The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [122]
Güzel was downstairs, when Lymond returned from seeing them off. He found her in the room where they had been sitting, replacing in its box the blue and gold oblong of the child Ivan’s Mernaya. She said, without looking round, ‘Were you content?’
‘Heliogabalus,’ Lymond said, ‘would have had the banquet spoons engraved with the lot of each guest. Ten pounds of gold or else ten pounds of lead. Ten flies or ten dromedaries.… It did, I think, all that was required.’
Güzel closed the box and moving back, leaned on the carved golden back of a chair. ‘I have a feeling,’ she said, ‘that Master Best has marched off to rouse the rabble to storm the homes of the decadent.’
‘He won’t get far,’ said Lymond peacefully. ‘The rabble live in small villages separated by miles of unamenable forest, and have never been instructed in the art of storming, or even of resisting unfriendly invaders.’
‘But you are teaching them,’ Güzel said. ‘From all those forts you and Plummer have created, you are teaching them.’
‘The land must be defended,’ Lymond said. He picked up the Persian book Adam had looked at, and stood, weighing it between his long fingers. ‘Is that a bad thing?’
‘Bad for the peasants, perhaps,’ Güzel said. ‘And Master Chancellor was taciturn. Or so I thought. He remained a great length of time in your writing room.’
‘He was watching me write,’ Lymond said. ‘They are sending dispatches by post through to Danzig. I gave him a letter to France and a letter to Malta. And another, direct to Philippa Somerville, freeing her on my part from the formal contract of marriage.’
Her ringed hands, hanging laced from the chair back, made no movement at all. She said, ‘I thought they demanded your presence.’
Francis Crawford looked up, with lucid blue eyes, from the book. ‘Master Chancellor was good enough to say flatly that he realized the proposal was foolish. And that he would report to the English authorities that the only prospect of dissolving this marriage was to accept my written statement. He said he recognized that I had found my home and my life-work in Russia.’
Behind the calm, painted face there was still no discernable emotion. ‘Perhaps then he will reassure the Tsar,’ Güzel said.
Lymond shrugged. ‘The Tsar will be reassured when the ships sail next summer without me. I have told him I am staying. I don’t intend to labour the point.’
I have a word of advice, Diccon Chancellor had said. Defer your public decision. Don’t announce categorically that you are not leaving Russia. For if you do, I believe we carry on our ships someone paid to kill you.
But Francis Crawford said nothing of that to the woman who had brought him to Russia, but drew the talk into minor cadenzas, and kissed her hand, and took his leave for the night.
It was late. Replacing the inkhorn and casing his papers, and marshalling his wide, impeccable desk, he made a decision of no importance, and instead of returning to his room sent his body-servant, one of the anonymous changing team who served his person, to warn the bath keeper that he was coming.
The baths in Güzel’s house were Turkish in fashion. No one sweated at bath stoves, and, like the Streltsi, jumped naked into the river. The dressing-room was silk-hung, with Persian rugs on the floor, and low cushioned sofas lining the walls. The tepidarium and calidarium were in marble, with wall fountains and a stepped marble bath, from which the steam, with inspired ingenuity, rose straight to furnish the winter garden with warmth.
Above all, it was silent. The servant who disrobed his master; the masseur who oiled the scarred, highly trained body lying still on the marble after the bath, knew better than to comment on their work. The masseur’s powerful hands moved kneading over the spider-white whip marks; the old wounds, gained in battle and out of it; the flourished white brand of the galleys. Strong and balanced and limber, the flesh warmed and eased to his moulding. What teemed within the still, arm-cradled head was the Voevoda’s own affair: he looked asleep, but the masseur knew from bitter