A mistake (gasp) and some further detail
This post came about when a correspondent told me that a friend of theirs was re-reading the LC and thought they had found a mistake. A mistake in Dunnett – sacriledge!
What they’d said was that “…at end of Disorderly Kights Philippa is 13 and at end of Pawn she is ‘nearly 17’ … Pawn does NOT span 4 years.”
Well, that’s fairly convincing. I was naturally intrigued and decided to check both the text to be sure exactly what was written, and my old email archives to see if it had come up before.
The problem can be summarised by the quote from Disorderly Knights – “the yellow flame bright on her thirteen-year-old face” as Lymond returns to Scotland with Jerott and encounters Philippa with Trotty Luckup’s body. But at the beginning of Pawn in Frankincense she says “I’m fifteen”, which is followed by “She would have lied about that, except that Fogge, the family maid, was on the pony beside her.”
So I started researching…
Philippa is born in 1537, and while we don’t know the exact date we do know that her star sign is Cancer as Lymond refers to her as a Crab in Checkmate after having referred to himself as a Scorpio. Cancer runs from June 21 – July 22.
‘Scorpio,’ Lymond said, ‘does not caper. He stings. We are damned, as the man says, of nature: so conceaved and borne as a serpent is a serpent, and a tode a tode, and a snake a snake by nature. ..’ He looked at her again, a little wryly. ‘And you, I suppose, are the Crab. It doesn’t matter. If you want to bite, bite.’
She’s 10 in 1547 when Lymond first goes to Flaw Valleys to find Gideon, and then questions her. “a serious ten-year-old with long straight hair”.
Richard takes the ill Joleta to Flaw Valleys in May 1551, so Philippa will still be 13 then, but Tom Erskine and Trotty die in Oct 1551 by which time she’ll be 14. So that description of her being 13 when Lymond and Jerott come across her is wrong.
Continung the timeline check to make sure of continuity:
She meets Gabriel in London in Oct/Nov 1551.
St Mary’s trains over the winter and the Hot Trodd occurs in May 1552. Falkland Palace is in August 1552 by which time Philippa will be 15. The St Giles fight happens in Oct 1552.
Pawn in Frankincense starts in the turn of the year so Philippa is definitely telling the truth when she says she’s 15 in Baden.
She turns 16 in the Lazaretto in Zakynthos, and while the date isn’t stated explicitly it appears to be in July – which confirms her being a Cancer and ties in with the other dates. The section that follows (after she’s been travelling with Mikal for a while) is in Zuara and is stated as being in August.
So it’s the Disorderly Knights quote that’s wrong, and it looks as if either Dorothy made a mistake – which I find hard to believe given she kept card indexes with all the important details on each character, and consulted them before every writing session – or perhaps an editor made a change and it wasn’t noticed, since she disliked revising anything. I wonder if perhaps an editor confused the timings of Trotty at Flaw Valleys treating Joleta with Trotty treating Tom some months later at Boghall? Whatever the truth, anyone who knows the book production process knows that there’s lots of places where mistakes can creep in without the author necessarily being in a position to spot them.
Of course the remarkable thing is not that a mistake crept in – it’s that there are so very few of them in such a long and incredibly complex series. So often in the 1990s I remember people on the old email discussion groups saying they thought they’d found a mistake, but almost invariably it turned out that Dorothy’s research and attention to detail were vindicated. Two of the very few are mentioned in an old blog post here from 2006 – Dunnett Directional Discrepancies.
Almost as surprising is that I can find no mention of this mistake in age in those email discussion groups, whose eagle-eyed members had poured over every detail for many years. It may have come up before I joined in the mid-late 90’s but my records don’t seem to have any mention from then on.
And what of the extra detail?
Well, when I was looking up various astrological/horoscope sites about Cancer I noticed sections about prominent attributes which are supposed to be associated with people under that sign. We’ve often discussed Lymond’s Scorpio persona on the various lists but I don’t recall much if any disccussion of Philippa’s, so curious, I read them.
In those entries we find that she should be:
“…known for emotional depth, nurturing nature, and strong intuition. Individuals born under this sign are often seen as empathetic, compassionate, and deeply connected to their feelings. They are also known for their loyalty, protectiveness, and tendency to be moody.”
and
“Nurturing and loyal, Cancers are also protective of their loved ones. While reserved, they stand on a foundation of strength – and aren’t afraid to act when they feel it’s necessary.”
With the possible exception of “reserved” you could hardly get a better description of our caring heroine – so it seems that Dorothy researched that background too, in order to make sure that in every sense they would be a good match – particularly as I further noticed that the soulmate of a Cancer is reckoned to be, you guessed it, a Scorpio!
A small insight perhaps, but it shows the depth of her research, and it more than makes up for a minor error which could have been nothing more than a typo.