The Ringed Castle (89 page)

Pembroke and Arundel, Paget and Petre were all within range of
that deliberate, carrying voice. Margaret Lennox did not look at the other men round her. But, her colour high and her carriage stiff and erect and unyielding, she said, ‘Mr Elder: I think we must go. The whims and humours of his unfortunate master appear to have affected Mr Crawford’s whirligig brain.’ And turning her head, ‘Where shall we find you next?’ said Margaret Lennox to the boy from long ago who was now so obdurately a man. ‘In New Spain, perhaps, in a mantle of feathers, running errands with knots on a string? Before you die, there must be nothing you have not experienced. When you die—and I shall be there—it will be an experience which no man has savoured. Guard your health, Mr Crawford. I should not like you to leave us too soon.’

For a moment longer, she held his eyes. Then, waiting neither for Elder nor Philippa, Margaret Lennox brought her train round to her hand and, gathering it, walked from the room.

‘Talking of feathers,’ said Francis Crawford conversationally to his elegant, seraglio-trained wife.

‘Or feather-brains,’ said Philippa Somerville furiously. Her eyes, glassy with rage, glared at her spouse. ‘You heard what the Tsar threatened. He’ll have your head in a blood-bowl like Cyrus.’

‘Not Cyrus,’ said Lymond. ‘I’m the other one.
He pincheth and spareth and pineth his life. To coffer up bags for to leave to his wife
. The pay is good. And I’ve remembered another quotation about Greeks.’

‘I don’t want to hear it,’ said Philippa.

‘You can try it on Master Vannes.
Greeks in bed, Italians at table, are most neat
. It doesn’t mention Spanish. Which will you have, Philippa? I like your Austin. I haven’t met your Don Alfonso.’

‘Earrings,’ Philippa said. ‘And eyes like dome-headed rivets. I don’t know which I shall have. I can’t have any, until someone annuls this——’ She broke off. ‘How am I going to get this marriage dissolved if you go back to Russia?’

‘Desertion?’ Lymond suggested easily. ‘Which reminds me. There were one or two mysteries about these last proceedings which I can see are going to be for ever unexplained. I think I owe you another debt. I owe you a great many debts, it would appear: it is time I removed myself and allowed you to allot your endowments where they are better deserved. Goodbye.’

He smiled, but did not kiss her cheek, as Don Alfonso would have done; or take her hand, as Austin effected so gracefully, or hug her, as Jane or Kate would have felt impelled to do.

He said again, without the smile, ‘Goodbye,
Yunitsa,’
and turning walked out of the room.

Ludovic d’Harcourt, come to take his wistful leave, stood beside Philippa, as Lymond vanished.
‘Yunitsa?’
he queried.

She smiled, bringing her gaze back to her hand as he lifted and kissed it. ‘A stupid joke. It means heifer, he tells me.’

‘It means heifer,’ d’Harcourt agreed; and, since the others were becoming impatient, pressed her hand and abandoned the subject without informing her how much more it meant.

*

The barge which Don Juan had commanded for Mr Crawford and his five friends was a fine one, with a gay canopy aft, and eight oarsmen in livery, who made the boat fly after its shadow in the ripe evening sunlight so that it shot London Bridge like a greyhound. It also held, between the canopy and the rowers, a captain and four armed militiamen. The King of Spain was anxious to speed his embarrassing guests towards Russia.

But Gravesend, twenty-four miles off, was not to be compassed in an evening. Just short of Greenwich, as the first riverside lights were spiralling down through the water, the portside rowers began pulling hard for the right bank and the captain, leaning over with deference, indicated to Mr Crawford from Russia that lodging had been arranged here for his party that night.

Mr Crawford from Russia, in the midst of a white-hot, furious quarrel which had lasted all the way from Westminster, acknowledged the information and continued in an undertone to issue commands to his subordinates.

Fergie Hoddim, for the five hundredth time, said, ‘Aye, we hear ye. But if a man says he’s going to Muscovy, how do you mean to impede him?’

‘You are not going,’ Lymond said. ‘No one is going but myself. You can get off the boat here and you can spend the night if you wish at the King of Spain’s expense, and then you can go to the devil. But you are not boarding the
Primrose
. Any of you.’

‘You’re falsing the doom,’ Fergie said. ‘You canna false the doom. It’s agreed, and that’s an end o’ it.’

As the sky darkened, the lights on either bank became suddenly stronger: the rowers, shipping oars, were drifting gently towards a low landing stage. Behind them, another boat was coming to shore. ‘Anyway,’ Guthrie said. ‘If you can go to Russia with impunity, why should we be less adequate?’

The other boat, swinging across, appeared to be heading straight for them. The captain of the royal barge, confident in the power of his gilded prow and three silken banners, gave a cursory shout. The other boat barely altered direction. Lymond said, ‘I am exceedingly tired of this argument.’

‘So,’ said Guthrie, ‘are we.’ He was looking over his shoulder.
Immediately, it seemed, the other barge, not quite as large as their own, moved quickly forward and hung floating, side by side with the barge from Westminster, the two gunwales grazing together. An outburst of shouting exploded.

It was too neat to be quite accidental. Lymond jumped to his feet. He had backed, weaponless, one hand on the struts of the canopy when someone seized him from behind, and someone else from the side. He reacted instantly, twisting half free and ducking, with his knees and elbows and balled fists already seeking and finding their marks. In the rocking boat, two might have failed to hold him. But when a third hard body flung itself on him, helped by another and yet another, the combined weight was enough to dislodge him. His face grim, his concerted muscular strength resisting every pull, blow and thrust of his attackers, Francis Crawford was dragged from his barge and thrown headlong into the other boat while his assailants, jumping, landed on top of him. Then the second boat, pushing off, fled with its captive across the dark water.

The shock of landing knocked Lymond breathless. He was lying half over a bench, with someone pressing hard on his back and someone else gripping his right arm: ahead he could see the scuffed buskins of the first oarsman; behind, Alec Guthrie’s calf boots. The pain in his diaphragm lessened; his breath came back; power returned fully to all his limbs. While the men above him still thought him helpless Lymond drew a long, noiseless breath, and then with every ounce of spring in his body kicked and rolled over and then, rising, kicked and struck again and again, feeling the blows ring on bone and sink into flesh, planting, without mercy, the agonizing punches, on Guthrie, on Blacklock, on Hoddim, on Hislop, on d’Harcourt. On all his own men, who had taken the law into their own hands and believed they could command him.

It was Alec Guthrie who stopped Lymond as he got to the gunwale and was ready, half-freed, to dive over. Guthrie who seized him round the waist, his face marked as Lymond’s own face was bruised, but who used his hands to inflict pain and to control, so that Lymond could not quite take the last step which would take him over and into the river.

Then Francis Crawford slid his one free hand inside his coat and dragged from it the glittering blade he always carried and said,
‘Now!’
to Guthrie. And this time, it was magisterial.

It was the only word any of them had spoken. Lymond’s face held naked and uncontrolled anger: Lymond’s eyes stared into Guthrie’s and Guthrie, in silence, tightened his crippling grip. Then Francis Crawford said softly, through the great breaths he was taking above Guthrie’s head, ‘I am not to be stopped. I will sail at all costs, and not one of you is going to prevent me. If you try, I shall kill you.’

The rowers, pulling hard, had almost taken them to the opposite shore. Across the dark river came the exploding of a hackbut, and shouting. They could see the other boat, with some of its oars dropped, getting raggedly under way to follow them. There came, clearly, a great deal of shouting. Faces, dimly white, turned from the few small wherries still plying past them, and someone yelled from a caravel anchored upstream a little. Then Guthrie, disregarding every warning, threw his bearded head up and flung out his arm to seize Lymond’s arm with the knife; and Lymond stabbed him.

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.

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 and breech hose, Guthrie was paler than his short grizzled beard, and there was a length of stained linen bound, over and over, by his neck and shoulder and chest. But his eyes were clear and resolute on Lymond and Lymond answered him quite as sharply. ‘Do you think my will was paramount when I came to this country? I came on the Tsar’s order, against his wishes and my own, because it seemed good for Russia. I am returning for the same reason.’

And Guthrie said, ‘You will not reach the Dwina alive.’

‘Because of the arms?’ Lymond said brusquely; and raised his aching brows in exasperated impatience. ‘Don’t you think? Don’t you know your merchants by now? The Privy Council may have unloaded the munitions, but the Muscovy Company had its own interests to look after, and did. There are nine casks on board which answer to pewter, but you won’t find the contents on anyone’s cupboard in Moscow. It’s not what we asked for. But it’s something.’ He stopped, and taking his time looked with deliberation into each hostile face. ‘I am not throwing away two years of my life for a fancy. The foundations are built. I will not let the Tsar, or Vishnevetsky or anyone else stop the fabric from rising upon them.’

‘How will you deal with them?’ Guthrie said. ‘How will you deal with unbalanced and ignorant aliens?’

Lymond flung his crossed hands wide. ‘How do I ever deal with the Tsar? From moment to moment, from second to second, averting, training, sustaining … cossetting him like a nurse-maid if I have to.… He cannot have gone so far away in ten months.’

‘And Vishnevetsky?’

‘Baida, so young, so glorious? I shall serve under him,’ said Lymond mildly. ‘It will not be for long.’

‘And Güzel?’ said Danny Hislop, from across the width of the room. Lymond turned.

But it was Philippa who answered, with her brown hair drifting loose round her pale, thin-boned face, and her brown eyes concentrated
and frowning. ‘This is what you must consider. She isn’t fickle, Kiaya Khátún. She knew what was coming. Master Dee here has drawn up your horoscope—yes,’ as his face hardened—’I gave him your birth date. He didn’t return the favour, I may say, by allowing me more than this single fact from its contents. Your horoscope says that you will not go back to Russia.’