************************

Francis Crawford lying in the grip of a burning fever had been a figure of anguish and of pity. Francis Crawford, recovering little by little his former strength, was a menace, so said Philippa his wife, and they would all go and live in the byre with the kine if this went on much longer.

The yellow hair had emerged first, spiked and streaked by dry sweat into a head of pure thistledown. The bleared blue eyes set in heavy lids. The fine, pale skin, blotched and reddened by illness. For as much as a day and a half, he had been content to lie ensconced in his cocoon of blankets, sneezing into a square of linen like a mappa mundi and listening to the strains of soft music, his gaze resting upon Philippa's face with a look of new wonder that made her blush and drop her eyes.

But, a querulous and a restless invalid, unused to yielding to the demands of his own body, Lymond could not sustain such a languorous state, even as sleep washed over him in great waves of exhaustion. The linens, he announced in a carrying and acerbic voice, should be transplanted to the pigsty if the pigs would lower themselves that far, and he must bathe to rid himself of their reek, regardless of the ice growing in cracking sheets at the well head. Bathed, he would dress and see his lady mother, and was only prevented from doing so when he fell asleep in the midst of a cutting riposte to Richard's curt denial. He summoned his brother's secretary, and was affronted when no such individual appeared. He could not countenance that a mere fever had achieved what swords and shipwreck had not, and was found, collapsed and sweating profusely in a huddle of brocaded silk and embroidered vine leaves, and carried back to bed by Richard, swearing at every step. If Philippa was not near, he grew anxious and fretful, his hands plucking restively at the covers until she returned. If she stayed, he grew ashamed of the weakness that kept him confined to the bed.

He must correspond with all the great men of Scotland and of France, even though his hand shook too much to hold the pen steady and Philippa removed the ink pot to prevent oakgall disaster overtaking the fresh sheets. He wished to read, but no book pleased him and the close-printed text pained his eyes, although he would not admit it. The rebec should be consigned to the fires of Tartarus; the lute was a monstrous, ill-tuned thing and he would defenestrate it forthwith.

At this last, Philippa, who suspected that Francis's headache had more to do with his refusal to sleep than the poor, maligned instrument, lost her temper, and removed herself and the lute both to her mother-in-law's warm parlour, where she devoured a piece of cheese the size of a man's fist, slept for twenty minutes, and, waking, vented her wrath on a well-thumbed copy of Chrétien de Troyes. Embarking on a long catalogue of Arthurian follies with a cat in her lap and her hair falling in disarray around her shining, pink face, she only broke off when she saw Sibylla's gentian eyes grow wide and round. Swivelling to stare over her shoulder, much to the cat's displeasure, she saw Richard's broad frame filling the doorway and, draped over him like a bundle of limp and unsavoury Yule greenery, Francis, swaddled in a sheet and with an entirely incongruous stocking cap on his head.

Richard met his mother's eyes and shrugged wryly. 'There was no help for it. It was me or the dog cart.'

'And that would make a horrid mess of the stairs,' Sibylla finished for him. 'Oh dear.'

One shaking hand, white-knuckled, clutched the linen at Francis's throat. Above it, his face was waxen and sweat-sheened, but the open blue eyes beneath the bruised lids were, for once, quite guileless, and fixed on Philippa's face. 'I've got the temper of Cerberus today,' he said at last, 'but at least I've only got the one head to bark with. I'm sorry, yunitsa.'

Philippa sniffed inelegantly. 'Well, poor Richard certainly doesn't deserve to carry you upstairs again.' And, giving way without warning to the strain of the last days, burst into a storm of weeping that thoroughly embarrassed her. Somehow, without either of them unbalancing or Francis losing control of the straying sheet, he and Philippa ended up tucked together on the day-bed, his damp cheek lying against the fall of her hair and their hands tangled together, while Sibylla sat enthroned in the great chair like Zeus in glory and Richard perched on a low stool, his long legs thrust out before him and a look of deep and abiding satisfaction on his face.

When the hiccuping subsided, Philippa read Boccaccio aloud, doing all the voices, until Francis fell asleep. And when she, too, drifted into a light doze, Richard retrieved the sliding book from her lax hands and read on in the warmth and contentment of the winter's afternoon.

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‘Douce playsence est d’amer loyalment...’: ‘It’s a sweet pleasure to love loyally, / For in no other way a lover truly could bear / That burning pain / Which is born from love’ - from a motet by Philippe de Vitry.

‘Her hat and ceald hwilum mencgað’: ‘Here heat and cold sometimes mingle’ - from the description of Hell in Christ and Satan.

I will try to post the sources of the other quotes and references as well when I have a moment.

In case other people are lucky enough not to have experienced this, I can promise you that it is entirely possible to cough until your throat bleeds; it’s alarming but not usually as serious as it looks.

#lymond chronicles #lymond fanfic #my fic #lymond/philippa #lymond spoilers #mention of death cw #mention of violence cw #suicide mention cw #whump fic #hurt/comfort #illness cw

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