The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [130]
‘… I can only say,’ said Francis Crawford tolerantly from the high ravaged bed, ‘that whoever slept with Dmitri Vishnevetsky fared much, much worse.’
Chapter 7
I believe we carry on our ships someone paid to kill you.
So Diccon Chancellor had found himself saying to Lymond. And as he toiled through those dark months of winter, exercising his spurious authority and disentangling the assorted affairs of his drapers, Chancellor found himself no nearer discovering which of them he could trust.
What of the four whom on the surface he had learned to know so well in Moscow—statuesque, bearded Killingworth; burly Rob Best, Ned Price, the young, clever wits of Harry Lane? Or the two company sons, Judde and Hawtrey, who dashed back and forwards, overturning sledges, from Vologda; or Barnes’s protégé Christopher Hudson, the first to get through with the delayed stock from Yaroslavl, and the man with the keenest nose for a bargain? It was Hudson who picked up sturgeons at seven altines each, which would cost nine marks for worse bought in Danzig. It was Hudson who reported that hemp was cheaper too, by two shillings and sixpence a hundred than in Danzig, and that George had been right to refuse twelve roubles for his cloth at Vologda, but should have jumped at the price for his sugar. As it was, Hudson had scraped up enough of the Tsar’s spilled chest to make a small profit, and had even sold the empty cask seasoned with Holland, largely because of the crest on the bung.
Diccon thought Hudson was too keen to have much care for English politics. He thought the same of Richard Grey, who had gone back from Vologda to Kholmogory to arrange for the storage of their unsold goods and those ready for shipment in the spring, and to set up a counting-house, with invoices, ledgers and cipher books, helped at intervals by his two veterans, Sedgewick and Edwards.
What did any of them have to do with a petty feud two thousand miles behind them in London? For they had got their charter. It had come from the Tsar’s lordly house and castle the Moskva, grandly cased, with a small red seal depicting a naked and stunted Saint George demolishing a no doubt Roman Catholic dragon. The wording had a sycophantic English ring about it, largely because it had been drawn up with his tongue in his cheek by Fergie Hoddim, and retranslated twice since, gaining drama as it progressed:
Considering how needful merchandise is, which furnisheth men of all that which is convenient for their living and nourriture, for their clothing, trimming, the satisfying of their delights, and all other things convenient and profitable for them, in such sort as amity is thereby entered into, and planted to continue; and the enjoyers thereof be as men living in a golden world …
It granted to all members of the Fellowship and successors for ever the right to buy and sell without tax or levy or safe conduct, to choose and discipline shippers and packers, weighers, brokers, measurers and wagoners; to govern and rule any Englishmen in Russia, and to deal with lawbreaking and complaints. It promised redress in case of injury, reparation for robbery; and enthusiasm for all the Company’s pious practices: in every possible particular, it was unspeakably generous. On paper.
After enjoying his golden world for a week or so, George Killingworth fell into the habit of quoting it, with a coda entirely his own.
‘Russians! Vipers! The cunning, wicked progeny of vipers!’
And Lane and Price and Best, holding him down, would talk him into a rational mood again. Hold a daily meeting of agents and factors, the Company instructions had said, and have the secretary note the decisions in his books of proceedings. A weekly vetting of reckonings is to be made by the agents, and the ledgers are to be accurate monthly. All possible information is to be collected on customs, coins, weights, manners and wares so no harm may be done or dispute caused by ignorance. You shall avoid all quarrelling, fighting or vexation; abstain from all excess of drinking as