#tumblr quality gods i beg of thee

[ninjas-and-coffee]

[erinaceina]

Mustela

Approximately 750 words of pure, unmitigated, post-Checkmate Francis/Philippa fluff. Pretty much spoiler-free. For @notasapleasure and her weasels.

Apologies if the line-spacing is off. Tumblr was being difficult.

“The coast's a jungle of Moors, Turks, Jews, renegades from all over Europe, sitting in palaces built from the sale of Christian slaves. There are twenty thousand men, women and children in the bagnios of Algiers alone. I am not going to make it twenty thousand and one because your mother didn't allow you to keep rabbits, or whatever is at the root of your unshakable fixation."

"I had weasels instead," said Philippa shortly.

"Good God," said Lymond, looking at her. "That explains a lot.” – Pawn in Frankincense, Dorothy Dunnett

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

'Lady blissful of mickle might,' Francis Crawford of Lymond and Sevigny paused dramatically, the pale Scottish sunlight burnishing his golden hair and striking lapis sparks from mockingly heavy-lidded blue eyes. One long-fingered hand paused delicately, just barely touching the open lid of the great kist at the foot of the bed. 'I am content thy servant to remain. But what, dear Philippa, should I make of this?'

If had been his newest court suit, sapphire damask richly slashed and paned with silk the colour of a summer sky, the peascod belly and breeches densely ornamented with black brocade. Now, it was a sadly scuffed and crumpled ghost of its former self, the damask dinted and shabby, the fine linen shirt torn and the starched ruff entirely beyond repair. From its depths, something looked back with round eyes that shone like jet, black as the roe of the Caspian sturgeon and lit with unholy amusement. Behind the eyes was a long, slender body like a hirsuite Jörmungandr, and a flash of movement.

‘A weasel, yunitsa?’ The enquiry was slightly plaintive.

‘Ferrets,’ Philippa replied, unruffled, and yawned hugely. ‘I had wondered where they were.’

‘She seems to have established herself as a seamstress to rival any in Paris or London, but I cannot commend the quality of her stitchery.’ Francis paused, and such a look of utter bemusement spread across his face, widening the blue eyes into lucent turquoise discs of shocking clarity, that Philippa had to stifle a chuckle. ‘Ferrets, my dear? A plurality of ferrets? What carnivorous multitudes of mustelids should I expect to find? Stoats in the buttery and martens in the closets? What roosts of bestes full of eyes before and behynde should I expect to find as reward for a longer absence?’

‘Ferrets don’t roost. They tend to fall off.’ Unabashed, Philippa wound herself in the sheet and came to stand beside him. Her long hair fell loose in a dark cloud about her shoulders, and he leant into her, feeling the warmth of her body through the thin linen and curling one strand of that silken hair around his finger, helpless to resist the lure of touch. A week, no longer, he had been absent in Edinburgh, and he had ridden hard over the green hills this morning, his heels clapped tight to his horse’s sides and his heart beating insistently under the rough cloth of his jerkin until he had seen Philippa standing in the door-yard with bright colour in her cheeks and her dark hair coming loose from its braid. Touch had consumed them then, a hunger and a completion that neither had resisted, and in the aftermath he had slept deeply, as he had not slept in all that long week, loosely ringed in the comfort of her arms.

‘Ferrets,’ Philippa continued, interrupting his straying thoughts. ‘A plurality, although not, perhaps, a multitude. She’s had her kits at last.’

‘The wesell nouryssheth her kyttons in howses and bereth them from place to place, so saith Berthelet,’ Francis murmured, and, one hand still clasped with Philippa’s, crouched down beside the chest, the linen slops slithering precariously on his lean hips and sunlight playing silver on the old scars that damasked his back. Indeed, around the long, sinuous body of the ferret in the chest, smaller ones clustered like grapes upon a vine. Grey-furred and helplessly blind, they piped and squeaked plangently in their nest of ruined brocade, and Philippa looked at them with a maternal satisfaction that rivalled their dam.

Francis gave way to laughter, a great torrent of it that welled up within him and that he muffled in the half-clad skin of Philippa’s shoulder. ‘Furunculi… Like Ireland, we have weasels in abundance, little in body, but bolde in herte. I surrender, Durr-I Bakht. You may have of every thynge a payre, if you wish it, but I beg of you to spare my hose.’ And he paused, visible startlement spreading across his unguarded face. Teeth like silver needles had clasped the flesh of his thumb and tugged with a determined impatience. The dam, standing on her hind legs to reach the lip of the chest, had secured his free hand and was bent on introducing this novel object to her young. Francis resisted for only a moment, and then, submitting to the stronger will, allowed her to guide him down until his long, slender fingers caressed fur like half-blown thistledown laid over scraps of wriggling, mustelid persistence. Philippa and their dam watched the encounter with identical expressions of smug pride.

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

Notes:

'Lady blissful of mickle might’ – the first line and modern title of a lyric in MS. Oxford, Merton College, lat. 248

'I am content thy servant to remain’ – Thomas Wyatt, 'My heart I give thee, not to do it pain’ (actually ‘I was content thy servant to remain’).

‘Bestes full of eyes before and behynde’ – Revelation 4.6 in the Tyndale Bible

‘The wesell nouryssheth her kyttons in howses and bereth them from place to place’ – Bartholomaeus Anglicus (sometimes known as Berthelet) – De proprietatibus rerum XVIII.lxxiv.829

‘Furunculi’ – Promptorium Parvulorum 171 – ‘little thieves’, here used as a Latin synonym for ‘ferret’.

‘Irlonde…habundethe in salmones…in egles, cranes…and gentille gossehawke; hauenge wulphes and moste nyous myse, and weselles [L mustelas] lytelle in body, but bolde in herte’ – Higden’s Polychronicon 1.335

‘Of every thynge a payre’ – Genesis 6.19 in the Tyndale Bible

There is a video of a ferret taking her human’s hand to introduce him to her kits. It is adorable and you should watch it.