The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [136]
‘… I think I am here for the same reason as Mr Crawford,’ said Danny reflectively. ‘To enjoy a condition of absolute superiority.… Isn’t that, after all, why you travel, Mr Chancellor? Why your friend Wyndham took combs and hatchets and nightcaps to the natives in Guinea: why Master Cabot returned so high-handed and generous from La Plata that he thought to bestow an island on his Genoese barber? Experts in a virgin land. What a world of confidence we may extract from it.’
‘I think,’ said Diccon Chancellor, ‘you underrate both us and yourselves.’
‘I know you think so,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘Wait, however. Wait until after Lampozhnya.’
It was then, Chancellor afterwards realized, that his decision was really taken to make the trip to Lampozhnya: the long, hard journey to the winter fair in the north, where men could see fire and ice on the same firebrand. And afterwards, also, he realized how much of that decision lay at the man Hislop’s door.
Returned, he told Killingworth, and, in Lymond’s absence, Alec Guthrie in the large house he and his fellows occupied when not out of Moscow. He had known Killingworth would easily be persuaded. He would take Christopher with him, and induce Richard Grey to leave the counting-house at Kholmogory. They needed train oil, and furs of a fresh killing. Why wait for them to come to Kholmogory, when one could buy them at Lampozhnya, straight off the sledge? Lane and Killingworth had their charter and the protection of the Voevoda’s establishment. They did not need his help to set up their warehouses and supervise the new house the Tsar was giving them at St Maxim’s, next to the Romanov palace.
These were drapers’ matters. He would travel north once again, conveying their cargo, calling on Hudson and Edwards and Sedgewick at Vologda; buying the Nassada and the two Doshniks perhaps on the way, which they would need on the Dwina in summer. He would renew his acquaintance with Nepeja.
Then, in February, he would come south to make his last call on the Tsar, and visit the merchants whose palms they had oiled so discreetly, and hold the final series of meetings with Lane and Price and Killingworth, and receive their reports and papers and the last of the cargo, ready to leave for St Nicholas while the snow still made travelling easy. And soon after that, the ships would be there.
He wondered if he should be sorry, in the spring, to leave this cold and savage and curious land. By then, perhaps not. But first, he had a country to explore for his nation; and a man, for himself.
Francis Crawford returned to Moscow just before Christmas: Chancellor saw him at the Play of the Fiery Furnace outside the Uspenski Cathedral, when the angel slid down from the roof in a cloud of irresponsible wildfire, and rescued the three children of Judah, slightly singed, from the circle of jumping Chaldeans,
He saw him again, after the Metropolitan’s pageant, at the Christmas banquet given by the Tsar for his court and some three hundred guests. The display of plate and the cloth-of-gold gowns were the same, but this time there were singers, whose efforts he did not enjoy. The day afterwards, by invitation, he spent another evening with Lymond at his home at Vorobiovo.
It was as pleasant as before, and as unrevealing. The partnership between the Voevoda and his mistress seemed, as before, intelligent, skilful and courteous: Lymond expressed his satisfaction that Mr Chancellor wished to see something of the lands of the north. He said, as Güzel fingered her lute, ‘I cannot leave Moscow until after the Kreshenea, the hallowing of the water. That is held at Epiphany, and we might set out the following day, if you wish. If you tell me what goods you are taking, I shall arrange for the sledges and post-horses. You will need no other escort. Who else will go with you?’
‘I thought of Christopher,’ Chancellor said.
‘No,’ said Lymond. ‘It is not a journey for youths.’
Chancellor smiled. ‘You need have no fears for Christopher.