The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [132]
What happened at Novgorod was not entirely George Killingworth’s fault, although Danny Hislop afterwards blamed his beard, which he claimed had a life of its own like Chang-kuo Lao’s miraculous donkey, which could travel thousands of leagues a day, and then at rest could be folded like paper.
In the event they were not popular, as no pensioner of the Tsar was popular in this city which had once ruled from the Arctic to the Urals, until taken and planted by Muscovites. It was still great in size, despite the fires which fourteen years before had destroyed the whole Slav quarter of the town, and the previous year had burned 1,500 izbas to the ground. It was still great in trade, forming the market for barter between the east and the trading routes to the west, and it employed a western mode of transaction, and a suavity missing in the oriental ambience of Moscow.
Primed with warnings; aware of the anomalies in the Company’s position; reminded that on Chancellor’s previous visit petitions had been made to the Tsar denouncing the English as pirates and rovers, George Killingworth quartered the markets of Novgorod, and was overwhelmed with enchanting discoveries. Tallow, sold at sixteen shillings in England, could be bought at seven shillings the hundredweight here. A piece of cloth worth six pounds, including transport, could sell here for seventeen roubles, or fourteen pounds at the lowest.
There was no competition. Flemish cloth travelled nine hundred miles overland to market at Novgorod: he could undercut it with ease. There was no product he could not buy cheaper or sell dearer, unhampered by taxes, while the peasant selling twenty geese for a rouble, or ten sheep, or two cows, or four sleighs, would have spent a quarter already on customs and tolls. ‘My people are like my beard: the oftener shaved, the quicker it will grow,’ had said the Tsar; and so the taxes flourished, and the usurers, extorting their furtive twenty per hundred in corners.
So it was perhaps inevitable that a scuffle should begin in the bazaar, among the Flemings, and that the Englishmen should be followed to the flax and hemp market and then to the warehouse for tallow by a growing crowd of angry, powerful-looking people in bedraggled skin and sheepskin coats and felt hats. There, Killingworth explained for the fifth time, to a group of booted officials, that he and his company possessed new duty-free privileges, and for the fifth time Chancellor produced and unrolled the creased document, and for the fifth time everyone waited while the customar sent for someone who could read.
Unfortunately, this time Killingworth’s patience expired before the end of the long wait, exposed to the jeering, quarrelling crowd. Shaking off Chancellor, he simply strode into the warehouse, picked up a billet of wood and proceeded to make his own examination of the casks.
Rob Best made to follow, but Chancellor stopped him. ‘Wait here, and hold the parchment. Christopher, go and fetch Hoddim and Hislop. Mr Killingworth will have to come out.’
The crowd were already pressing into the warehouse. Christopher saw his father begin to fight his way through the doorway to Killingworth’s side and then, with a clap on the shoulder from Best, began to burrow his way in the opposite direction, swimming upstream like the idol Perun until he came to the building where he knew he would find the Voevoda’s men.
They were doing some haggling of their own, but in a civilized way, at a table, with a full jug of mead at their elbows. There was no question by this time of the Voevoda’s authority in any of the principal cities under the Tsar. In theory, he could requisition what he wished, at his own price, for the use of the army. In practice, policed