The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [38]
Lancelot Plummer had expected to undertake this survey with Adam, but had been foiled calmly in passing by Lymond. ‘Ah, no. One aesthete and one philistine are what we require.’ There could have been few philistines, thought Plummer acidly, as insistently common as Hislop.
Then they stopped making lists. For four days, Lymond was absent, in conference with the Chosen in some retreat in the Kremlin. When he returned, he carried between two boards the programme to which he had committed them.
He read it through to them in Kitaigorod all that evening, instead of returning as he usually did, straight from Vorobiovo to the Kremlin. In it were the provisions for all Fergie’s supplies; the foundries to make Guthrie’s new weapons, the forts for Plummer to build and the musters, district by district, of all the men owing horses, weapons and service, for d’Harcourt and Hislop to train.
They listened to him in silence, fired in spite of themselves by the scale of it. But for the sake of their pride they kept quiet, and only at the end did Guthrie move, and say growling, ‘And so they agreed? Even the cost?’
The Voevoda Crawford of Lymond laid down the last page, picked up and tapped the stack on a desk to align it, and handed the bundle and boards to the boy Venceslas to bind and hold ready to carry. He looked at Guthrie. ‘I have on record,’ he said, ‘the Tsar’s public pronouncement that the only riches he cares for are peace with honour for Russia.’
‘My God,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘He said that for effect, after the fall of Kazan.’
‘No doubt,’ said Lymond. ‘But he said it. Peace and honour he shall certainly have, in due course. And those most deserving, no doubt, will be granted the riches.’
The letter from Philippa Somerville arrived at the end of the month when, in the field or out of it, they were working eighteen hours and more in every day and the messages from Rome and Venice and Brussels and London and Paris lay on Lymond’s desk, waiting until he chose to step aside for an hour from the machine, and give them his due and orderly attention.
Even when he returned, he did not go at once to Güzel’s house, but was stopped, passing through the Nikólskaya Gate, and asked to call at Ivan Milkhailov Viscovatu’s office. He went there on foot, dismissing his men and his horses, and found the secretary fondling the thick metal plate of his crucifix. ‘My sovereign lord wishes to see you. Your riding dress will be excused. You may leave your weapons with me, Voevoda.’
His sheath, worked in the Turkish style, was inlaid with coloured enamels and had turquoises in it, set firm as apples. Lymond drew his sword and laid his dagger beside it. Then Viscovatu, darkly smiling, gave a clap of his hands, and the door opened on a file of tall headgear and ranked silver axes. The guard closed about them as Lymond with the secretary stepped into the open, and taking one of the wide boarded walks of the Kremlin, escorted both men to the west, behind the network of houses which backed the Uspensky Cathedral and the Church of the Robe of the Virgin and into the square containing the old church of St Saviour in the Wood, behind which lay the steps to the women’s buildings, the Terems. And from that upper terrace, trodden almost daily by Güzel, was a doorway into the maze of connected pavilions which represented the Tsar’s private apartments.
Ivan of Russia this time wore neither of his worked golden crowns, but merely a tall hat in velvet over a banded cap of black sable and an Ispahan gown in crimson and indigo, with long slit sleeves brushing his footstool. Adashev was with him and a handful of others, seated on a long bench hung with red fringed brocade. There was a table with books and an ikon hung with gold cloth in the room corner, before which an oil lamp glimmered scarlet. The lower walls were painted to simulate marble.
Lymond walked to