The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [110]
Chancellor answered it all. Christopher beside him, said nothing; nor did Lane or Killingworth or Price or Rob Best, seated sick-faced beside Lymond.
‘I saw Willoughby once, in Scotland,’ Lymond said. ‘He held a fort there under the Protector, during the late King Henry’s Rough Wooing. As the great-uncle of the Lady Jane Grey he would have needed all his social dexterity, had he lived to return. I imagine he must have died just about the time she was executed. If Christopher is going to be sick, I think you should make some excuse and remove him. Disgust is held to be the summit of weakness. As well as, in this case, an insult.’
They had driven the hares like sheep into the dogs. And when the slaughter was slowing, they had emptied sackloads of leverets into the arena, so that they loped and staggered and bumped, still blinded, into the mouths of the mastiffs. When the last dog was persuaded to leave, they counted three hundred bodies, of which the Tsar’s dogs had killed seventy. The Tsar, bestowing favours so gracefully, was elated. Best said, under his breath, ‘They are a nation of Goths. Rude, bloody and blind as the wild Irish.’
‘They do not pursue the art quite as it is practised in France,’ said the voice of Ludovic d’Harcourt softly. ‘But then, few kings can claim to have killed seventy hares in a single day’s hunting. Un chasseur émérite.’
‘You are thinking of venery,’ Lymond said. ‘Whereby all men of worth may discover a gentleman from a yeoman, and a yeoman from a villein. This is something quite different, as I said. This is a demonstration by a ruler of his power and fitness to rule. I suggest you do not forget it.’
‘I couldn’t,’ said Robert Best.
The following day, the business meetings began. Lymond did not attend, but Fergie Hoddim surprisingly did. It was not until his third intervention that Chancellor remembered the provider of snares in which apes are caught, and the Troitsa monastery, where Mr Crawford also had mentioned his legal confrère. Where Mr Crawford had refused point blank to do anything further about the affairs of his wife.
He had one winter in which to persuade him. He had seldom met anyone who looked less amenable to persuasion. And yet, if Lymond did not return, he himself would go back, he had been told, to face an arraignment for heresy. And Lymond, Lady Lennox had said, would lose his life.
How? It was not the first time, looking round at his talking companions, that Diccon Chancellor wondered that. Who was Lady Lennox’s agent? Not one of his seamen: they had sailed home to England, and when they returned would come no farther south than St Nicholas. Unless Lymond travelled a thousand miles north to bid them farewell, he would be out of their reach in Moscow. Therefore, it must be one of ten men: the six he had left at Vologda, and the four men, Killingworth, Price, Lane and Best, who were here at this table. Christopher, at least, could be left out of the reckoning.
Which of them had been paid to kill the Voevoda Bolshoia? Which, when Philippa’s husband gave his last, bored refusal, would make sure that if he did not come home to England, he would not live to harm England in Russia? Who cared for England enough? Who was sufficiently afraid of Margaret Lennox? Or who, perhaps, hated Lymond from long ago?
He looked at them all again, and found they were all looking at him, and that it had evidently been agreed, without his realizing it, that the Tsar should be approached with a request for stronger privileges than those so far mentioned verbally, and that Hoddim and he were to frame the letter, and Viscovatu to scan it. He nodded