The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [269]
‘You think I suspect you?’ Lymond said.
Ludovic d’Harcourt looked down. ‘You would think that after Malta a man could stomach anything. It isn’t so. I couldn’t whip a man as you whipped Adam Blacklock. I couldn’t cosset that bird, and feed it and fly it as you did, or ignore what you could ignore in the man you called master. I couldn’t call men to me across Europe and then gamble their lives as you did, when the Streltsi attacked us in our first days in Moscow. I couldn’t speak to fellow human beings as you do, or deal out unmoved such violent punishments. And I made no secret of it, so that if you suspect me, it is not without cause. Only——’
‘You have had a change of heart?’ Lymond said dryly.
He sat, a big man, with his hands dangling between his knees, and said, ‘It is easy to mock. But you cared for that bloody eagle, and yet you killed it, for a Tartar baby that turned out to be dead already. And at sea … there is no disguise that will serve a man on the sea.’
‘So? What are you saying?’ Lymond said.
‘That I want to go back with you to Russia,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt bluntly. ‘I shall serve you to the best of my ability. You will be safe from me and I swear I shall protect you against any man wishing to harm you. And if you fear any danger to that girl, I beg you, take her back with you. She is worth … I have never encountered her like.’
‘Ye Gods: another,’ said Lymond staring at him. ‘I must introduce you to her excellent, widowed mother, also multum in parvo: if you can stomach the Somervilles you can probably even contrive to endure my behaviour without sickening. Do I understand that, in your humble Christian fashion, you are indicating that I should look for the culprit in St Mary’s? Now I come to think of it, Fergie Hoddim now and then had a very odd look in his eye.’
And as d’Harcourt shifted uncontrollably, Lymond sat up and added unexpectedly, ‘I know. It is easy to mock, and not so easy to make a confession of ill will. As it happens, suspicion lies somewhere else, with a man who had access to my correspondence. But if you are concerned about Philippa Somerville, then you can engage your courts of higher authority in all our interests. Because if anything threatens my liberty in the three weeks now left before sailing, Philippa will also be implicated. And far from being allowed to sail with us to Russia, she may not live to sail anywhere at all.’
Philippa thought, when they stepped out at the River Fleet water-gate, that poor Mr d’Harcourt had been receiving a lecture, so subdued and concerned did he look. But Mr Crawford, on the other hand, sparkled, paralysingly bright and sharp as an icicle; and it was only listening to him, with the inner, divining ear which the Somervilles bent upon everybody, that Philippa noted that the easiness she had felt for a moment had gone. With a sigh and a flip of her sock-hat, Philippa set herself to restore him.
Since the Dissolution, the handsome buildings and gardens of Blackfriars Monastery had been put to many and impious uses. In its heyday, the Emperor Charles V had stayed there more than thirty years before on his State Visit, and a gallery had been built over the Fleet to join it to the Palace of Bridewell, where lived all his accompanying courtiers.
Now, the grass was as green and the apple trees still fruited in summer, but the great hall held an hourglass instead of the tall clocks of Nüremberg, and instead of warming the short Flemish frame of