Chapter Twenty-Two

 

 

 

Neither Baron Mandeville nor his taciturn daughter appeared at the breakfast table.

 

Ryan and the others had been roused and unlocked from their chambers at 815 by Mercy Weyman, accompanied by a discreet but powerful force of a dozen sec men, all carrying Armalites.

 

She explained that the baron was often a late riser and that Mistress Marie had followed her usual practice and gone riding in the forest.

 

They all ate at the same long table as the evening before, in the galleried dining room, served by a dozen silent women. The only other member of the staff of Sun Crest who appeared was Sergeant Harry Guiteau.

 

He nodded to them and sat at the bottom end of the refectory table, helping himself to a jug of coffee and making no effort to join in their muted conversation. Ryan felt that the sec man was there merely to observe and listen. And then to report back to his master.

 

The food was varied and excellent fresh apples and oranges and some more exotic specimens of fruit, in heavy, sweet syrup; several brans and flakes with foaming milk; platters of eggs, some over easy and some sunny-side up, with ham and bacon and link and patty sausages; the finest, fluffiest hash browns that Ryan Cawdor had ever eaten; a copper dish of fragrant refried beans; trout, as fresh as the sunrise, on and off the bone, and some delicious smoked salmon; a dozen or more different breads and biscuits, all warm from the ovens, with twice as many jellies and preserves.

 

And plenty of the wonderful coffee. Nobody said more than a few words, everyone concentrating on the rare sybaritic pleasure of eating fine food in the finest surroundings.

 

As they'd walked down from the floor with the bedrooms, Ryan had been sharply alert, trying to work out the lay of the land, the strengths of the ville. And the weaknesses.

 

So far he hadn't managed to spot any weaknesses. Just as Doc was draining his fourth cup of strong sweet coffee, Baron Mandeville made his appearance. The first clue to his arrival was the scraping of the chair legs on the flags as Guiteau stood upright. He was wearing a crimson cap of fine wool, perched on top of his snowy curls. The Father Christmas outfit of the night before had gone, replaced by a dark green jacket over a pair of tailored black pants that were tucked into neat ankle boots. Ryan noticed what tiny, trim feet he had. A small pearl-handled revolver in a holster was at his belt.

 

It crossed Ryan's mind how often frontier barons went in for ostentatious blasters, rather than selecting dull and functional weapons.

 

"No, sit down, sit down," he said, beaming and waving his pudgy little hands. In fact, the only person to stand had been his senior sec man.

 

"Thanks for the bed and lodging," Ryan said. "Couldn't have been better."

 

There was a chorus of agreement from all around the table. Doc wiped his mouth with his swallow's eye kerchief, barely managing to stifle a belch.

 

"I think that your table is as fine as any in the history of man," he commented.

 

"Very welcome, Doctor. All of you" he spread his arms wide "are most welcome."

 

Ryan stood. "If you want us to go, then we'll move along, Baron."

 

"No, no, no!" Each repetition rose up the scale into an anguished squeak.

 

Guiteau broke the sudden silence that followed. "Baron wants you to see his collection of predarkies this morning. Then, after you take a break for some more food, there'll be the postnoon combat skills."

 

"We can watch these tests?" Mildred asked.

 

It seemed that Mandeville hesitated for a moment. Then his smile returned like the sun from behind a cloud. "Of course. But better than that. All of you can take part in any of the events that take your fancy."

 

"Are there prizes?" J.B. queried.

 

Guiteau laughed, smothering the sound behind a cupped hand, trying to turn it into a cough. The baron turned toward him as though he were going to say something. He changed his mind. "Prizes for those who do well and please me."

 

"And those who do badly and do not please us will also get their own reward."

 

None of them had been aware of her entry. But Marie Mandeville was leaning over the rail of the minstrels' gallery above them, her hair falling straight down on either side of her pale oval face. She was in shadow, but Ryan again got the uncomfortable feeling that the woman was staring directly into his face, trying to stare into his soul.

 

Nobody asked her what she meant, but the sense of the unvoiced threat hung in the air like the remembered hiss of a venomous reptile.

 

"Good morning, my dear. Did you enjoy your ride?"

 

"No. The bitch of a mare nearly foundered under me. I had to spur her and lash her until the blood flowed to the ground to get her home."

 

"Will you eat?"

 

"After you've gone. Guiteau."

 

"Lady?"

 

"Remain behind."

 

"Lady."

 

Mandeville was still near the main doors, and he beckoned to them. "Come then. I shall show you my pictures and my weapons. I am proud of both."

 

Ryan was standing close to Guiteau, who whispered softly, "I remembered where I seen you before. Long years ago, in another place. Trader's man."

 

"That a problem?"

 

"Not for me. Nothing's a problem for me. Nothing in Sun Crest touches me, Cawdor."

 

The rest were filing after the baron. Marie still watched, motionless, from above.

 

Ryan smiled at the sec man. "You can't be a diamond swimming in a sea of shit forever, Guiteau."

 

"No?"

 

"No. Doesn't take long before you're just another shit-covered diamond."

 

 

 

"MY PICTURES FIRST. I was always a lover of the art of painting. Even before I was able toto obtain some for myself. Now I have them here in this gallery."

 

He had led them out of the dining room, along a broad passage with three flights of stairs opening off it. Ryan noticed the sec men posted at the angles of the corridor, none of them showing the boredom and indifference that he'd seen from guards in other, sloppier villes.

 

They tracked the stout figure up a wide staircase, each step made from a single block of rose-tinted stone. The banisters were marble, and some sort of heraldic animal stood guarding at top and bottom.

 

"This way."

 

The baron acknowledged the salute of a sec man. "Morning, Brandt. Wife better?"

 

"Much, thanks, Baron."

 

They moved on, Mandeville turning and speaking over his shoulder to his following guests. "One of the best in the ville at hand-to-hand until he dislocated his right knee a year ago. Broke his heart he couldn't compete anymore. Any of you people much good in that field?"

 

Eyes darted toward Ryan, who nodded at Michael. There didn't seem much risk in showing their skills to Baron Mandeville. If he'd wished it, they could all have been sent off to buy the farm at any time since they reached Sun Crest.

 

"I'll give it a try," Michael said.

 

"You? Tad young for a rough-and-tumble. Still, like your courage, young man. Brother, isn't it?"

 

"Yeah."

 

"Don't suppose any of you have a way with a knife? Throwing?"

 

Ryan answered for them. "Used to know a boy. Could put a knife in your eye at fifty paces."

 

"Hope that isn't how you lost your eye, Cawdor." A bellow of laughter filled the hall. "Course. You said that it was a rabbit, didn't you? Rabbit! Like that, Cawdor."

 

They turned a corner, finding themselves facing an immensely long gallery.

 

The morning had been cool, and fires burned in six hearths measured along the length of the gallery. A little smoke had drifted out as the wind veered easterly, and the room was so long that it was impossible to make out the far end through the woody haze.

 

The ceiling was fifteen feet high, and there was not a single window in either of the endless walls. It was lit with strings of hand-cast light bulbs that flooded the walls with a golden glow. Ryan noticed that a significant proportion of the lights had malfunctioned.

 

But what caught the eye were the pictures.

 

At that first startling glance, it seemed to Ryan that there wasn't a single inch of space on the walls, from floor to ceiling, that wasn't covered by pictures. All had been hung haphazardly, some of them overlapping.

 

Many were in ornate frames of rococo gilt, while some had plain frames of unvarnished beech or elm. Some had glass over the paintings, but most were uncovered.

 

"By the Three Kennedys!" Doc stood stock-still, the ferrule of his sword stick rapping very softly on the polished wood-block floor.

 

"Gaia! You must have all the paintings left in Deathlands, Baron!"

 

"Far from it, Krysty. I may call you by your first name, may I? Good. No, there are many other barons throughout the world who have collections every bit Well, honesty makes me admit that their collections are not quite up to the quality of my own gallery. Not quite."

 

"Quality or quantity?" Mildred whispered to J.B. "He's sure got the quantity."

 

"Perhaps I should take you through, picture by picture," Mandeville said doubtfully. "Though that would take us all day and most of the night. I want you also to admire my collection of weapons this morning. And there are the games this afternoon. No, we will move along the gallery and I will comment on any that are specially dear to me."

 

Ryan found the next hour or so lurched past him in a blur of names and colors, giving the cumulative effect of staggering boredom.

 

There were more paintings in that single room in Sun Crest than he'd seen in his entire life. But after the first couple of dozen they all started to merge in his mind.

 

He remembered the first one clearly.

 

The small brass plate on the bottom of the frame said it was by Eric Bailey R.A., though Mandeville wasn't sure what the initials meant. Possibly "Royal Artist," as the man had been English.

 

It was a large portrait of a modest young woman conversing with a canary in a cage. She wore a dress like a puritan's, with a white collar and cuffs, and her hair was smoothed, nunlike, into a low chignon. Though it was impossible to ignore the nubile curves of her body. On her face was an expression that struck Ryan as rapturous imbecility.

 

The title of the picture was The Pretty Maid .

 

"She looks double-stupe," Dean whispered to his father. "Like she was going to eat that jaybird."

 

Mandeville didn't hear him, striding on ahead, hands locked behind his back, beaming with a proudly proprietary air.

 

Mildred and Doc boggled in amazement at some of the paintings, which they said were very famous, though both of them, making sure that Mandeville didn't hear them, suggested that they thought that quite a lot of them were either fakes or prints of the original pictures.

 

Ryan couldn't find many to admire, though he enjoyed a large canvas of a fallen tree with dark, jumbled branches, against a field of bright rapeseed. The signature looked like "Alan Burgess," but he couldn't be certain.

 

One of the few pictures from the over-the-top collection that everyone liked was an impressively plain painting of a rectangular adobe building, with a shadowed door, against a reddish-pink Southwestern landscape.

 

Mandeville said he didn't know who it was by, but had traded a pair of matched Navy Colts for it a few years earlier.

 

Doc and Mildred were in agreement that it had been painted by a woman artist called Georgia O'Keefe.

 

Names flowed by Ryan as the pictures blended into a mosaic of multicolored wallpaper.

 

Hopper, Alma Tadema, Picasso, Winslow, Warhol and Remingtonone of the few names that prompted any interest at all from J.B.

 

"One of your relatives, Mildred?" Michael asked, peering at the name beneath a portrait of a sturdy naked woman with a plait of reddish hair.

 

"Andrew Wyeth? No. No relation."

 

The smoke settled on Ryan's chest, making the atmosphere more oppressive.

 

The talk had been fairly desultory at the beginning, but by the time they'd all joined the baron at the distant end of the gallery a gloomy silence had descended over them all.

 

Mandeville was sitting on a brocaded chaise longue, waiting eagerly for them.

 

"Well?"

 

"Amazing," Ryan commented after a moment's consideration. "Double amazing."

 

"Yeah," the Armorer echoed. "Never seen so many pictures all in the same place."

 

"Beautiful." Krysty looked back at the diminishing perspective of the gallery, its distant entrance quite invisible in the dusty haze.

 

"No criticism? Just unstinted praise?" Baron Mandeville beamed.

 

"I thought there was too many of them," Dean said. "I liked some, like that desert house and that woman lying on the hillside. And I thought the one was a hot pipe with the raft and everyone chilled. But there was just too many all at once. Sorry, Baron, but you asked."

 

"Too many pictures," Mandeville repeated. His merry little face had gone cold, as though a mask of ice had been slipped into place. "You think"

 

"Mozart, the great composer, was once told by his noble patron, the emperor, that a piece of music contained too many notes." Doc looked to make sure he had the baron's attention. "Mozart asked the emperor which particular notes he thought that he might profitably remove." And he gave a great bellow of laughter to underline the fact that it was supposed to be a joke.

 

"Yes, yes, I see. Too many notes. Too many pictures! Of course."

 

Mandeville threw back his head and joined in Doc's merriment, the ice vanishing and his rosy Father Christmas cheeks and smile returning. But Ryan noticed that the meltwater look never left the eyes.

 

 

 

RYAN HAD GLANCED at his chron several times during the interminable visit to the ville's art gallery, watching the digits tick over with agonizing slowness.

 

Yet, somehow, it was already close to noon and a faint rumbling in his stomach warned him that some more of the baron's excellent food would be welcome.

 

It was a fact that had also impressed itself upon Mandeville himself.

 

"Damnation and blast it!" The baron stamped his foot in a strangely childish temper. "I wanted to show you my guns and swords before we ate. But now it's the mid of the day and the games are set for two o'clock."

 

"Do you collect anything else, Baron?" Krysty asked.

 

"Pictures and weapons are" He was suddenly suspicious. "Why? What have you heard about my private What?" His eyes blinked and he tugged at the white beard, trying for a strained, false laugh.

 

"What am I Of course you didn't know. Couldn't, unless that unnatural bitch has been"

 

He had a gold hunter watch in a pocket of his vest, on a golden fob chain. It suddenly started to play a tinkling, melodious little tune, which, oddly, reminded Ryan of an antique Western vid, but he couldn't recall what it was.

 

It broke the thread of Mandeville's anger.

 

"I think that every one of you probably possesses some sort of cunning in fighting. I feel that, Cawdor. Yes, oh, yes. The ladies will watch, if they wish. And the bright little boy. But the rest of you will amuse us."

 

"If you like," Ryan said casually. "But if you have anyone who reckons themselves with a hand-blaster, then I'd back Mildred against them."

 

"Back the woman? Sergeant Guiteau is the best I've ever seen. Mildred can shoot against him if she wishes."

 

She smiled. "I wish, Baron. I really wish."

 

 

 

ONCE AGAIN THE REFECTORY table groaned under an assortment of cold meats, salads and pastries, with jugs of chilled fruit punch to drink.

 

J.B. sat next to Ryan, picking at a plate of sliced roast beef with some cold potatoes and pickles.

 

"Think going in for these combat games of his is a good idea, Ryan?"

 

"I don't know. Just have to wait and see. They start in an hour, so we won't have long to wait."