The Ringed Castle (64 page)

He got up. ‘What shall we do with him? We have him at our mercy. Think of all the browbeaten Streltsi at Vorobiovo who would like to take their revenge at this moment. We could hire out his carcass for
money
!’

‘There is a Russian proverb,’ Nepeja said.
‘Beat your shuba, and it will be warmer; beat your wife and she shall be sweeter.’

There was a brief silence, while his hearers considered the analogy. ‘Beat your brother and he shall be deader?’ at length Danny said.

‘He will be, if you leave him there,’ Ludovic d’Harcourt said, suddenly arriving. ‘His skull may be fractured, you idiots. Look out. Let me.’ And taking charge, in a Christian way, he supervised the lifting of the Voevoda Bolshoia and his transfer, sensibly, to the bed. Then he got everyone out of the room, keeping Danny.

Danny stood, his hands dangling unhelpfully. ‘Well?’ he said. ‘Adam is your man, you know, for sensitive nursing.’

D’Harcourt, his hands pressing through Lymond’s hair, said, ‘But just think how he is going to enjoy finding you watching him when he wakes up. It isn’t fractured. My God, he must be a good man with his fists.’

‘Lymond?’ said Danny sweetly.

‘Lord Culter. I assume,’ Ludovic said. ‘At least, he was the last person up the stairs before Yeroffia. What did they quarrel about?’

‘Can you remember,’ Daniel Hislop said, ‘how many times you have wanted to do that in the last two or three years, and the occasion each time?’

‘Once a day,’ d’Harcourt said. ‘Sometimes twice. And for as many different reasons.’

‘As you say,’ Danny agreed. He dipped a cloth in cold water and squeezed it. ‘He can make you want to knock him down, if he feels like it, by simply saying “good morning”. He possibly said simply “good morning” to Lord Culter. The difference was that, being his brother, Culter hit him. Will he travel tomorrow?’

They both gazed, united in fascination, at the insensible and manhandled person of the sacrosanct Voevoda Bolshoia. ‘I doubt it,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt.

But he did. He stirred some time after that conversation, and if his awakening took rather less time than was obvious, the effect was to cheat Danny Hislop’s expectant ears of whatever uncouth revelations he was hoping for. Without warning, his eyes closed, Lymond said, ‘Hislop?’

‘Yes sir?’ said Danny, jumping. Then he said sympathetically, ‘How are you, sir?’

‘Well enough to guess which vulture would be present,’ said Lymond pleasantly. ‘I wish to know the exact time.’

‘Three by the clock, sir,’ said Danny. ‘I’ll change the cloth. You must have a——’

‘Leave it,’ said Lymond. He opened his eyes. ‘If you are here, where are Blacklock and d’Harcourt?’

‘Downstairs. I don’t know,’ said Danny. ‘Sir.’

‘You have forgotten, in your excited interest in my colourful family affairs, that you were to meet the Queen Dowager’s harbingers at three?’

There was a slight pause. Then Hislop said, with an edge, ‘D’Harcourt will have——’ and was interrupted with impolite flatness.

‘D’Harcourt has news to spread, and will be spreading it, while Blacklock no doubt is wringing his hands at an apothecary’s to find a leech who knows the bottom layer from the buffy coat. What the merchants are saying and doing, I can imagine. Is it really necessary to remind you all that the great adult world must continue, no matter what childish by-play may occur? Get hold of d’Harcourt and get to that meeting. And send Phoma, while you’re at it, to me.’

Danny got up. ‘Yes, sir.’

The open blue eyes travelled up in the general direction of Daniel Hislop’s face. ‘And Hislop?’ said Lymond softly. ‘Don’t sound so aggrieved. There are no rewards, celestial or mundane, for the best display of pure, bloody inquisitiveness.’

Which drove Ludovic d’Harcourt to a deduction, five minutes later, as Daniel Hislop marched into his room. ‘Let me make a guess. He is awake.’

‘He’s awake. The honeymoon,’ said Danny, ‘is over. Come on. We’ve a meeting to go to.’

*

So on the following day, Sunday, February 14th, the cavalcade of Osep Nepeja, his friends, colleagues, English supporters and servants set out from Edinburgh, lavishly escorted, on its fourteen-day journey to London. And straight-backed, wan of face and suavely vitriolic in temper, the Tsar’s friend Mr Crawford rode with them. Since the marks on his face, tenderly discoloured, were so obvious, he made no effort to disguise them, and to the solicitous inquiries of the lairds of Corstophine, Craigmillar and Restalrig, of Innerleithen, Elphinstone and Niddrie Marshal, of Herdmanstoun, Wauchton, Bass, Langton, Swinton, Blackadder, Wedderburn, Swinton and Blanerne merely made delicate reference to the brawny fists of Master Nepeja’s ladies of solace. The three escorting courtiers, Home, Coldingham and Morton, the son of his old adversary Sir George Douglas, presumably were better informed, but if so, they maintained a discreet silence. Whatever Lymond might be suffering, there was nothing wrong with his tongue, or his sword-arm. And in four days, they were off Scottish soil, and in Berwick.

By then the bruises were fading, although the eye of a connoisseur such as Thomas, first Baron Wharton, could distinguish them. Stepping out from under the flag of St George to welcome, as Governor of Berwick and General Warden of all the Marches, the first arrival in England of his Muscovite Majesty’s embassy, Lord Wharton’s gaze fell and remained on the embassy’s sole damaged member. But Lymond, when his turn came to be greeted, was the first, briefly, to refer to it. ‘May we exchange our beaten refugees for your singed ones?’

And Lord Wharton, who knew all about Lymond from both English and Scottish sources and was not a master of riposte in any case, grunted and ushered them in through the gates and up to the castle of Berwick on the banks of the broad and beautiful Tweed.

They were given a banquet that afternoon, attended by the Mayor and officials of Berwick and the lords of all the surrounding countryside whose roads the new snow was not blocking. Best, on English ground and with English food on the table before him, talked himself hoarse answering questions and interpreting Nepeja. Lymond, who might have helped, was placed some distance off, with a purpose he soon came to realize. On one side of him sat the well-dressed,
confident person of Sir Thomas Wharton, the Warden’s middle-aged son. Privy Councillor, master of the henchmen, parliamentarian and former steward of Mary Tudor’s own household, Tom Wharton had gone far since the days when hunting down Crawford of Lymond had become a national pastime.

And on Lymond’s other side was a dark and fragile young man he had never met before, but who was now introduced, with inexplicable enthusiasm, as Austin Grey, fourth Marquis of Allendale.

A moment later, and the object of the manoeuvre was obvious. ‘He knows your wife,’ Tom Wharton said. ‘We both do.’

There was no guilt-filled hiatus whatever. ‘The one I married in Stamboul?’ Lymond said kindly. ‘How is she?’

Tom Wharton bellowed and said, ‘Have you got others?’ but Austin Grey did not smile. He said, ‘She is well, and extremely happy in the Queen’s service. Her grace depends on her a great deal.’

The stark blue eyes turned on the long-lashed dark ones, which did not flinch. ‘I am not proposing to take her back to Russia,’ Lymond said. ‘Except perhaps to bottle the soft fruit in season. She cannot possibly excel the other members of my houshold in anything else, I am afraid.’

Austin Grey was rather pale. He said, ‘She is still your wife.’

Tom Wharton was grinning. ‘Don’t be simple, my child. He has a magnificent mistress. I want all the details.’

‘Perhaps after the food?’ Lymond said. ‘I hear you are married yourself, and breeding more Whartons?’

‘A bantling. Philip,’ Tom Wharton said. ‘They’re all called Philip. My wife’s in London; her brother’s just died. I’m coming south—so is Grey—for the burial. You’ll meet Anne, and all the Sidneys. They’re kinsfolk. Great wailings over that fellow Chancellor.’

Lymond said, ‘I thought Henry Sidney was in Ireland.’

‘They come back and forth. My God, the Brussels couriers all look like bricked-up greyhounds. You know there’s war afoot?’

‘So I am told,’ Lymond said. ‘Is the Duke of Alva in Rome?’

‘Not quite yet. They had a try at a truce. Two chairs, a table and a little bell in a tent on an island. It finished last month. That old bastard the Pope!’

‘Wharton!’ said Austin Grey sharply.

‘Yes, well: he’s not religious. You’re not religious?’ said Tom Wharton to Lymond. ‘The last Pope didn’t live through the installation ceremonies, and this one is waging wars in his coffin and loving it. Got the Jews harnessed to artillery pieces and dragging them to the bastions of Rome. Promises he’ll make one of the French children King of Naples and the other Duke of Milan if the French King sends an army to help him. Says he’ll call on the Turks if he has to. It’ll be war.’

‘And the Queen of England approves of her husband making war on the Pope?’

‘If you’ll believe that, you’ll believe anything,’ Wharton said. ‘But who’s going to stop him? He’s coming to England in Lent. And then the fun will begin. He’ll want English help.’

‘Will he get it?’ said Lymond.

But Tom Wharton was not quite drunk enough to go on. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘Time will tell. The Council doesn’t babble its business in England, you know. You have to be under the table to know what goes on in England. Austin could tell you, but he’s a nice, discreet boy. Your little wife could tell you, and a lot more than I could, I fancy. The secrets of that bedchamber would be well worth knowing, if you were a man of affairs. I say that woman will never breed. Not in her forties, not in her thirties, not any time. Nor will her sister. Men mistaken for women. Like the widow of Binche. Not what a proper man fancies. Now——’

‘I have a message for you,’ said Austin Grey directly to Lymond.

With some regret, having brought his other companion to simmering point, Lymond turned back to the youth. Austin Grey of Allendale, a diffident man of quiet and obstinate purpose, lifted his chin a trifle and looked into the cold face of authority, faintly marked, faintly impatient, which had surprised and shaken him so profoundly. He said, ‘It is from Philippa’s mother.’

‘Mistress Somerville,’ Lymond said. Someone, in the centre of the room, was rendering an English folk song, with indifferent success. Against the noise, he added, ‘From my home in Midculter?’

‘No. Here in Berwick,’ Allendale said. ‘She heard you were coming. She has taken rooms at an Ordinary.’

‘With the child,’ Lymond said. His voice was amused; his face chiselled with fine contradictory lines; of irony, entertainment, even, possibly, of a scathing anger which might have been stronger than any of the rest. ‘Whom she wishes to transfer to my keeping. Along with my loving wife Philippa?’

‘She said,’ Allendale said levelly, ‘that you were certain to suppose she had demands to make on you. I was therefore to give you this letter. ‘

Without speaking, Lymond received it. He read it then and there, in such a way that even Tom Wharton peering beside him could see nothing. It began without preamble; without his first name which she, of the vanishing handful of those closest to him, had earned the right to employ.

From what Richard has said, and more from what he has not said, I know what you wish us to understand about your intentions. I will not speak here, or at any time, about my personal wishes or anyone else’s. I am mentioning the name of Kuzúm only to assure you that it will not be referred to again
.

All I wish to put to you is that here, on neutral ground, it is necessary for us both, as her elders and, I hope, her well-wishers, to make what arrangements are needful for the future of Philippa
.

I have heard the circumstances of the marriage, and I understand your desire to give her a standing after what she had done on behalf of you and the child. Since a legal step was taken, and matters of law and finance are now involved, simple consultation of some kind seems necessary. Should you agree to this, Austin will bring you to where I am staying this evening. If he brings me your refusal, I shall try to understand, and at least you may be sure there is no possible ill will between us.…

There were no conventional greetings. Only her own Christian name,
KATE
.

Across the table, watching the Voevoda read his letter, Edmund Roberts was reminded of something. ‘My God, I nearly forgot. Crawford!’

Lymond looked up.

‘I’ve got a letter for you as well. Remember Chancellor’s chest?’

‘Yes,’ Lymond said. To Grey’s watching face he said shortly. ‘I shall go. Perhaps you would take me.’

Roberts raised his voice a little. ‘Buckland took it to London. Well, they found a letter in it. A sealed letter, addressed to you. It must have come straight to Kholmogory. Buckland brought it back, and then left it with half his clothes here in Berwick. He told me to find it and give it to you. Have you time after the dinner?’

‘I am going out,’ Lymond said. ‘I shall call for it on my way. Do you leave in the morning?’

Roberts and Lewis, having seen the Ambassador safely in England, were to return to Scotland forthwith, to their sorrow, to throw themselves yet once again into the contentious legal fray. The talk, begun in this vein, became general. And later, when the meal had long finished but the convivial uproar was reaching its height, Edmund Roberts joined Lymond and Allendale when they made their excuses to Wharton, and set off down the steps of the castle to obey that formal summons from Kate.

Outside, there had been a fresh fall of snow and the house lamps laid their squares of light, sparkling, on the still virgin coat of the roadway, flat as white worsted. Lips of snow hung from the rooftops: with soft, unseen collisions, pills and tablets and showers of snow fell from thatch and bracket and shutter and settled like footpads behind them.

The air, cold and sweet, had no trace in it of the black air of Lampozhnya, which suffocated a man with its ice, and left his eyelashes hoar, and his breath like silver sarsanet on his neck-furs. Three men maudlin drunk back at the castle had known it like
that, and one man treading here in the white, silent street, immune to the thin, meaningless chatter of the two others walking beside him.