The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [166]
Blandly, Gregory Stroganov told them what he knew: there was iron, in Karelia, Cargapolia, Ustug Thelesna, but imperfectly founded; there was silver and copper on the River Pechora, but little of it had so far made its way west. He said, ‘For good steel, we should fire it as the Voevoda tells me you do, with stone coal. But our workmen are ignorant. We need metallurgists to find our ores and show us best how to mine them. Men come from Germany, from Italy, and then they leave us. We need ironfounders to teach us how to refine the metal, and forge it. Then we would have the best and cheapest steel in the world.’
Richard Grey said, ‘Why shouldn’t the Company do it?’
‘Do what?’ Chancellor said. ‘Send founders and hammermen and refiners? We haven’t got them. We have to conduct half our business at Robertsbridge in French as it is.’
‘But not all of it,’ said Grey. ‘There are some ironmasters who would come. And what does Sir Henry Sidney expect for his steel—five or six pounds the firkin? We could freight it from Tula for four pounds, and make a profit if the quality were improved.’
He was deep in figures. Chancellor, the mathematician, left him to it, and in due course, having completed his business, Gregory Stroganov left, followed, after an ink-stained and well-lubricated interval, by Richard Grey, to close his affairs at Lampozhnya. Lymond, whose papers were already in order and cleared, offered the vodka jug once more, gravely, to Chancellor, who accepted it somewhat grimly. Lymond said, ‘I doubt if Sir Henry’s affairs will be seriously disturbed by an influx of steel gads from Muscovy.’
Diccon Chancellor took a long drink and stared at the other man. ‘So the Voevoda Bolshoia wishes help to create foundries,’ he said. ‘To make steel with the strength of the Persians’. Because the Tsar is going to ask me to send him shiploads of armour and weapons, and I am going to refuse.’
‘He is also going to ask you for an apothecary,’ Lymond said. ‘And we should like one of those. But I fear, as you say, that his hopes of munitions from England will return to him lame in both elbows. He will ask you for sulphur and lead and powder and saltpetre also. I hope you will be tactful.’
‘Or we shall not be allowed to take our goods out of the country?’ Chancellor said, descending to bluntness.
‘I don’t think you need fear that,’ Lymond said. ‘Unless you deal with him too curtly.’
Chancellor said, ‘I am hardly likely to do that. But what undertaking can I possibly make? The last time a party of skilled German workmen was about to travel to Muscovy, Livonia stopped it with the Emperor Charles’s backing. The Polish Ambassador has already been promised that no arms or military engineers will go to Russia. Sweden will feel the same. So will Cologne and Hamburg: England might find her own imports of weapons cut off. And Sigismund-August will continue to protest like clockwork, as you may well expect, against all such traffic to the Muscovites, enemy to all liberty under the heavens.’
Lymond, who had conducted the meeting sitting in comfort on his bed, closed his eyes and recited. ‘Our enemy is thus instructed by intercourse and made acquainted with our most secret counsels. We seemed hitherto only to vanquish him in this, that he was rude of arts and ignorant of policies. If so be that this trade shall continue, what shall be unknown to him? The Muscovite made more perfect in warlike affairs with engines of war and ships, will slay and make bound all that shall withstand