The Ringed Castle Read Online Free PDF

circumspectly, from Mr Hislop’s baby-pink lips.
    He was the same. Or very nearly the same. Relief flooded through Adam, and beside him Alec Guthrie smiled also, and said, ‘Francis!’
    The wreathed, sapphire gaze rested on him and then moved, with perfect courtesy, along the haphazard grouping of faces. ‘So you have all arrived safely. I am glad. Don’t rise, gentlemen,’ Lymond said pleasantly. ‘I am sure you have worked hard for your breakfast.’
    Which brought them all, untidily, to their feet as Lymond pressed the door shut and walked to the head of the table. There he tossed down some papers and, hooking the master chair to him, said, ‘Please sit. We have a great deal to get through this morning. I know four of you. Guthrie, will you kindly introduce me to the others?’ And stood, knee and elbow supported, while Guthrie, level-voiced, described them one by one. Roger Brown of Kirkcudbright. Hislop, from Renfrewshire, who had joined them when Hercules Tait left for Venice. And the two former Knights of St John, Alan Vassey and Ludovic d’Harcourt, a Frenchman of Scottish extraction who had come to replace Jerott Blyth.
    ‘Also departed,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘The beauty of worthy things is not in the face but in the backside, endearing more by their departure than their address. Daniel Hislop, the son of the bishop?’
    ‘The Bishop’s bastard,’ said Hislop, with a cold-eyed assumption of coyness. ‘Sir. My lord. Jesus.’
    Lymond’s eyes turned to him, open. Then changing position, he seated himself, and placed his hands gently on the table before him.
‘Sir
will do,’ said Lymond calmly, ‘unless you receive divine witness to the contrary. I thought all our Knights of St John had hastened back for the Grand Master’s election on Malta?’
    D’Harcourt answered: a burly, soft-footed man with wrestler’s features and a schoolboy tangle of pale, tightly curled hair. ‘Malta will manage without me. I wished to fight Mohammed in Russia.’
    Lymond was watching his fingers. ‘And if the Tsar in his wisdom decides to fight the Lithuanian Christians and not the Koran-worshipping Tartars?’ He looked up.
    ‘I will fight,’ d’Harcourt said. ‘I am a mercenary, and I fight for the leader who pays best.’
    ‘So are we all mercenaries,’ Lymond said. ‘I would have you remember that, all of you. There is no precedent for what we are about to do here. We are about to offer this kingdom an army, and there will be no place whatever for anyone’s private crusade.’
    ‘An army!’ said Alec Guthrie.
    ‘Can you possibly imagine,’ Lymond said, ‘that I brought you all from France to rush about on demand, killing Tartars?’
    ‘Eight of us?’ said Adam diffidently.
    ‘Nine of us,’ Lymond said dryly. ‘To find out what exists, and plan what we want to exist. To create the prototypes, and instruct the instructors. And then to muster and train and equip a national army.’
    ‘Dealing meanwhile with such aggravation or reaggravation as molesting invaders may offer us,’ said Fergie Hoddim. ‘Yon’s a long business, sir.’
    ‘Yon’s a lifetime,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘Fergie’s all right.
He
isn’t married.’
    ‘Neither are you,’ said Adam sharply.
    ‘No, but the women are all the right shape for Fergie,’ said Hislop.
    ‘Then you will have to decide, won’t you,’ said Lymond, ‘between women and money? It will be a stay of five years. Are you prepared for it?’
    Guthrie said, ‘Are you staying five years?’ And his blunt, bearded face turned squarely to Lymond’s.
    Lymond said, ‘I am not staying anywhere unless we are granted fees on a scale greater than anything we might earn in Europe. That, on your behalf, I can promise. In return, I shall offer the Tsar five years from this spring of our services. After that, you may take your fortune and go.’
    ‘And you?’ said Guthrie again.
    ‘You need not, I think concern yourself about me,’ Lymond said, his