The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [191]
‘Come to my cabin,’ Chancellor said.
And so the sessions began which so riled Christopher and surprised Best and roused Danny Hislop’s bright-bladed, excoriating curiosity. Lying now in the damp, foggy cabin, listening to those competent footsteps, he said aloud, ‘You know, and I know, that without astronomy and the mechanical arts, and most especially without the most rigorous training in advanced mathematics, a navigator is only a seaman. Why, then, is Master Chancellor gulling the Voevoda, and why is the Voevoda ready to be gulled?’
Adam Blacklock, as he had suspected, was awake. ‘Is he being gulled?’ he said in a murmur, out of the darkness.
‘You don’t learn mathematics as a galley slave. He was a galley slave, I take it, and not merely the River Forth ferryman?’
‘In his teens. He was on travaux forcés for two years. He is also a Bachelor of Arts of Paris University.’
There was a brief, overturned silence. Then Best’s voice, joining in on the other side, said, ‘What?’
‘What indeed,’ said Danny, recovering. ‘A two-year test course for schoolboys in logic. Added, we all know, to a liberal self-education. Big words and Latin. But no mathematics.’
Adam said, ‘He studied under Orontius Finaeus when he was fifteen.’
‘You know all about him, don’t you, Adam?’ said d’Harcourt’s voice thoughtfully. ‘We find him, all of us, a subject for ceaseless conjecture. Do you realize that? Do you realize that since we’ve been here, none of us has thought of ourselves; of home and work and all the plans we were making? Is it a form of common subjection that holds us all together?’
‘Speak for yourself,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘I’m held together by intellectual curiosity. So are we all. We were wonderfully specious at Novgorod—Best will remember—about our reasons for staying in Russia. No one gave the correct one. You can hate a man and stay in his company because of his sheer, God-given, irresistible powers to stimulate. We all liked fighting, and we liked talking about fighting. With Lymond you don’t talk about fighting; you discuss the art of warfare, and then its philosophy, and then ten dozen other subjects all through the night, or for as long as he has patience to stay with you. I thought, God help me, that you were all trailing through Europe because you were enamoured of him. It wasn’t that in the least.’
‘We loved his mind,’ said Adam Blacklock, with sudden terrible bitterness, and Robert Best drew in his breath. After a moment’s silence, they realized that Blacklock had got to his feet, and an instant later, the door opened and closed behind him. Danny Hislop said, ‘Daniel Hislop, you are a bloody fool.’
Robert Best said, ‘I don’t understand.’
In the dark, Danny was silent. Then he said, ‘It’s Adam’s story. But it begins a long time ago, when he was in St Mary’s in Scotland, and began to take drugs. He bore no grudge over that flogging, you know. It had to be done, and Lymond did it, sparing him as no one else could. And came straight from the Tsar and sat beside him till daylight afterwards, except when he was being sick. An unheroic and unpublicized scene.’
‘Why, sick?’ Robert Best said.
‘A crise de nerfs,’ Danny said. ‘Or, according to Guthrie, because the Voevoda had been playing chess.’
‘And what,’ said Robert Best, irritably sleepy, ‘on earth has chess got to do with it?’
‘Ask Alec Guthrie, next time you see him,’ said Danny. ‘But I hope you take the point vis-à-vis Adam. He is impelled by that wasteful fuel, love. That is why he is leaving. To stay would harm St Mary’s, or the Voevoda, for whom living, as you have seen, is an exact science to be pursued with the brain.’
‘And d’Harcourt and you?’ Robert Best said.
‘Ludo?’ said Hislop. ‘Why are you leaving? In case, perhaps, you came to like it too well?’
‘I think he has too strong a hold over you,’ d’Harcourt said. ‘I think you might come to forget, too, that life is more than a science.’
‘Then dispute it with him,’ Danny said. ‘He is not immutable. No man can be. I am here because I find in him a