The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [14]
‘A handsome woman,’ Fergie Hoddim had opined, stroking the sad brown moustache he had been attempting to cultivate ever since Lübeck.
‘Going by what?’ Lancelot Plummer had inquired. ‘She was wearing a veil and a cloak to her ankles. I grant you the jewellery was handsome all right.’
‘Enough to keep us another few days?’ asked Danny Hislop. ‘I thought they had a light hand with the mutton at supper. Did she look exhausted?’
‘She looked,’ said Alec Guthrie dryly, ‘like a clever woman who was not unaware that five ill-dressed passers-by were displaying an unhealthy interest in her personal life.’ But he spoke without rancour, because he shared the concern of the others. In this unknown country their standing and fortune and future were precarious enough as it was, without depending as well on the whim of a well-furnished hetaera.
They were not present however at the brief encounter between Francis Crawford and Güzel when, on the day of the audience, he took leave of her on his way to collect Guthrie, Blacklock and Hoddim, who were to accompany him to the Kremlin.
He wore a doublet her tailor had fashioned for him from woven Indian silks of all colours; and over it a sleeveless coat cut with cunning, the seed pearls glimmering as he moved in the warm morning sun. She came to meet him and considered him, standing in silence, while he watched her with unmoved, cornflower eyes. ‘The word,’ he said, ‘is gorgeous.’
She raised her arched eyebrows.
‘… But it is axiomatic to select the right armour, whatever the battle. An overplus of rings, would you consider?’
‘No,’ she said. ‘The Tsar is the supplicant.’
‘I trust he knows it,’ said Lymond. ‘But you have no doubts.’
Her smile, cool and subtle, was celebrated.
‘No. Neither have I,’ Lymond said. ‘Which is fortunate, perhaps, for us both. If you want Russia, mistress mine, you shall have it.’
*
Alec Guthrie had paid fifteen gold florins for a boyar’s cap trimmed in black fox, and wore it doggedly, his short beard combed, above a new velvet cloak with gold braiding. Fergie and Adam Blacklock likewise had spent the morning, to the marked admiration of their less fortunate fellows, struggling with new clasps and unfamiliar belts until Hoddim offered, red-faced, to replace an oral process with a physical one. Then, joining Lymond in the cavalcade of liveried horses waiting outside, they trotted, stiffly correct, up to the drawbridge which led to the square red Frolovskaya Tower, the principal entrance to the Kremlin.
Adam Blacklock, riding behind his commander’s uncompromising back and the swaying gold fringe of his horse-harness, wavered between a savage excitement and a deadly desire to be safely in Renty, speaking bad French and facing the guns of the Emperor.
He recited to himself, and saw by Fergie’s set face that he was doing the same, the remarkable briefing they had received from Francis Crawford:
‘Ivan Vasilievich has been Tsar since he was three. He is secure on his throne: has dealt harshly with the boyars who repressed him as a youth and has turned his attention to this inheritance. After more than two centuries of Tartar subjection, Greater Russia has come into being, largely through Ivan’s father and grandfather.
‘There remained three Tartar kingdoms unconquered. Two of these, Kazan and Astrakhan, Ivan has successfully dealt with. The third, the kingdom of the Crimean Tartars, still remains a marauder within his southern frontiers whose raids have the support of Ottoman Turkey. Ivan must conquer the Crimean Tartars. He also wants to recover those lands lived in by Orthodox Russians