The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [214]
Face to face, they were the same height: one middle-aged and heavily built; the other light to the point of attenuation. ‘Tell whom?’ said Richard harshly.
‘Oh, God!’ said Lymond explosively; and then, drawing breath, set himself to take hold again. ‘Look. It’s my fault. You’re falling asleep as you stand. But give me a moment. Sit down on that bloody rock for a minute, and let me try to explain. And listen to me as if I weren’t related. Can you make some sort of frenetic endeavour, and pretend to do that? Because in the only sense that matters, Richard, it’s true.’
He stopped as Richard reseated himself, a hand on his shoulder, and stood looking down at him crookedly, as he used to do long ago, but with different eyes, and a face differently blocked. He said, ‘You rode sixty miles through the night for a brother who doesn’t exist. I haven’t been here for four years. I have been growing and changing, somewhere else, with different people, speaking a different language. The old ties are gone: my family wouldn’t recognize me: what in God’s name do you think I could find to say to them? And the new ties are only on paper: the divorce is a formality as the marriage was. And for all he knows of me, the boy could be anyone’s son; perhaps … it doesn’t matter. Do you know how he was saved?’
‘Not in detail. By a chess game, Philippa said.’
‘Do you know how the other one died?’ Lymond said.
Richard shook his head.
Lymond took his hand away. ‘By the deaf-mutes, at the same game,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to see this child. If you can’t understand that, I can’t help it. I don’t want to see anyone at Midculter; it would serve no purpose and the second parting would only be worse. I am part of this embassy. I have a share in it. I have to go to London with the Ambassador and aid him in all he has to do, and carry out other duties, for which I am entirely responsible to the Tsar. When I have done so, I shall sail back with Nepeja to Muscovy. And after that, I am not coming back.’
Richard, his face white with fatigue was staring at him as if, indeed, they were not related. ‘You are going back to that woman in Russia?’
‘To Güzel, yes. And to St Mary’s.’
Bitterly scathing, ‘Is there any of St Mary’s left?’ Richard said.
‘Hislop will come back with me. It is more than St Mary’s. We are the nucleus of the Tsar’s army.’
‘So you are important?’
‘My life is there,’ Lymond said.
‘A big fish in a little pool. What you wanted,’ Richard said.
If he was moved suddenly to laughter, he did not show it. ‘Or, If you have made your bed well, well may you lie on it,’ Lymond said. ‘The Buchan version is even apter.… Richard, I am not worth anyone’s heartache.’
‘I know that,’ Richard said. ‘But she does not.’
‘She will have to learn,’ Lymond said.
*
It was full day when they returned to the castle, and Alec Fraser (my wife’s Da is the Provost), voluble with excitement, led the third Baron Culter into the Great Hall, the third Baron’s brother modestly following.
They all rose; but Adam Blacklock first of all, to greet the man he remembered well from his early days at St Mary’s in Scotland, when the first great struggle began between the two leaders who hated each other: Lymond and Gabriel, Sir Graham Reid Malett. So he shook Richard’s hand, and noted the distress on his face and the serene and arrogant calm of the Voevoda’s, smiling behind him. And noted, too, the quick turn of Culter’s head as the Russian flowed from man to man about him; the domestic language they all used: Yeroffia to Lymond; Lymond to Simeon and Phoma to discover if the Ambassador would receive them. Ludicrously, Lord Culter had not expected his brother to be familiar with Russian. Certainly, he had not looked for the deference which surrounded Lymond on every side; and not only, Adam was aware, from the Russians. To d’Harcourt and Hislop and himself, he was the Voevoda Bolshoia. But, obviously, Lymond had not told his