The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [92]
Through all the speeches and the excellent meal which followed, Christopher was still thrashing it out. It was not until later, when they were both in the chamber they were to share with Lane and Killingworth and Ned Price, that he said to his father, ‘Do you like Mr Crawford?’
Diccon Chancellor, in the act of climbing heavily on to his bed-board, turned’ and said after a moment, ‘He was helpful. Why, don’t you?’
‘He stopped you going to Moscow,’ said Christopher.
‘He was under orders,’ said Diccon. ‘When you’re ready, you might blow out the tapers.’
‘And he made Mr Grigorjeff look a bit silly. I wondered if there was some bad feeling between them. Pretending he could translate.’
‘Ah,’ said Diccon Chancellor. Harry Lane, already under his blanket, was grinning.
‘What, Ah?’ said Christopher, getting incensed.
‘Ah,’ said Chancellor, struggling down in his turn, ‘but are you sure now he couldn’t translate?’
Christopher sat up. A drop of wax, unregarded, fell on the arm of his shirt. ‘You mean——’
‘I mean,’ said his father, ‘that you should remember one paramount rule. Watch your tongue.’ And he leaned over and blew out the taper.
Chapter 2
They were in the monastery for three days and three nights, during which George Killingworth and his colleagues were in frequent session at long meetings held in and around the storehouses, and the contents of the telegas were subject to some picking and rummaging. Christopher, handed over to the monks for entertainment, ate rather well, and was conducted with some care through the buildings and along the fifty-foot walls with their twelve faceted watch-towers, and was shown the ten vaults with their immense nine-foot barrels of wine, beer and mead, filled by chute from above.
He had more time than he wanted to look at the Troitsa Cathedral, with its golden globes on tall, window-ribbed drums, and its thick white stucco, banded with stone fretted like lace. Inside, in the low trapeza, lay St Sergius’s coffin in draped cloth of gold. Christopher had seen it manage no miracles, although he spent some time watching the constant movement of people chatting, eating and praying, and had drifted through to the high, narrow hall of the church, with the square painted panels of its iconostasis rising in tiers of gold to the ceiling. The light dazzled: from a dozen candles taller than himself, and the blazing wick of a hundred-pound kettle of wax. It set fire to the rubies, the sapphires, the gold of the rizas, the embossed shields of the ikons: the Virgin Platytera, the Virgin Hodigitia, the Virgin Blacherniotissa, and Andrei Rubles’s three grave, almond-eyed angels seated at Abraham’s table. It lit the chalices, the crosses, the incense burners, the royal doors to the sanctuary, and the canopied gold of the altar, with its circle of dark, singing figures. A ring of candles shone on the white beard and sparkling brocade of the abbot. He wore a slabbed medallion with a sad, sunken figure lost in its centre.
They were all around Christopher, the sombre figures, in picture and fresco. Profiled bodies, bowing in long, graceful rows, turned their faces to watch him. Here, the uplifted thumb-shapes of wings. There, the elderly, dome-headed Child within the engraved foil of its cover. The prostrate, holy figures, curved like an ark. The hyphen eyebrows and long, thin-boned noses and down-curved, patient mouths. The hunched shoulders and creased double fingers of benison; the robes veined in folds like body moulds made of thin leaves, rising on walls, pillars and ceiling: settling, dry and humble and melancholy, upon him.…
‘They will use flax seed oil,’ a voice said at his elbow. ‘I have it on the best authority that varnish and candle soot together will soon turn every saint into an Ethiopian and the Virgin Platytera into a subject for prayerful speculation. Have you eaten yet?’
It was Mistress Philippa’s powerful husband, with Makaroff at his shoulder.
‘No, sir,’ said Christopher.
‘Then come with us and rejoice,’ said Mr Crawford