The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [188]
Guthrie said, ‘You are destroying yourself. You are destroying all that makes common cause with your fellows.’
‘Some of it,’ said Lymond calmly. ‘It is my parting gift to you all. You are free, and so am I. There are no bonds between us, except those of the intellect.’
‘And the intellect,’ said Alec Guthrie, ‘will bring you back to us?’
‘Self-interest,’ Lymond said, ‘will bring me back to you. And intellect, I trust, will maintain me.’ The bridge was clear. The men were waiting for him on the other side. He gathered his horse and, for the last time on Russian soil, Alec Guthrie looked into the domineering, incongruous eyes which showed something of impatience and something of regret and something, blatant and wounding, of sharp self-derision.
‘Abandon your quest,’ said Francis Crawford. ‘What you are looking for, dear Alec, is buried. And no leech in London is going to revive it.’
And wheeling, he turned his horse’s head to the north, where a thousand miles off lay waiting the four ships for England.
Part Three
Chapter 1
On her sixth and last voyage through the Frozen Sea, the Edward Bonaventure drew away from the mouth of the Dwina, her sails brimmed with the sweet air of summer, her holds laden with furs and choice foods and delicate gifts, with a cargo worth twenty thousand pounds and three people of consequence to the pattern of her age: Richard Chancellor, Francis Crawford, and the Tsar of Muscovy’s first Ambassador to the Queen of England, Osep Grigorievich Nepeja. It was the second of August, the month in which the small fleet of Hugh Willoughby had been scattered, and two of its ships later locked in the Arzina to die.
The season was advanced, but not impossibly so. The weather seemed settled. Oats and barley stood yellow round the four mouths of the Dwina, full of fat blackcock with their green shimmering bodies; the white strand of Rose Island burned the feet under the sun, and the fields of wild white briar exhausted the air with their scent. There were gnats.
Balancing at last on the forward deck, with the wind fresh on the cheek, Chancellor forgot those last anxious weeks in the heat of Kholmogory, waiting for the news that the Edward and the Philip and Mary had returned from their winter in London, bringing with them the extra crews to man Willoughby’s two frozen ships. Now the small fleet sailed briskly beside him: the Philip and Mary with Howlet and Robins, the little Bona Confidentia and the Bona Esperanza, Willoughby’s flagship, carrying a six-thousand pound cargo and the two Kholmogory merchants, Makaroff and Grigorjeff, with eight of their friends.
All the ships had been scraped free of barnacles and checked and reloaded, to the satisfaction of himself, his masters and his pursers. Only he had made sure that the lightest cargo was carried by the two Arzina ships. One could not always see the harm done to the stoutest ship’s timbers by a winter in ice.
It had been clear, when he came back from Lampozhnya, that the Russian merchants not only wished to barter their goods: they wished to trade direct on their own part in London. Ten of them, after discussion, had been chosen, and were to sail with their cargo to do so. It was only after his last round of visits in Moscow, including a formal audience with the Sovereign Grand Prince, hedged about with Viscovatu and Adashev, that Chancellor learned that, beside merchants, he was to carry an ambassador and his suite.
The reasons were plausible in the extreme. Goodwill should be exchanged. If direct trading was to take place, then reciprocal privileges would be required. The fact that with no seagoing ships Russia could make little use of them without the courtesy of the Muscovy Company was not one which anyone stressed.
The underlying motive was obvious also. He had been warned of it by Francis Crawford, but, ignoring the warning, had listened unmoved when the Tsar, addressing him kindly, had asked him to desire the sovereign princess