The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [249]
Lymond pulled his head up. ‘As if nothing had happened.’
‘Well. Nobody knows,’ Philippa said. Poor Austin was moaning a little.
‘Except you and me,’ Lymond said rising abruptly. He walked to the door. ‘You were going to give me a promise.’
From where she knelt by her knight, Philippa looked up at the other man, graceful, facile and worldly. ‘You are thinking of someone else,’ she said bluntly. ‘I don’t change from minute to minute. I don’t change at all.’
‘I don’t think you have changed since you were ten years old,’ Lymond said. ‘How fortunate we all are, in some ways.’
He made his farewells with perfect courtesy and left by the door into Broad Street. Back in Fenchurch Street, shocked by his looks, Adam Blacklock was rash enough to address the Voevoda, and was treated to the kind of response, white-hot, venomous and unforgivable, which he had largely spared Philippa Somerville.
The holocaust in his head by that time was on its most staggering scale: was there a scale for headaches? Perhaps Master John Dee could plot them. Except that Master Dee would certainly want his date, time and place of birth, and Master Dee was not going to get them.
A commanding resolution. Margaret Lennox presumably had them in detail already.
There did come a time, eventually, where thought was quite impossible. Francis Crawford read for a little, then, since he knew very well what was coming, locked his door and lay, face downwards waiting, upon the high pillared bed.
He did not welcome it. But in its own way, sometimes, it was better than thought.
Chapter 8
On Thursday, March 25th, twelve months to the day since he took leave of the Tsar his master, Osep Grigorievich Nepeja, the first Muscovite Ambassador to England, was summoned to Westminster to present himself before the King and the Queen, and to make his formal Oration.
The State barge, in which he left the Three Cranes wharf in the Vintry, was decked with streamers and flowers and gilding and flew the flag of St George for both England and Muscovy, and carried the arms of both countries. With him travelled Lord Montague and a large number of merchants from the Muscovy Company, as well as ten City Aldermen and his own far-travelled escort, which included the Voevoda and three men from St Mary’s. On the jetty at Whitehall he was met by six lords in velvet, with trumpeters, and by them conducted up the Watergate stairs to the long gallery, and from there to the Great Chamber, hung with brilliant blue baldachine and spread with one of Wolsey’s damascene carpets.
There he was saluted by Nicholas Heath, Archbishop of York, the Lord Chancellor; William Paget, Baron de Beaudessert as Keeper of the Seals, William Paulet, Marquis of Wiltshire, the Lord High Treasurer; and William Howard, Baron of Effingham, the Lord High Admiral, the last two being Charter Members of the Muscovy Company.
The intent on both sides was to impress. Nepeja, dressed by the Muscovy Company, whose members comprised half the Government wore a gown paned with gold wire and sewn jewels like acorns, with a tall jewelled hat on his great bearded head. The Voevoda with his three colleagues following was as refined as a charming shell cameo in thick silk brocade sewn with white sapphires and cloudy star rubies. Across his shoulders he wore, as Danny Hislop’s dazzled eyes registered, the Tsar’s great barmi of pendant medallions.
Treading between the double line of brilliant courtiers, brittle as the Queen Dowager’s iron flowers at Binche, Danny wondered how much it impressed the middle-aged Governor of a trading town in frozen, Tartar-torn Muscovy. The broad river, so like the Moskva, but lined with great houses and long garden walls, pierced by handsome gateways and jetties. And behind it, instead of the uniform ranks of the izbas, the whole crowded panorama of London with its church spires and towers and the tiered rows of its houses in wood, brick and plaster with their random gables and