The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [19]
‘There’s a point,’ said Fergie Hoddim, ‘that I’d advise ye to give suit and presence to before you argue much further. If Lymond has asked for more money than the Russians are willing to pay, you don’t suppose they’re going to stand by and watch us stroll away to offer our catholic services to Poland or Lithuania or Turkey?’
‘That, of course, is the risk,’ said Guthrie blandly. ‘It all depends on whether our friend has judged the market correctly. I won’t tell you the conditions he laid down. It would upset your digestion.’
They were in their dining hall, sitting or standing about him as he leaned half-hitched against the long table. Adam said, ‘My digestion died on me as it is, somewhere in the Baltic. What went wrong? Why the bristle and snap at the end?’
‘The Tsar,’ said Alec forbearingly, ‘said that no high-born prince in his realm, or even the Blessed Head of his Most Holy Church, had ever laid claim to fees of such magnitude.’
‘And Lymond?’
‘Said that this was possibly why, as he had observed, the Crimean Tartars had been driven out neither by a princely campaign nor by a miracle.’
‘Oh Mary Mother of God.’ Adam closed his eyes.
‘He wished to make an impression,’ said Hislop, with a blandness quite equal to Guthrie’s. ‘Let us hope …’
He broke off. Adam looked at him quickly.
‘… that he makes the right one?’ said Guthrie, smoothly filling the pause. He had risen from the table, raising his hand. At the unspoken signal, Plummer rose also and swiftly and silently took his place by the door to the staircase, while d’Harcourt and Vassey moved to the head of the steep inner stairs to the kitchens.
Danny Hislop said, ‘What’s more, I suppose we have to wait dinner till his lordship returns?’
And Adam heard again what had barely reached him before: the finest paring of sound from the inner chamber: the long room where their bedding and all their possessions were stored, and whose high casement windows gave on to the back yard alone.
When they had all gathered here, they had left the inner room empty. A thief, then, after the foreigners’ money? Or the weapons left in their store-chests?
Except that they were wearing their weapons, and wore them day and night, wherever they were, muffled under their cloaks and their clothing, since the day when Danny Hislop had propounded a certain hypothetical scheme of defence and Lymond, not hypothetically at all, had desired them to keep it before them.
So now, Danny Hislop, his hazel eyes sparkling, took up his position on one side of that closed, inner door, with Fergie Hoddim grim at the other; and Adam himself, keeping out of the line of the windows, edged beside Plummer and looked down through the small opaque casement, at the outside steps which led to their door.
The steps were deserted, and so was the yard. But as he watched, the cold spring light glinted, for a second, on something hard and metallic which glanced past the balustrade and then vanished. Then the sun struck through the cloud and he saw, for an instant, a dancing pattern of light on the rough brick wall of the yard, which made him throw up his hands to draw Guthrie’s attention through the covering patter of chat, and then open his fingers to denote numbers. Not a sneak-thief. Not a raid by underprivileged Muscovites. But a full-scale attack by three to four dozen men under arms.
And the only armed men in Moscow were the Streltsi, the hackbutters of the Sovereign Grand Prince of Russia.
Plummer, sighing, left his post at a signal and helped them lift the oak dining table against the outer door he had been guarding. ‘I fear,’ he said, ‘our dear commander has committed some blunder.’
Their hackbuts were in the inner room—all except one, with its stand and charges which had been hidden with care in this chamber. It was already