The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [10]
By comparison, this was harbour and comfort. They had perhaps hoped for more, but they had been promised nothing. And being professional men they made, caustically, the best of it with the help of Danny Hislop’s sharp tongue. They threw down their saddles and baggage; they moved about, examining the appointments and stood at the windows, discussing what they could see. There was no sign of other quarters attached to the lodging, and no sign at all of the man they had been summoned to meet. But presently a door opened somewhere and the smell of hot meat filtered up from the steep kitchen staircase. And a moment later a tousled head rose from it and they were offered unexpectedly a tray full of rough bowls of broth.
They had breakfasted already at the monastery, but none the less it was decidedly welcome. They kicked stools up to the long oaken table or ate standing, their exuberance quieted, so that they became aware of the noise of the city; of the broken rumble of wagons on the long laddered paving of timbers; of the discordant clanging of bells and the whining of vendors and the harsh spoken artillery of the Russian voice, with its scooping vowels and hard bitten consonants.
Adam Blacklock found it soothing. He spooned his broth, absorbing it, thinking of nothing, and suddenly among the sounds in the yard was another voice, light and clear and demanding, which he had not heard for a year and a half. It spoke in Russian, once, and then again, giving an order. And then was followed almost at once by a quick running step, scaling the stairs outside the house.
There was time to glance once at the others, sitting arrested, and then the door opened and Francis Crawford stood on the threshold.
For a moment Lymond remained there, surveying them. His eight officers, staring edgily back, saw a delicate-looking gentleman in a pretty paned and pinked tunic with the finest voile shirt bands and a link-belt of Italian enamel work. A man whose yellow hair, dry and light and unevenly tipped, eclipsed the sunlight behind him, and whose attic profile and unoccupied, long-shafted hands caused a small moan of ecstasy to burst, very circumspectly, from Mr Hislop’s baby-pink lips.
He was the same. Or very nearly the same. Relief flooded through Adam, and beside him Alec Guthrie smiled also, and said, ‘Francis!’
The wreathed, sapphire gaze rested on him and then moved, with perfect courtesy, along the haphazard grouping of faces. ‘So you have all arrived safely. I am glad. Don’t rise, gentlemen,’ Lymond said pleasantly. ‘I am sure you have worked hard for your breakfast.’
Which brought them all, untidily, to their feet as Lymond pressed the door shut and walked to the head of the table. There he tossed down some papers and, hooking the master chair to him, said, ‘Please sit. We have a great deal to get through this morning. I know four of you. Guthrie, will you kindly introduce me to the others?’ And stood, knee and elbow supported, while Guthrie, level-voiced, described them one by one. Roger Brown of Kirkcudbright. Hislop, from Renfrewshire, who had joined them when Hercules Tait left for Venice. And the two former Knights of St John, Alan Vassey and Ludovic d’Harcourt, a Frenchman of Scottish extraction who had come to replace Jerott Blyth.
‘Also departed,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘The beauty of worthy things is not in the face but in the backside, endearing more by their departure than their address. Daniel Hislop, the son of the bishop?’
‘The Bishop’s bastard,’ said Hislop,