The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [313]
He stabbed Hislop too, before they got a grip of him, and slashed Hoddim across arm and chest. He fought as he had said he would fight, without quarter and without mercy, because he was on his way to board a ship waiting to sail at Gravesend, and no man, friend or enemy, was going to stop him.
He might have done more except for the hirer of the boat, who stepped quietly round with a bottom plank, and felled him, cleanly and with a blow to his unguarded head.
Chapter 14
He awoke under his own reflection, with the sound of low, uneasy, talk going on about him. The hurt in his head was greater than it had ever been; worse than when Richard had reached the end of his decent forbearance; worse even than it had been at Volos, when he had been heavily addicted to opium for months, and the lack of it had driven him nearly out of his mind.
He had survived that. He would survive this. He closed his eyes for a moment, feeling the lids rest in the two drained excavations which were all that seemed left of his face. Then he opened them, and, holding them open, let them travel over the mirror above him.
Himself, stripped of his coat, lying prostrate—limp, bloody Lamuel in the lamplight on a rough trestle table in the centre of a small crowded room, which held somewhere a vague smell of sulphur and horseradish.
And faces all round him: some clear-cut and sharp in the same light; some obscured; some lost in the shadows. Seven faces. One of them, seeing the movement of his lashes, looked up and watched the glass also.
It was Philippa. Francis Crawford closed his eyes and ridiculously, for a man who had struck to kill without hesitation that evening, said to himself, Pray God, let me not weep.
‘He is awake,’ Philippa said. And John Dee, whose room it was, rose and touched Lymond’s wrist, and after waiting a moment said, ‘Yes. Then, sir! come attend to your reckoning. You have caused deep injury to those who wished most to help you. A headache is less than you merit.’
‘Wait,’ Philippa said. ‘Wait a moment.’
But because John Dee was correct, by his own lights, Lymond opened his eyes and looked at them all as they were looking up at him: Ludovic d’Harcourt in a torn jacket; Fergie Hoddim with a stained bandage over one arm; Adam Blacklock with no new injury, but the scar of the old one thin and red across his blanched face. Danny Hislop … there too, against the wall, with his leg on a stool. But no Alec Guthrie.
With a sudden smooth movement, which cost him more than he had expected, Lymond sat up. And John Dee, a tall man with high colour on his sharp cheekbones and a black cap on his light hair, said, ‘The Muscovy fleet will sail from Gravesend with the dawn tide. You have missed your ship. You have to thank God for your friends and beg their forgiveness.’
It was Hislop who saw the move coming. He flung himself across the threshold, stabbed thigh and all, as Lymond slid from the table and made for it. Lymond wrenched the door open across Hislop’s felled body but the delay was enough: Blacklock had him, and Hoddim, one-handed, and the door was kicked shut and locked in his face as he ripped himself free. He stood, still facing it as they released his arms slowly, and then turned.
Alec Guthrie’s voice, serene from the shadows, said, ‘You are not going to Russia. You are not going. All your life you have resented control and brooked no hint of instruction or guidance. This time, your will is not paramount.’
Moving slowly, Francis Crawford crossed the room to where Guthrie lay. Stripped as he was, to shirt