The Ringed Castle (69 page)

‘So just is God. He is a man,’ said Mary Sidney, ‘and treads the world while we sit at home with our sewing silks. What of Russia do you enjoy, Mr Crawford? There is music? One hears that, as the Turk, the Russian is skilful at chess?’

Beside Austin, Philippa’s hand had closed very hard on her wine cup. In face and hands, voice, mood and posture, Lymond, considering, showed no ruffled nerve. He said, ‘There are some marching songs which would amuse you. But their music is to our ears disagreeable, and the Church does not favour it. Every Lent, wagon-loads of dulcimers and rebecs are taken over the Moskva and burnt. The virginals in my own house were the first ever seen, I believe, inside Russia. But you are right about chess. They play in the fields and on the stoves. It suits the Muscovite mind. The trading company would do well to remember it.’

‘Whom do you play with?’ Philippa said abruptly. ‘Or is it a game confined only to menfolk?’

There was laughter, which she had expected, and Lymond’s glance, which she summoned the courage to meet. But it was a look quite free of overtones, of mildly simulated reproof. ‘My opponent in fact was usually the Tsar Ivan. A matter of some diplomatic strain. One must not win too many games, and, on the other hand, one must not lose too many either.’

‘Tell us,’ said Lady Mary. ‘What is he truly like? One has heard such tales, of dogs hurled from the battlements, of wild exploits riding down peasants, of childish dabbling in the blood of dead animals. We have so many Englishmen there now. Is he to be trusted?’

Lymond said, ‘My advice to the Muscovy Company has been to establish their trading post there. They are in more danger from the Tartars at present than they ever will be from the Tsar. And that danger will be, I hope, short lived.’

There was a small silence. Then Lady Mary said, ‘Robert Best has told us, you should know, your position with the Tsar’s army.’

Lymond said, ‘So long as it is not public knowledge, no harm is done. I am making no claims to hold the whole of Muscovy secure single-handed. But I have tried in some measure to contain the threat
of the Tartars. There are other complications on the borders, but I shall not bore you with these.’

‘But you are here,’ Philippa said. ‘Can Muscovy spare you?’

Lymond’s blue eyes dwelled on her with chilly amusement. ‘In the nature of things, there are a number of gentlemen filling the void, I imagine, with some assiduity. Have you ever heard of Baida?’

No one had.

‘An extremely mettlesome leader of Cossacks, who has become a legend already in the Ukraine. There are many songs his men sing about him. You were asking about music. This is an example of it.’

‘Play,’ Lady Mary said. ‘There are virginals. Play and sing it to us. Or the harpsichord.’

He rose with ease and perched at the harpsichord, one hand on the keys. ‘It’s only a marching song. But this version is interesting.’ And he sang lightly, picking out the notes one-handed, an expurgated version of the song which had roared round the camp, on the night Prince Vishnevetsky had joined him.

He did not make it too long, and they left the table and moved round him as he played, and made agreeable sounds as he finished. Philippa said, ‘Who did you say Baida was?’

‘I didn’t,’ said Lymond. ‘In fact, his name is Dmitri Vishnevetsky.’

He did not expect it, clearly, to convey anything. And, indeed, only on Philippa’s face did any enlightenment show. But Lymond saw it, and before she had drawn breath to speak, he forestalled her. ‘But anything Rob Best told you about that,’ he said agreeably, ‘I should advise you to keep to yourself. Have you heard this new piece of music from France? M. de Roubay’s musicians are playing it in Edinburgh.’ And he turned and played properly and then rose and gave up his seat, and would not be persuaded to play again, but became part of the audience while Lady Mary herself played an estampie, to be followed by one of her cousins.

Philippa, with loving care, favoured them last of all with a furious piece which fell short of the surprising technical skill of her husband, but far exceeded it in violent expression. He congratulated her winningly. ‘Music. The Medicine of the Soul.’

‘Aristotle,’ said Philippa impatiently. ‘But yours isn’t music. It’s numerology.’

‘Numerology,’ said Mary Sidney, ‘is the basis of all great music. Or so—don’t you?—Master Dee holds. But before we discover an
argument, I suggest, Philippa, that you take the opposing army away and attack it in private. You did wish to see Mr Crawford, didn’t you?’

She did not. But, she remembered with exasperation, it was necessary. Lymond was looking at her with raised brows and the rest of them, damn them, were smiling. ‘Yes, of course,’ Philippa said. ‘If you will excuse us?’

‘Go to Sir Henry’s room,’ Lady Mary called after her. ‘And if you use weapons, be sure to call witnesses.’

The laughter followed them both along the dark passage.

*

Lymond shut the door and said, ‘Be a good girl and keep it short.’ Against the dark panelling the clear, colourless skin and fair hair looked deceptively delicate, like a tutor she had once had who turned out to be a practising gelder.

The room, littered with cases and boxes, had obviously never been used since Sir Henry had left the previous summer to become Vice Treasurer and General Governor of all the King’s and Queen’s Revenues in Ireland. There were two white Irish rugs on the floor and a little slope field bed which still filled the room, with a cloth counterpoint lined with fustian and a leather lute case lying on it. Philippa squeezed her way irritably between a flat Flanders chest and a magnificent joined chair, with its seat lozenged in cream silk wrought with gold porcupines, and perched herself at last, with infinite if Turkish grace, on the windowsill.

A large curtained object decorating the wall on her left provoked her to investigate with one finger: the painting beneath was of St Jerome, notable for his involvement with the lady Paula and her daughter Eustochion, and disarmingly naked. Philippa whipped back her hand and said with irritation to the St Jerome still standing immobile with his back to the wall: ‘I can barely see you, never mind confound you with eloquence. Come and sit on the porcupines.’

‘And sing? Prick-song?’ Lymond suggested.

Philippa was silent. Then she said, ‘I don’t suppose either of us has had a particularly rollicking morning. I was stupid, and everyone else seems to have suffered for it. When did you get the letter?’

‘It doesn’t matter,’ Lymond said. ‘The damage is done, and at least we are less ignorant, if not noticeably wiser than before. Now you
have
involved the rest of us, I suggest you step back and let us struggle on in our own puerile way. That apart, where do we stand? I assume Tristram Trusty has passed on my talk with your mother?’

‘And your memorable talk with himself,’ Philippa said. ‘I can quite imagine what you would have done in his place.’

‘I doubt it,’ said Lymond dryly. ‘But I shall speed the divorce all I can. What else?’

‘This,’ said Philippa, hauling papers out of the serviceable bag at her girdle. ‘They’re yours.’ And she held them out.

Slack-lidded, Lymond did not at once move. ‘Today, you are full of surprises. What are they?’

‘Reports,’ Philippa said. ‘From de Seurre and Nicholas Applegarth and Hercules Tait. Didn’t you wonder why Bartholomew Lychpole had no letters waiting to pass on to you? He didn’t have them because I intercepted them. Here they are.’

‘Now,’ said Lymond slowly, ‘you
have
astonished me.’ He moved forward thoughtfully and taking the papers she offered him, stood turning them over. ‘These have been opened.’

‘I opened them,’ Philippa said. ‘Didn’t you wonder either how my letters reached you? Lychpole came and told me he was in correspondence with you. He’s not very discreet. Or very clever.’

She had his full attention now. He was watching her face, the blue eyes dainty as metal embroidery. He said, ‘Do I have it clear? Bartholomew Lychpole informed you unasked that if you wished to write to me, you could do so through him. He also informed you that I was leaving Russia and that all the dispatches from Europe would therefore be coming to him. And because you thought him untrustworthy, you decided to intercept them? How could you do that?’

‘I am studying with Ascham,’ Philippa said. ‘The Queen’s Latin secretary.’

‘I noticed you capped all my best quotations,’ said Lymond absently. He turned, and, finding the porcupine chair in his way, laid the dogeared packet for the moment on the seat, and sat himself on the arm of it. ‘And on the strength of Lychpole’s tender concern for your marriage vows, you decided to stop all the traffic between us?’

‘I’ve read all your books as well,’ said Philippa, getting the confession over quickly while he was unlikely to dwell on it. ‘It sounds feeble, doesn’t it? But there was more to it than that. Lady Lennox also knew that you were in Russia. And I didn’t tell her.’

‘So?’ Lymond said.

‘So I feel,’ Philippa said, ‘that Bartholomew Lychpole may be a little more than just careless.’

‘In which case,’ Lymond said, ‘Lady Lennox has seen all the letters Lychpole has sent me already, including the two written by you. Why did you open these?’

Philippa, who had gone red, said flatly, ‘They might have been important. You were a long time on the voyage.’

‘So you knew I was coming,’ Lymond said. ‘And Chancellor. What a tense winter you’ve had. All the same, it’s a pity you opened them.
Now we shall never know whether the Lennoxes reached them before you did. Were they important?’ And picking them up, he began to leaf lightly through them. ‘Christ, what a gossip.’

‘Espionage is gossip,’ Philippa said. ‘Is that the series about our octogenarian Pope’s wars against the Imperialists?’

‘He fights Charles because he is an octogenarian,’ Lymond said. ‘He was born when Italy was free: a welltuned instrument of four strings, Naples, Milan, Venice and the States of the Church. He has waited for this all his life, a priest, a linguist and a scholar. Now he sits there with his three scandalous nephews, drinking his repulsive mangiaguerra and scheming how to recover Naples and Milan and keep Venice Ayes 0, Noes 0, Neutral 19. Helped, I gather, by Piero Strozzi’s Germans, Protestant to a man.’

‘And by the French,’ Philippa said.

‘Yes. Well, de Guise is supposed to have a remote claim on Naples through Renée of Lorraine. Hence the secret treaty between France and the Pope to recover Naples, and the Pope’s fury when the Constable pushed through the truce two months later. So our old man goes to work, and five months after that, manages a new secret treaty between himself and France—here it is. The Pope to create a new batch of French Cardinals, just in case. Each side to provide twelve thousand foot, five hundred men at arms and five hundred light horse. The crown of Naples to go to King Henri’s younger son, and land to the Papal Territory and the three nephews’ estates. Also, the French King is to invite the Sultan Suleiman to attack Calabria …

‘How the Pope adores Charles.
That schismatic and heretical Emperor.… We will deprive him of the Empire, of his realms and of his existence as a human being and a Christian … that devilish soul of Charles, in that filthy body … the most vile and abject nation in the world … gnawing the vitals and drinking the blood of the poor … diabolical, soulless, thirsty for the blood of Christians … born to destroy the world.… If the enemy crosses my frontier by so much as the distance of this toothpick, a sentence so tremendous it will darken the sun.…
And a bit in Italian, which is just as well. What sentence? Perpetual residence in Naples?’

‘I understand Italian,’ Philippa said. ‘The threat, if you read on, is to release the Emperor’s subjects from their oath of allegiance, and confer the kingdoms on those who shall obtain them. And the justice of God, he says, will cause even the Turk to come and inherit them.’

‘I see,’ Lymond said. ‘
We love the King of France and will make use of him, as we would even of the Turk, for the need of the See Apostolic
. But the King of France doesn’t want to fight, yet. The Duke of Alva crosses into Papal territory on some small excuse, and Strozzi and all the French ministers are hanging on to the pontiff’s coat tails to persuade him not to give Philip cause to start a full-scale war. For now
Charles has abdicated and King Philip is running the Empire—I see his character has not escaped blessing, either.’

‘Little beast, begotten of that diabolical father?’ Philippa said.

‘You
do
know Italian.
An inexperienced youth, having by the grace of God become master of so many kingdoms, his first exploit is to take up arms against the See Apostolic to give proof of himself.… That accursed silly boy; would to God he had never been born, nor yet that iniquitous father of his: rebels to God; a treacherous race, without faith.… Rely upon it, the powder is prepared and the guns shotted and that if ignited, everything will be consumed in all directions
. A fair estimate. And note of a letter from Queen Mary of England to her husband King Philip, congratulating him on the Duke of Alva’s success, and suggesting that since all is going well, he should come back to England.… Oh God, the asinine woman,’ Lymond said.

Philippa Somerville was silent.

‘But she pays you. The point is taken. Ah, here is Venice.
We love the Seignory, both as Pope and as man
. Offered half Naples to intervene on the Pope’s side, the Seignory declines, and hopes that matters will adjust without their help—Ayes 100. The Pope is angry:
Tomorrow or the next day we shall depart this life and you will remain, and in the ruins will remember this poor old man, and lament not having chosen in time to provide against our downfall.…’

‘His Serenity the Doge,’ Philippa said, ‘has accommodated His Holiness with three tons of coarse cannon powder. You
have
reached the bit about Courtenay?’