Cassell, 1971, 525 p.

The fifth of Dunnett’s Lymond Chronicles, featuring the life and exploits of Francis Crawford of Lymond, Duc de Sevigny.

Having killed his adversary Graham Reid Malett in the last instalment, Pawn in Frankincense, while Ambassador of France to the court of Suleiman the Magnificent in Ottoman Turkey, Lymond, with the aid of his mistress Güzel, has now travelled to Moscow to find employment for his company of mercenaries under Prince Ivan Vasilievich, the Tsar of All Russia (known in English as Ivan the Terrible, but never named as such in the text.)

There is first, though, a focus on the activities of young Philippa Somerville, who had travelled to Turkey to help retrieve Lymond’s illegitimate son from Mallet’s clutches and who, after spending time in the Sultan’s seraglio (somewhat improbably without suffering any undue attentions) had, at his insistence, contracted a paper – and unconsummated – marriage with Lymond in order to protect her reputation. Philippa brought the child, known as Kuzum, to Lymond’s home of Culter in Scotland but now has a position as a lady in waiting to Queen Mary in England. Intrigued by Lymond’s family’s reticence about his origins she has been inquiring into his background and obtained two differing accounts of his actual parentage.

In Moscow, Lymond soon becomes the Tsar’s right-hand man, the Voevoda Bolshoia, and sets about modernising the army. All this is put in jeopardy when the Tsar decides to send an envoy, Osep Nepeja, to England to purchase modern armaments and supplies, tasking Lymond with securing these.

Behind the scenes machinations of Margaret Douglas, Countess of Lennox, (a granddaughter of Henry VIII and mother of Lord Darnley) are a threat to Lymond through all this.

When Lymond states his firm intention of returning to Russia, Guthrie, a member of his company says of the Russians, “They are a nation accustomed to violent, unreasoning rule, and when it yokes them again, they have no instinct to withstand it, to beat it down and to replace it with sanity.” To which Lymond replies that given time that change could be achieved. We’re still waiting.

It’s all very well researched and incident packed but there is an opacity to proceedings. Dunnett withholds certain information from the reader somewhat unfairly and there is often a lack of clarity to the dialogue.

However, only one instalment, Checkmate, remains unread by me.

Pedant’s corner:-  mortised (morticed,) a missing comma before a piece of direct speech. “The crowd were already pressing into the warehouse” (The crowd was already pressing…,) reindeers (the plural of reindeer is  reindeer,) gutteral (guttural,) complajnts (complaints,) Kholgomory (elsewhere always Kholmogory,) “Turkey will not always remain the power; that she has been the secular power of the Pope is also in question” (the semicolon is misplaced ‘Turkey will not always remain the power that she has been;  the secular power of the Pope is also in question’.) “‘Right?’ said Lymon .” (‘“Right?” said Lymond.’) cracklure (craquelure.) “‘I thought we could surrounded the Tsar with’” (could surround the Tsar.)

Century,1983, 494 p. First published 1969.

This is the fourth in Dunnett’s series of novels featuring Francis Crawford of Lymond, Comte de Sevigny. See here, here and here. After the revelation in book three that Lymond had fathered a son on Oonagh O’Dwyer and Graham Reid Malett’s escape from the cathedral of St Giles, Crawford is faced with a dilemma. If he kills Malett then the child will be killed.

Taking advantage of the commission of Henri II of France to transport an elaborate spinet to the Grand Sultan Suleiman the Magnificent and be French Ambassador to the Sublime Porte, Crawford travels the Mediterranean accompanied by former Grand Knight of Malta and one of Lymond’s mercenary company, Jerott Blyth, and sixteen year-old Philippa Somerville, daughter of friends of the Lymond family whose intention is to protect Lymond’s child Khaireddin from further harm. Also in the party are the spinet’s constructor Georges Gaultier, his niece Marthe, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Crawford, and a Swiss cook, Onophrion Zitwitz.

Things are complicated by the fact that there are two fair-haired children of the correct age knocking about, Khaireddin and Kuzucuyum, one of them the child of Malett and his deceased sister Joleta. Both may have to be rescued.

False trails, betrayals and incident abound, including a set piece among the ancient cisterns below what was once Constantinople but is now – and has been for a hundred years – Stamboul, the atmosphere of Suleiman’s court is evoked admirably, Crawford’s trials grow. The climax comes with a chess game using live pieces instigated by Suleiman’s second wife Hürrem Sultan, known as Roxelana, to resolve the competing claims of Malett and Lymond as to the truth, a game which involves a pawn sacrifice.

There is something about the writing which lends the tale opacity, however. Perhaps Dunnett, like Lymond, is being too clever for her own good. Not that it affected her sales.

Possibly reflecting attitudes when the book was written a minor character, Pierre Gilles D’Albi, says of Marthe, “‘She has too many ideas. Women with ideas are a threat to the civilized world.’”

The series as a whole may be the Lymond Chronicles but as written this one is more the tales of Philippa Somerville and Jerott Blyth than of Lymond.

Sensitivity note: uses the word ‘nigger’.

Pedant’s corner:- bouillotte (is an 18^th century card game, not a 16^th century one,) a missing quotation mark at the end of a piece of dialogue. At one point Blyth is trapped in a small building which is on fire and giving off hydrocyanic gas, and survives. (Exposure to small amounts of HCN is usually fatal,) “since Odysseus’ time” (Odysseus’s time – I note Zakynthos’s appeared later so usage of the apostrophe wasn’t consistent,) Scandaroon (x 1, elsewhere Scanderoon,) “a English girl” (an English girl,) rauccous (raucous,) hoopoo (hoopoe.)

Polygon, 2024, 140 p, including iii p Glossary and i p Acknowledgements.

This is one of a series of short novels Birlinn (Polygon’s owner) has commissioned from modern Scottish authors under the rubric Darkland Tales: “dramatic retellings of stories from the nation’s history, myth and legend.” The good lady picked it up from the local library and I thought I might as well read it too.

An author’s note prefaces the tale with a note saying that Shakespeare – like people today – knew little about life in Scotland just over a thousand years ago now and his “Scottish play” about two power-crazed tyrants was an invention (actually taken from Hollinshed’s Chronicles.)

McDermid’s book – like Dorothy Dunnett’s King Hereafter – is an attempt to restore the balance and has two strands; one in the present of Macbeth’s wife Gruoch as she tries to evade capture by Malcolm’s followers (specifically MacDuff) some time after Macbeth’s defeat at Lumphanen by sheltering in a monastery on an island in Loch Leven and the other (printed in italic) her memories of her life when she met and fell in love with Macbeth while in a dynastic – and on her part loveless – marriage to the Mormaer of Moray, Gille Coemgáin, the man who had killed Macbeth’s father Findlaidh. The whole is a love story in which McDermid conjures up late tenth century Scotland admirably.

Macbeth here is not the Earl of Orkney of Dunnett’s imagination but has a power base on the isle of Mull and a prickly relationship with Gille Coemgáin until he takes revenge for his father and establishes his rule by adopting Gruoch’s son Lulach, whom this account asserts is his son anyway.

Within the text there are several sly references to Shakespeare’s play – the handle toward my hand, to the sticking place, untimely ripped etc – but McDermid gives it her own spin.

On the whole I found Queen Macbeth more interesting and writerly than McDermid’s crime fiction. This is Gruoch as a living, breathing – feeling – human being.

Pedant’s corner:- “quantities of ginger and peppermint tea” ( I wondered when ginger came to Britain. It was known in the 11th century so that’s fine. Peppermint was apparently only identified in 1696 but its use will certainly predate this.)

Cassell, 1966, 513 p.

Being the continuing adventures of Francis Crawford of Lymond, Comte de Sévigny, following on from The Game of Kings and Queen’s Play. We start here with a small incident in the ongoing border skirmishes with English forces before Lymond sets out for Malta, the seat of the Order of the Knights of St John, currently under the corrupt leadership of Grand Master Juan de Homedès. A Turkish fleet is bearing down on the island and Lymond is accompanying a mission to warn of its approach. It is there he meets the fair and pious Sir Graham Reid Malett (known as Gabriel.)

After witnessing the fall of Gozo they engineer a message giving false information to the Turks so that their fleet sets out for Tripoli instead of attacking Malta. A small group of Knights travels there to help its defence. Lymond’s former lover Oonagh O’Dwyer, whom he previously persuaded away from would-be Irish King Cormac O’Connor, has taken up with Galatian de Césel, Governor of Gozo, but when the island is lost she falls into the hands of the Turks. It turns out she is pregnant with Lymond’s son, eventually named Khaireddin, but for most of the book he is unaware of this.

The attempts to prevent the Turks capturing Tripoli eventually failing Lymond is joined by Malett in his efforts to form and train a private army partly to police the perennial feuds in the Scottish Borders but also to make money as mercenaries.

In the meantime Malett’s young and visually captivating sister, Joleta, has been sent by him to Lymond’s mother for safe keeping. Her attitude to men, who have always it seems deferred to her beauty, is summed up her reaction to Lymond’s articulation of his feelings for her, “‘But you can’t dislike me!’” In this scene Lymond seems to act at odds with the gentlemanly demeanour we might expect of a novel’s hero. But we later find his reasons are sound.

Notably (to me anyway) the pivotal moment in the book takes place in a hostelry in Dumbarton.

Twists and turns, betrayals and unfortunate choices abound and there are several loose ends (presumably to be taken up in the three later instalments of the Lymond Chronicles.)

It all jogs along eventfully enough but there is something about Dunnett’s writing here that jars with me. Too many viewpoint jumps perhaps, too little transparency.

Pedant’s corner:- helments (helmets,) unhung (unhanged,) “nursed rom” (nursed from.) “‘Unless your  fortify’”  (‘Unless you fortify’,) pomegranite (pomegranate,) “which soaked hides at might need protect” (context suggests ‘hides it might need’,) “the knights vulnerability” (the knights’ vulnerability,) disks (discs,) demonaic (demoniac,) hiccoughing (hiccupping,) cameraderie (camaraderie,) “a oecumenical” (‘an oecumenical’, and the latter is usually, now, spelled ‘ecumenical’,) Sandilands’ (Sandilands’s,) “every man, woman and child for which the company were responsible” (for which the company was responsible,) connexion (connection,) “had reached a screaming crescendo” (had crescendoed to a screaming climax,) pollarchy (first known use of this word was in the 1850s, not in mediæval Scotland.)

Michael Joseph, 1982, 725 p, plus ii p frontispiece showing the lineage of Kings of Scotland (Alba) and Northumbria, ii p backispiece (I apologise for the coinage) of rulers of Orkney, Norway, Normandy and England, iii p maps of mid Europe in the 11^th century, Alba (Scotland) and Northern England in AD 1050, and of the Orkney islands and Caithness of AD 1050, and ii p lineage of Danish and Norwegian rulers.

The sparseness of the historical record for Scotland in the Dark Ages leaves something of a blank canvas for the novelist to exploit. In Dunnett’s account of the life of Macbeth MacFinlay (whom Shakespeare portrayed as a villain) she has chosen to fill that canvas by conflating him with a certain Earl Thorfinn of Orkney. (See here.)

In Dunnett’s version, Thorfinn (in the book he is rarely referred to by his Christian baptismal name of Macbeth,) although the grandson of King Malcolm II is more proud of his Orcadian heritage than his Scottish one and keener for that to be passed on to his own sons, to whom he gives Norse names.

He is not the only character to have more than one name. His wife was born in Norway as Ingibjorg Arnason, has the baptismal name Margaret but is known to him as Groa (and in Gaelic as Gruoch.) Aged fourteen she was forced into marriage to a middle-aged Mormaer of Moray, Gillacomghain, who had killed Finnlaech, our hero Thorfinn’s stepfather. When Thorfinn in his turn killed Gillacomghain to regain his lands of Moray he married the widow.

Such was life for high-born women in the Dark Ages; destined only to cement alliances and to breed. (Spoiler alert [Really? Are the outlines of the story not well-known?]: she was to suffer a similar fate when Thorfinn is killed by the man who became Malcolm III who also made her his wife.)

This was the time when the Norse kingdoms had only recently become (at least nominally) Christian and a fair bit of the narrative deals with the merits of the Celtic as opposed to the Roman Church in particular as Thorfinn is trying to unify the Kingdom of Alba’s only loosely held regions of Fife, Angus, Buchan, Caithness etc. Though Thorfin has some sway in Galloway (and Cumbria plus alliances with Ireland) the Lothians were territory disputed with Northumbria. England’s regions (Mercia, Wessex, East Anglia) likewise owed allegiance to one king but their rulers had ambitions of their own.

The novel’s main attention, though, is given to Thorfinn’s Scottish lands and those in Orkney but ranges widely over the Northern Europe of the time and has mentions of King Stephen of Hungary. Thorfinn even makes a pilgrimage to Rome to seek the Pope’s imprimatur. In his youth he had spent some time in the English court of King Canute whose wife Emma (another who had been taken as a wife by her first’s successor,) after her second husband’s death still has her matrilineal fingers spread across England and Normandy.

At times, then, the book reads more like a historical account than a novel. Shifting alliances and manoeuvrings make up most of the intrigue with the interests of the Godwinsson family and William the Bastard of Normandy (which would eventually collide at the Battle of Hastings) begin to loom large towards the book’s end.

King Hereafter can be seen as one of many attempts to rescue the historical Macbeth from the obloquy to which Shakespeare consigned him.

His periglour Sulien here says to him, “‘Men will look back and see a king who strove to build for his people. …. The name each man leaves is a small thing compared with the mark he puts on the world.’”

The book is long, with fairly small print, and paints Thorfinn and Groa’s relationship sympathetically and humanly but also serves as a primer on late 11^th century history.

Pedant’s corner:- dwarved (dwarfed,) manoeuvering (manoeuvring,) unfocussed (unfocused,) aureoles (areolas- or areolae,) chorussed (chorused?) pleat (it was hair, so ‘plait’,) basalm (balsam,)

Vintage, 1997, 436 p, plus i p Foreword by the Author, ip Contents, iv p list of Characters, ii p map of France.

This is the second in the author’s “legendary” (according to the cover) Lymond Chronicles, of which I read the first, The Game of Kings, in 2017. In this instalment our hero is engaged by Mary of Guise to travel incognito to the court of Henri II of France – where her seven-year-old daughter Mary, Queen of Scots, is being brought up and educated to be a wife for the Dauphin (and hence to unite the crowns of France, Scotland – and, in the fullness of time Ireland) – in order to keep her informed of any intrigue she might otherwise miss. Lymond travels disguised as Thady Boy Ballagh, ollave (a kind of high-grade factotum of learning, “professor, singer, poet, all in the one”) to Irishman, Phelim O’LiamRoe, Prince of Barrow and lord of the Slieve Bloom.

From the outset things do not go smoothly, the ship they are sailing in is rammed – apparently by accident but in reality not so – just before landfall. Someone has mistaken O’LiamRoe for Lymond and is trying to kill him. O’LiamRoe’s first meeting with Henri is also blighted by him being given the misinformation he is actually to meet a look-alike.

As Thady Boy, Lymond makes his impression on the court; not least in a roof-running race similar to parkour (but obviously centuries before that became a well-known thing.) There is as much of the said intrigue – not to mention skulduggery – as you could wish, with numerous attempts on the young Queen Mary’s life thwarted in various ways. Lymond’s clever-dickery is not quite as to the fore as in The Game of Kings but Dunnett’s fondness for unusual words – habromaniac, hispid, branle, cangs, gregale – is again in evidence.

It’s all readable enough but at times a little too convoluted.

Pedant’s corner:- focussed (focused,) hiccough (several times. That spelling is a misattribution; the word is spelled hiccup,) Callimachus’ (Callimachus’s,) unfocussed (x 3, unfocused,) O’Li mRoe (O’LiamRoe,) StAndre (St André,) span (spun, used later,) “hearking back” (harking,) a comma at the end of a piece of direct speech, Empedocles’ (Empedocles’s,) paradisaical, (paradisiacal?) serendade (serenade?) sunk (sank,) “that closed the back of this throat” (of his throat,) appalls (appals,) shrunk (shrank,) “‘Thinking death the only division. I could not imagine …. ever so insulting you’” (no full stop after division.) “She studdied him” (studied,) “knees akimbo” (it is very difficult indeed to rest a leg upon its own hip, never mind both of them. Okay, I know people use it to mean limbs splayed out but bent inward,) “black cloth of gold” (if it’s cloth of gold it can’t be black,) “no on touched him” (no one, better still, no-one.)

Cassell, 1962, 541 p. One of the 100 best Scottish Books.

This novel is set in the times of what the father of the historical novel Sir Walter Scott dubbed the “Rough Wooing” (a phrase Dunnett never uses in the book) which started when Henry VIII of England wished for a marriage between the infant Queen of Scots, Mary, and his son Edward (VI of England) in order to unite the two kingdoms and so prevent any military threat through England’s back door. The Scots, longtime allies of England’s perennial enemy France, were somewhat unwilling to oblige Henry in this regard, and so a series of wars and invasions began, which in the novel are being promulgated in Edward’s name by Lord Seymour, Duke of Somerset, England’s Lord Protector during Edward’s minority.

Our hero is Francis Crawford of Lymond, Master of Culter, a younger son at odds with his older brother, though his mother’s favourite. We find him newly returned to Scotland from enforced exile (not to mention a term as a galley slave,) the leader of a band of border outlaws, the states of both Scotland and England having a price on his head (in particular he is thought to have betrayed Scotland, as a result contributing to the disaster that was the Battle of Solway Moss five years in this story’s past,) as a young red-headed aristocratic lad called Will Scott of Kincurd, heir to Sir Walter Scott of Buccleuch, turns up wishing to join his band.

Lymond is outrageously accomplished, a master swordsman and archer, who litters his speech with Latin epithets and quotations from both French and German, speaks Spanish, has a firm grasp of psychology and can outthink and outdrink anybody – the last being handy when you’re the leader of a band of outlaws. To put it another way, in the words of Chris Tarrant on Tiswas parodying Eamonn Andrews in This is Your Life, he is, “a right clever dick if ever there was one”. He is not unaware of this and neither is Dunnett as at one point she has him say, “‘Nothing arouses suspicion quicker than genuine, all round proficiency.’”

I confess it got a bit wearing in the earlier parts of the book when every mysterious “new” character turned out to be Lymond in some disguise or other (or, in one instance, as an amnesiac.) Whatever, incident is packed on incident, scrape on scrape, as the plot unfolds Lymond’s efforts to uncover the Englishman who might clear his name.

However, Dunnett has, while foregrounding the lives of Lymond and his family, also, almost quietly, ticking away in the background, provided a primer in the politics and strife of the time. This, indeed, is the sort of story nations need periodically to tell themselves so that they keep their histories alive.

And some things never change. An Englishman tells Lymond, “I don’t want to become part of the Holy Roman Empire, and it wouldn’t do Scotland any good either. You’re a threat to three million people out of all proportion to your size. You can’t expect us to leave you alone, to siphon up the dregs of Europe and inject them into our backside.” Substitute EU for Holy Roman Empire and fifty-five for three million and you’ve just about got the present day situation. As a rejoinder Lymond says, “‘You haven’t seen what your late king managed in the way of practical persuasion, with Somerset following ….. abbeys brought to the ground, villages annihilated by the hundred, a nobility decimated, a country brought to poverty which thirty years ago was graced above any other in Europe with the arts of living.” To the suggestions that French domination is inevitable if Mary marries the Dauphin and that the Auld Alliance had done Scotland little good, “‘Look at Flodden,’” Lymond replies, “‘France has too many commitments to spare enough troops to rule Scotland. Good lord, if England can’t do it, then France isn’t likely to.’”

On the subject of patriotism Lymond is scathing. It’s “‘a fine hothouse for maggots. It breeds intolerance; it forces a spindle-legged, spurious riot of colour ….. A man of only moderate powers enjoys the special sanction of purpose, the sense of ceremony, the echo of mysterious, lost and royal things; a trace of the broad, plain childish virtues of myth and legend and ballad…. He wants advancement – what simpler way is there? Patriotism. It’s an opulent word, a mighty key to a royal Cloud-Cuckoo-Land …… a vehicle for shedding boredom and exercising surplus power or surplus talents or surplus money; an immature ignorance which becomes the coin of barter in the markets of power.’” I am with the Lord Advocate, Henry Lauder, who says to Lymond, “‘Preserve us from the honest clod and the ambitious fanatic.’” There are too many of those, in any time.

Dunnett definitely aspires to fine writing. Lymond’s allusions are the least of it. “‘I wish to God,’ said Gideon with mild exasperation, ‘that you’d talk – just once – in prose like other people.’” Many chapter headings refer to obscure moves in chess and the text is littered not only with quotations and epithets but a good dose of uncommonly used or obsolete words (how about aposteme, or concamerate, or escharotic?) but actually not very many Scots ones. When she stops to take breath Dunnett is particularly adept in description of scenery or atmosphere but for me there was not quite enough of that and a bit too much of the swashbuckling derring-do about the project. But her characters are well drawn, the intrigue and politics intricately laid out. It’s a good read if a little over-wordy (but in that it’s not in the class of Sir Walter Scott, novelist.)

Throughout, though, I couldn’t shake off the feeling (and the dénouement only emphasised the thought) that however much Lymond appears to be Dunnett’s vehicle the tale is really that of Will Scott of Kincurd.

Pedant’s corner:- “dead right” (dead is here used in dialogue as an emphasiser to mean completely or absolutely. In the 1400s?) knit (knitted,) vocal chords (it’s cords; vocal cords.) “The progress of Sybilla though a market” (through a market,) “as Flaw Valleys’ near the border” (Flaw Valleys is a farm so, “as Flaw Valleys is near the border”,) “genetically speaking” (in dialogue in the fifteenth century? Imre Festetics was the first to use the term genetic, 300 years later,) Portugese (Portuguese,) peripetia (peripeteia?) Bowes’ (Bowes’s; apart from the one below other names ending in s are rendered …s’s elsewhere,) accolyte (the correct “acolyte” appeared later,) vivesection (vivisection,) Berick (Berwick,) Stokes’ (Stokes’s,) olefactory (olfactory,) insifflating (insufflating?) subsaltive (subsultive?) catachumen (catechumen.)