The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [133]
‘In the wax and tallow warehouse,’ said Christopher, wheezing.
‘I’ve informed the Namiestnik. I’ve shown the document to every petty office-holder in Novgorod. They can’t be in trouble,’ said Hislop.
‘They can’t read,’ said Christopher.
‘They can read,’ said Fergie, shoving papers into his pouch and embarking on a hasty round of handshaking. Hislop had already gone to round up his men. ‘They just dinna want to offend their well-furnished friends in the city. It’s natural. Is it a case of litigation, d’you fancy, or just simple manual force?’
It was a case of both. By the time Christopher got himself on a horse, and with Hoddim and Hislop and twenty trained cavalry charged across the frozen snow of Novgorod to the warehouse, you could see the glare of its burning against the grey winter sky, and the trampled snow was overlaid like a lava-bed by a creeping carpet of mingled tallow and blood.
And Chancellor, Killingworth and Best were in prison.
‘It was a grand case,’ said Fergie dotingly afterwards, when they had been to Pskov and bought all the flax and felt and hemp and tallow and wax that four ships could hold, and Diccon Chancellor’s black eye and Rob Best’s bruises were turning yellow. ‘Mind, in a decent country they would hae had you under Ejection and Intrusion, Molestation and Spuilzie, and a plea for dampnage and skaith sustained forbye. Man, they lost their warehouse.’
‘It was a public market,’ said George Killingworth, from sheer furious habit, through the scarf which shrouded the lower part of his face.
‘Aye. But ye were tellt not to go in by the customar. And then ye flung a cask at his heid.’
‘Well, they were coming at him with hatchets,’ said Chancellor mildly.
‘Aye. It’s the Lord’s wonder ye werena killed,’ said Fergie. ‘I never heard of a fire more opportune. They tell me the flaxbox they found in the tallow was melted out of all recognition, which is just as well, because they’re death on incendiarism. For theft now, they’d just put you to the pudkey, unless it was your second offence; and if ye had enough gold in your palm, maybe not even that. But traitors, church robbers, kidnappers, men who murder their masters and incendiarists—death. And not even an attorney. Man,’ said Fergie, carried away. ‘The crown must make a fortune. No costs to speak of, and for every simple arbitration, the roubles pouring out to the judge and the clerk and the notary, and the losing plaintiff to pay ten in the hundred of the sum in dispute to the Tsar.… D’ye know he owns all the cabacks, the drink-houses?’
‘Yes,’ said Rob Best.
‘Leased at three thousand roubles a year, and the landlord daren’t throw out a drunk or he’ll be sued for spoiling his sovereign’s income.…’
Chancellor let him run on, with the sledge. They had been saved, by Hislop’s force and Fergie’s jovial implacability in argument. Their right to trade had been proved. Their innocence in the matter of the fire had been, if not proved, at least left in doubt. Killingworth’s mad disregard of the inspectors had been the only incontrovertible sin, and there had been a nasty possibility at first that the matter would be removed, as the law properly demanded, to the Tsar’s courts at Moscow.
He did not want that, and neither did Killingworth. There must be no trouble between themselves and the Tsar. Nor—what would almost be worse—should the Tsar be moved on their behalf to punish the Novgorodians, and thereby end all hopes of peaceful trading with the city for good.
It was Fergie who had reduced the matter to a fine, to be paid on the spot; and it was Danny Hislop who, when the sum demanded proved to be stubbornly monstrous, suggested the common Russian alternative of duel by proxy.
They had argued all afternoon