The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [98]
‘It’s that drunken land-hog’s unspeakable cooking,’ said Best.
‘No, it isn’t. It’s the detention and the silence,’ Chancellor said. ‘I give you leave to imagine what it was like the first time. We waited twelve days before he sent for us.’
‘Cleaning the silver,’ said George Killingworth, who had finished working on his boots and was brushing his beard, which was long, curling and golden and smelt of badly cooked rabbit. ‘According to Crawford. D’you still think he’s not to be relied on, Diccon? Maybe the Army thinks Englishmen ought to live in big houses.’
‘I imagine the Army is far too busy consolidating its own position to have any charity left over for foreigners,’ Chancellor said. ‘No. The climate is different. Moscow is different. They’ve had another fire. They had one eight years ago. There wasn’t a post left you could tie a horse to, and two years ago you could still see the mess. But this one has been cleared up, and the spaces between the houses are bigger, and there are water troughs and broom hooks at the street-ends. The buildings are better. There’s more brick. More glass and less mica. Look at the studs on this door. Look at the work in that chest.’
Harry Lane said, ‘But no beds. No chairs. No trenchers. No metal-ware for the table: beech cups and a case of wood spoons at your girdle. And the drink is God-awful.’
‘Kvass,’ said Chancellor reflectively. ‘Described as water turned out of its wits, with a little mash added. Christopher …’
‘Drink,’ said Christopher aggressively, ‘has no effect on me at all. You said so yourself. It was the stewed hare.’
‘I said at Penshurst,’ said his father calmly, ‘that you could start drinking beer. English beer. Not mead sodden with hops and fermented in God knows what uncured receptacle. Tomorrow, God help us, we have to present our credentials to the Tsar of this country and ask for his favour, remembering that the present we intended to give him is still in Vologda, and will stay in Vologda apparently until the ground freezes over. We shall be bidden to dine. After dinner, there is only one test of manhood, and none of us, surprising though it may seem, is looking forward to it. You are not coming.’
‘But——’ said Christopher.
‘You heard your father,’ said Killingworth. ‘You can’t hold enough liquor.’
‘Can you?’ said Christopher, goaded.
‘No,’ said George Killingworth, after a moment’s reflection. ‘But who else is going to help us to bed?’
So Christopher was not among the five men who rode out next morning, with a gaudy escort of boyars, and pressed their way to the gates of the Kremlin through the cleared market place with its closed shops and sealed taverns: cleared so that the people of Moscow, and the soldiers and the lower though valuable nobility, could suitably congregate, and impress with their numbers and vigour; and so that the people in turn could witness the honour done to their country by distant and powerful kingdoms.
Tricked out in new Russian gowns of branched velvet and gold, furred with sable and squirrel and ermine, and edged and faced with black beaver, Diccon Chancellor and his four English gentlemen rode through the ranks of packed faces, sweating slightly under the mild sun of early October, and over the rise, past the scaffolding of the Tsar’s new Cathedral of St Basil, and dismounted at the Frolovskaya Tower, the ceremonial entrance to the Kremlin, where yet another company of soldiers awaited them at the bridge, in damascened helmets and coats of mail, with blue and silver tunics laid over them.
Their commander, a grey-bearded man with a face neither Slav nor Tartar, delivered a grave bow to Chancellor, and Chancellor saluted both him and the ikon over the gate, and crossed over the ditch into the Kremlin. The soldiers marched stiffly before him, and more of them stood at attention, lining the rising ground where he was to walk. (Every soldier in Russia is a gentleman, and does nothing else. Who had said that? It was true. These were not the inbred faces of high western culture, but neither were they the