The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [26]
Lymond looked round at them all, and then walking inside, said, ‘Brown and Vassey?’
‘Dead,’ said Alec Guthrie. ‘D’Harcourt and Hoddim are in the other room, wounded.’
The Indian silks, flecked with charcoal, were otherwise as fresh as in the morning: the seed pearls-glimmered creamily. Lymond said, ‘How many men came against you?’
‘Forty, perhaps,’ Plummer said. ‘It was hard to see.’
‘We were busy,’ said Hislop.
Alec Guthrie said slowly, ‘Who sent them? They were Streltsi.’
‘The Tsar,’ said Lymond. He opened the inner door, glancing at the wreck of the room and d’Harcourt, lying unconscious on one of the beds. On another, covered with rubbish, Hoddim was staring at him. Lymond turned back. ‘He wanted to see if you would jump when he pricked you. The excessive zeal, I rather imagine, was the work of the boyars. Not everyone wants to see the Tsar with his own private army. Considering the odds, you seem to have achieved quite a massacre.’
‘Do you mind?’ Hislop said; and the impersonal blue eyes travelled to him.
‘Politically speaking, it was a mistake. It makes it impossible for the Tsar to take his own people to task.’
Guthrie said suddenly, ‘Will you tell me something? Did you know this was going to happen?’
‘What are you asking me?’ Lymond said. ‘Did I know something of the sort was likely to happen? Yes, I did. I was under the impression that I had warned you. Did I know it was to happen this morning? No, I didn’t: I have been informed only this moment. Did I have a fruitful morning drinking wine with the Council? Certainly, I did: and I have promised that those of you still surviving should come with me now, and as a gesture of forgiveness and goodwill, put out the fires which you started.’
‘And be damned to that!’ said Adam Blacklock into the silence.
‘Because …?’ said Alec Guthrie with patience.
‘Because you are the new officers in charge of the Streltsi, as of this moment. The contract is for five years. For each of these five years the Tsar will house you, feed and clothe and equip you and pay you in gold or in kind the equal of four thousand roubles. If it was a trial,’ Lymond said, ‘you have apparently passed it. If it was an action, you have undoubtedly won it. If we have had losses, the fault is the nation’s, and that is what we are going to remedy. What happened this morning can never happen again. And whatever we think of the boyars, we cannot afford to sacrifice, at this moment, the goodwill of the city of Moscow.’
Plummer said, ‘Four thousand roubles!’
‘Quite,’ said Danny Hislop with a terrible brightness. ‘It makes quite a difference, Maeve, doesn’t it?’
Chapter 4
In October Philippa Somerville, a stickler for the more remote social graces, decided to write to her husband from Scotland.
It was to be a long, newsy letter, effective in spelling and conveying inexplicitly in its latter pages an explicit injunction from his mother to come home at once.
The fact that Francis Crawford’s mother had made no such request and before she did so would bleed in her coffin like pie-meat was a matter of minor importance. So also was the truth that, having written the letter, Francis Crawford’s child-bride had no idea in the world where to send it. For the one thing made clear to Philippa during her long stay that year at Midculter was that Lymond’s return was needed and quickly, for the sake of Sybilla.
She never spoke of her son. It was noticeable, too, how seldom she allowed herself close to her grandson Kuzúm, now briskly tolerated by a concourse of violent black-headed cousins, and cared for in nurseries full of smiling, soft-handed women. Philippa, who had thought Kuzúm all her own but for the birth-pangs, saw with loving resignation the ties being loosed as his need for her now became less, and Kate saw more of the child now than she did.
But it was in pursuit of a straying Kuzúm that Philippa one day unlocked