The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [300]
Francis Crawford, watching and listening, could sense only one thing. Whatever news had arrived, it concerned the merchants, not the Russians or his own affairs in any of their various aspects. And the news, whatever it might be, was good.
Then it reached the top of the table and Osep Nepeja, puzzled, brought his speech to a more rapid conclusion than he had intended while Best rushed through the translation and was applauded almost before he had done, so eager were his audience to get rid of him.
And in the end it was Sir George Barnes who stood and made the announcement, from a piece of paper passed along from his fellows; perhaps because he had the loudest voice; or perhaps because, with Judde, his had been the vigour which had launched the Muscovy ships into their first, fateful journey to Russia.
The statement was brief. ‘My lords; gentlemen; the Philip and Mary has arrived safe in London.’
The answering roar rose to the hammerbeam roof, and hats and gloves leaped vying after it. Men jumped to their feet. Barnes and Cabot and Judde, leaning over the table, shouting answers, exchanging embraces and slaps and hand-wringings of joy had, every man, a tear in his eye. Nepeja, his massive head jerking to and fro sat ejaculating until Best, taking pity, explained it. The fourth of Richard Chancellor’s fleet of small ships, given up as lost with the others at the entrance to Trondheim, had made its way safely to harbour, and, after wintering there, had now crossed the ocean to London. Intact, with every man well, and her whole cargo, including ten thousand pounds of wax, to the value of over four thousand pounds.
Lymond did not rise to his feet. Nor did Henry Sidney; or Adam Blacklock or John Buckland, or Robert Best. Across the jostled tables, strewn with meats and overturned glasses, the eyes of the five men found each other, and met. And the look they exchanged was not one of joy yet, nor of thanksgiving, but a recognition of mourning.
Then Sir Henry Jerningham’s hand touched Francis Crawford on the shoulder, and the Vice Chancellor said, ‘I hesitate to call you away in the midst of such rejoicing. But there is a matter my colleagues and I would wish to discuss. Will you follow me?’
And since he could recognize, also, the touch of fate when it came, and its inevitability, Francis Crawford rose, and followed him out of the room.
*
Sir William Petre was in the small room they took him to, and his host John Dimmock, and the Earl of Arundel, the President of the Council, and a great many other men, armed, whom he recognized as Jerningham’s, and who closed in behind him as he walked through the door. As he moved forward there was another step on the threshold and Lymond, glancing back, saw that Adam Blacklock also had been ushered into the room, followed rather quickly by Sir Henry Sidney. Petre said, ‘Henry! This does not concern you.’
‘Nevertheless, as a member of the Muscovy Company also, I should like to stay,’ Sidney said. ‘This is our roof and Mr Crawford is our guest beneath it.’
‘Let him stay,’ the President said. Henry Fitzalan, 10th Earl of Arundel, could afford to be magnanimous to a man married to a Dudley, the family he had helped to overthrow when Queen Mary came to the throne. ‘It does not affect the course of our business. Mr Crawford, you have two servants named Daniel Hislop and Ludovic d’Harcourt?’
‘I have,’ Lymond said. The Russian coat, long and close-fitting and sashed with Persian silk burned in the afternoon sunlight with its gold wire and jewels: the buttons were emerald cameos. The eyes of the men at arms, like cats in a jungle, reflected the points of green fire. Lymond said, ‘They are officers of rank in