The Ringed Castle (28 page)

‘Unless he proposes to detain us permanently in Russia, I do not see how he can avoid it,’ Chancellor said.

‘You are perfectly correct,’ Crawford said. ‘Tout par raison, raison partout, partout raison. There is no more point in secrecy. Especially if the fact is known in England already.’

It was a question. Restored to equanimity, Chancellor said, ‘It is by no means widely known. I have, however, some messages to convey to you.’

The blue eyes opened wide. ‘Then pray convey them,’ said Lymond. ‘I am sure our Russian friends will bear with us.… I take it you refer to my rib, my holy and innocent wife?’

Again the levity he, Diccon, found so misplaced. Pressing his bearded lips together, Chancellor sought to pick out what could be said safely in public. ‘You have had no letters from Mistress Philippa?’

‘One, of no moment whatever. I imagine,’ said Lymond, ‘that she has found congenial company in Flaw Valleys, as I have in Moscow.’

‘She is certainly surrounded by suitors,’ said Chancellor. ‘But at Hampton Court, not at Flaw Valleys. She is in the Queen’s suite. Unlike you, therefore, she can expect little in the way of consolation until she is freed of her marriage. It is this I was to broach with you. We can speak of it later.’

‘Good God,’ said Lymond. ‘Has she had a better offer? What does she want, a letter? I shall give you one to take back with you, releasing her from all formal connection with the kingly blood of the
Billing. What is the reason for agitation, or would it be tactless to ask?’

Robert Best, six foot three and broad with it, laid down his goose leg and turned on the bench. ‘It isn’t a matter of tact,’ he said bluntly. ‘It’s a matter of doing the right thing by the lady. Diccon, I didn’t tell you. But she was ready to stow away on the
Edward
, to get to Russia and settle affairs with her husband.’

Diccon swung round and stared at his countryman, while Lymond leaned back, his hands loose before him and broke into genuine, uninhibited laughter. Chancellor said, ‘Is that true?’

Rob Best nodded.

‘You soft-headed idiot: and I suppose you planned to help her?’

‘She thought better of it. At least she didn’t turn up,’ Rob Best said. ‘She was worried in case Mr Crawford wasn’t getting her letters.’

‘Maybe she’ll get on the
Edward
next time,’ Lymond said. He was still sobbing faintly. ‘Maybe she’ll arrive in the spring. Or maybe she’ll send her intended, thundering out his thrasonicall threats.’ He said something in Russian to Osep Nepeja, and Nepeja laughed. It was too idiomatic for Diccon, who caught only the one word, ‘Güzel’.

Chancellor said, ‘I find the situation less comic than you do. Until now, I had no idea that Mistress Philippa knew that you were in Russia. I was told to open the matter of divorce by someone quite other, who did.’

‘Told?’ Lymond repeated. His face and his hands, very still on the table, told Diccon nothing at all, except that he had his attention.

‘By the Countess of Lennox.’

‘Ah,’ said Lymond, on a long, noiseless sigh and stretched his back slowly, like an athlete, Diccon thought, kept too long indoors. ‘And why should the Countess of Lennox be concerned with Philippa’s marriage?’

‘Because,’ said Diccon Chancellor, ‘Flaw Valleys is a manor of strategic importance placed on the English side of the Scots border. And because Philippa’s mother is widowed, and could not hold it against you or your friends.’

The limpid gaze was full of encouragement. ‘How exciting,’ said Lymond. ‘I had no idea that we had declared war on each other.’ A thought illuminated the untrustworthy contours of his shadowless face. ‘Or do you think the Countess of Lennox will come on the
Edward
?’

‘We are not at war with Scotland,’ said Chancellor curtly.

‘And I am no threat to Flaw Valleys so long as I remain safely in Russia, which I have every intention of doing. I cannot see, Mr Chancellor,’ said Lymond agreeably, ‘that my affairs constitute a
serious problem, either to my bride’s courting, or to the security of England, or to you. Meanwhile, we are imposing unimaginable tedium upon our kind hosts.’

And bowing, he turned to his neighbour, breaking into a murmur of Russian; nor did he speak English at any point for the rest of the meal.

On a sudden impulse, Diccon Chancellor crossed to the Troitsa Cathedral on his own late that evening, and lit a candle before the sparkling Trinity, and made a brief and private prayer to do with his ship and his sons. On the way back across the dark paths under the trees, he found his way barred by six armed men, one of whom addressed him in Russian, demanding that he should come with them quietly.

Unarmed and unescorted, attack was the last thing he had expected within the confines of the monastery. Diccon Chancellor ducked and ran, opening his mouth to shout as he did so, and was brought up like a galloping calf by the grip of men’s arms round his shoulders, and the flat of a man’s sweaty palm on his mouth.

He bit the flesh at his lips and almost tore himself free at that; then the men closed round him tighter than ever, and as he drew breath to call out once more, one drew a club and hit him, briefly and expertly, at the nape of the neck. He slid to the ground, into blackness.

He woke in bed, in a small, whitewashed room hung with dark, jewelled ikons, and two silver lamps whose glow touched the bright hair and calm face of the man kneeling beside him, a wrought metal dipper smelling of aqua-vite in his hands.

‘My apologies,’ Lymond said. There was no one else in the room.

Diccon Chancellor dug in one elbow, and sat up, with elaborate care. Speech eluded him.

Lymond held out the
koush
. ‘But you shouldn’t have tried to eall out.’

Chancellor sipped, and the power of speech returned, quickly. ‘In the dark, with six armed men at my back? What in hell’s name are you playing at?’

‘They were in my livery,’ said Lymond mildly. ‘Rumour said the Pilot General was observant. Since it failed, I can only say again, My apologies. I wanted to speak to you.’

Astonished fury invaded Chancellor’s chest and made speech again a matter of will-power. He said, ‘So I had to be brought here unconscious?’

‘A crudity,’ said Lymond, ‘that you would expect from the spawn of a naive and barbarous régime. I am sorry I was unable to issue a written invitation. You are watched, and so am I. By the monks, the grooms, the merchants. Grigorjeff has fluent English, learned from a German trader, as Best learned his Russian from the Tartars of the
Queen’s stables. Makaroff has also more than you suspect although Nepeja, bless his patriotic heart, has no gift for languages. Only my soldiers are sentimentally loyal.’

‘So even your masters don’t trust you?’ said Chancellor. He finished the aqua-vite, and bent to dip the ladle again in the wine pot while Lymond came to rest on the floor, his hands relaxed round his knees. The ends of his girdle, Chancellor saw, were worked with Ceylon pearls and bright, twisted silks, and his tunic was clasped with pale, bulbous stones, high in the collet.

‘Why should they?’ said Lymond. ‘They don’t trust anyone. When you get to Moscow you’ll find that, as before, you will be confined strictly to your house, and allowed out by appointment, and firmly escorted. You will not be invited to Muscovite homes, and you will not be allowed to entertain on your own account. One reason is that, as a representative of royalty, your person is sacred and must be guarded from all untoward incidents. Another is that, as representative of a western and civilized power, you should be allowed to see and describe only those things which reflect Russia’s culture and power. And the last reason is that you yourself shall not infect the Russian, peasant or noble, with the enchantments of an evil religion, or the practices of other, corrupt peoples as regards food and justice and government, domestic freedom and taxes, clothes and climate and culture. Villages are emptying already round Moscow. The land cannot afford to lose all its people.’

‘It is a corrupt rule then?’ said Chancellor. He had forgotten the ache in his head.

For a while, Lymond was silent. Then he said, ‘How can one answer that? Parliament consists of the Tsar, twenty boyars and twenty clergy also. The people are told of the Tsar’s decisions after he has made them. He’s never spoken to a peasant in his life, except to ride him down in the street as a boy.
The Empire is Majesty, and above that Majesty stands the Sovereign in his Empire, and the Sovereign is above the Empire
.

‘A state of mind not exclusively the Grand Duke’s. But, you know, with abuses wherever he looks, and no experience behind him, he has tried to do something. He’s revised the law. He’s put some restraints on the appointment of unpaid, single-term governors, who milk a province and run at the end of the year. He’s thought of the Zemsky Sobor, the wider assemblies of gentry and boyars and church representatives. They still don’t include peasants or merchants—and merchants, you already know, have no status at all outside Novgorod—but it’s something. He’s laid down clear rules for the landowners about raising an army.…’

‘Yes?’ said Diccon Chancellor, as the other man paused.

On Lymond’s face, bare of all but the courtesy emotions, a touch
of resignation appeared. ‘You will discover it when you reach Moscow, so you may as well become used to it now. The Russian Army is my affair. I am supreme commander: Voevoda Bolshoia.’

Slowly, Richard Chancellor sat up, his eyes on the other man’s face. ‘A foreigner? But what of the boyars? The princes?’

Francis Crawford smiled and rose, in the single, enviable movement of the remorselessly trained gymnast. ‘One day, when I have given them Ochakov and they are loading their cargoes at Riga, someone will no doubt pass a sword through my decaying sinews. At present, they dare not.’

‘Yet they watch you? You cannot speak to me openly?’

‘The Tsar watches me,’ Lymond said.

‘It is the Tsar himself, then, who distrusts you? What future, what security can there be for you there?’ Diccon said.

There was a short silence. The man to whom, out of all likelihood, that lively, normal young creature had allowed herself to be tied stood in thought by his bedside, the light showing no tremor on his still, hard-moulded face. Then Lymond said, ‘You will see when you come to Moscow. It makes no difference to what I said there at table. I am staying in Russia. I want to know one thing only. Why does Margaret Lennox wish to force through a divorce?’

Margaret Lennox
, noted the watching brain behind Chancellor’s clear, blue-black eyes. He said, ‘I mentioned a letter, purely because the Russians were present. Lady Lennox does not wish you to write releasing Mistress Philippa from her promise. She says that Holy Church will not grant a divorce on written evidence only. She says you must come to England.’

The lamp-lit face was merely attentively polite. ‘Or …?’

The threat to himself, Diccon Chancellor had long since decided, was the affair of Diccon Chancellor and no one else. He said, ‘Or Flaw Valleys would have to be guarded in the only way possible.’ He drew breath, but Lymond spoke first.

‘Kate?’ he said. ‘If I don’t return and Philippa can’t remarry, then Kate must marry to make Flaw Valleys safe? Is that it?’

Diccon Chancellor stared at the other, fair face which was smiling.

He said, ‘If Kate is Mistress Somerville’s mother, then that is the threat. She shall be made to wed a loyal English citizen, for the sake of herself and her family.’ And at something, a question, in Crawford’s face, he elaborated. ‘There is a boy, I believe: a lovechild who stays with her also?’

Lymond laughed. He laughed slowly and softly, turning away from the bed, and the sound of it, in the quiet night, made the hairs prick between Chancellor’s flesh and his clothes. Then turning suddenly he lifted the dipper, presented it smiling to Chancellor, and, when he had done, tipped it twice down his own throat.

‘A lady of classical impulses,’ said Lymond. ‘The weaklings may hold to the Rule of Zosima: without women, how should we sharpen our wits?’ He paused a moment, and said pleasantly, ‘The child is not Kate’s or Philippa’s, but mine. A threat of such nicety deserves to be appreciated.’

‘Why does the Countess of Lennox want you back?’ Chancellor said.

‘To play with,’ said Lymond.

‘Will you go?’ Chancellor said.

Lymond smiled. Like a painting in gesso the lamplight caught the moment of pleasure: lit the ridged brows and gold feathered hair, the tips of the thick, open lashes; the sapphires glowing like oil on his doublet.

‘Ask me in Moscow,’ he said.

Four days later, through gentle country of yellowing birches and sunlit scarlet berries of rowan, they reached the joined wood walls and log bridges of Moscow, and passed between the izbas and churches to reach the inner city, ringed by its wall of rose brick, where Lymond conducted them to a modest, shingle-roofed house and introduced them to the two Pristafs, with their company of soldiers, who would be responsible for their lodging and food. Then he left them.

The following day, they received a summons from the Chief Secretary to bring to him all their official missives for translation, and did so, finding Master Ivan Mikhailov Viscovatu prepared to be most cordial, and being conducted on their return to a larger house in a different district where they waited in total seclusion for almost a week, playing cards and trying to engage the Pristafs in frivolous conversation. Seven days after their arrival, they were advised by Master Viscovatu that the Tsar felt a desire to accommodate them in still greater comfort, and, with a great deal of bowing and baring of teeth, were escorted to a still larger house, hung with red serge, which had beds in it. Here they received daily eight hens and a portion of mead, together with an allowance of five and sixpence in cash, and a man to clean house and serve. Two days after that, the letters were returned, and they were warned that they would be called to the Tsar’s presence in the morning. Christopher was sick.

‘It’s that drunken land-hog’s unspeakable cooking,’ said Best.