The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [116]
‘No,’ said Diccon Chancellor in a superhuman access of courtesy.
‘My God,’ said Lymond, stopping and staring at him. ‘In that case, I wish we had cooked it for you. Come along. Adam Blacklock is here, modestly reinstated, before you. I thought we should have a mildly cultural evening. I have not asked Mr Hoddim, who might expound too inconveniently on the laws of property, or Alec Guthrie, who is prone at times to be dismally moral. You are entering a different world: a world of determined sybaritic experience. The bower of Majnún and Leylí.’
The reference struck no response from Diccon’s navigational repertoire. Rob Best’s mouth had opened again. Lymond looked from one to the other.
Into Lancelot Plummer’s humourless eyes there came, without warning, a spark of undeniable entertainment. ‘A pair of Persian lovers,’ he offered.
‘A pair of Persian lovers,’ agreed Lymond, acknowledging the assistance. ‘Do you have a mistress, Master Chancellor? It is an asset no man should deny himself. Without it, the cooking suffers abominably, and I dare not mention what goes amiss with the drainage.’
Chancellor laughed. He laughed for quite a long time because his sense of humour was touched, while his logical mathematician’s brain was telling him that very likely he would be flung out of the house for it, if not banished altogether from this alarming country of Russia.
Lymond waited until he was nearly finished, and then, placing a hand on his shoulder, steered Chancellor up the remaining few steps, and along a gallery to the main double doors of the house. The light, flooding down from the sconces, gilded the bright feathered gold of his hair, and the cushioned silks of the caftan, and the faint lines round the relaxed mouth which were almost, but not quite, a smile. ‘Well, thank God,’ said Lymond. ‘I thought you were going to go down on your knees. The occasion is expensive, but not so far meet for prayer.’
And so, with a degree of anticipation not far from horrified pleasure, Diccon Chancellor entered the country home of the Voevoda Bolshoia and his mistress, and did not look to see if there was a witch ball hung over the lintel.
It was like an evening at Penshurst.
If an evening at Penshurst could have been spiced, and scented and jewelled, and anointed, like King Raia Colambu, with oil of storax and benjamin, it would have bred handsome hours such as these, charged with good wine and light talk and music, enclosed with comfort, and incised all about with a curving, trephining wit.
The vulgarity he had expected was missing. The beautiful woman introduced by Francis Crawford as The lady Güzel, your hostess and mistress of all you see about you, spoke English as well as himself, with an accent part Greek, part something else he could not identify. And recalling with compassion the pungent mind and honest gifts of Mistress Philippa, Diccon Chancellor recognized before him now, in the woman Güzel, the face and the mind and the power of a woman of destiny.
She dined with them, facing Lymond across a low, marbled table of malachite, with Plummer and Blacklock on one side, and on the other himself and the bearded young man in ermine, whom he had noticed while watching the Triumph. His name was Prince Dmitri Vishnevetsky, and he was governor of Cherkassy on the Lithuanian frontier, which made his presence in Moscow worth pondering.
He knew the Voevoda and his mistress fairly well, it was obvious, and called the Voevoda by his territorial name of Lymond, which his own men, out of habit, sometimes also used.
It suited him; Chancellor thought. Brief; impersonal; without title, or else, if you wished it, a title in itself. He tried to see him through Güzel’s eyes. She had brought him to Russia, he had been told: had introduced him and his company to the Tsar;