The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [189]
Chancellor had listened, and he had spoken softly, but he had refused. Refused without prevaricating, as Lymond advised, because his business was navigation, not politics, and because trading, not politics, was the concern of the company which paid him. He had hoped that there, perhaps, it would end. The appointment of Osep Nepeja had enlightened him.
So his ships were to be full of Russians. And Robert Best, to his fury, had disappeared south with the army. And yet, waiting for the incoming vessels had tried Nepeja’s patience even more than his own; and long before Best finally arrived with Blacklock and d’Harcourt, surprisingly, behind him Chancellor realized that the Tsar had picked the wrong man for his mission; that Nepeja was anxious about the effects on his trade of this sudden condition appertaining to arms; that perhaps in all Russia there was no man except the Tsar himself who could have placed his views with conviction before this alien sovereign.
It was therefore with a strange sense of foreknowledge that he received a crested packet at the end of July from the hands of a weary courier from Moscow, and learned that the Voevoda Bolshoia was on his way north to join him, together with his servants and Daniel Hislop as henchman. Christopher Chancellor, standing by his father when that message came, was shocked to see on his face an expression which had in it nothing of the disgust he had expected.
Adam Blacklock’s reception of the news was even odder: he stood, blankly, staring at Chancellor and then said, his eyes brilliant, ‘Thank Heaven.’ And d’Harcourt, behind him, said, ‘Amen to that,’ very softly.
Christopher’s angry ‘Why?’ was not answered, and remained unanswered after the lighters had come with the Voevoda’s luggage and servants to be followed in due course by Lymond himself, self-contained and efficient and hard as Hislop behind him with the sun and the tempestuous ride by post-horse from Moscow. To Nepeja, he was charming, to Best, formal; to Blacklock and d’Harcourt, lightly abrasive. Chancellor introduced him to his sailing master, and Lymond shook Buckland by the hand and turned back to Chancellor.
‘And so,’ he said, ‘I have to carry out your sordidous errands.’
‘Not my errands,’ Chancellor said. ‘Those of Nicephorus your ruler, the pale death of the Saracens. How many did you impair?’
‘Men or women?’ said Lymond. ‘Why in the name of the Muscovy Company, refugium quorum in Deo est, could you not have accepted the commission?’
‘Because I have to come back to Russia,’ said Chancellor bluntly.
‘So you have,’ said the Voevoda Bolshoia. ‘Bringing me and Nepeja. You will have gathered, I take it, what a merry bundle of fun he is. You have not yet discovered what happens to Russians at sea.’
‘The same thing, I suppose, that happens to Englishmen,’ Chancellor said. ‘Scots, I take it, are immune.’
‘To sarcasm, yes,’ Lymond said. They had cleared a cabin for him below Chancellor’s own, in the poop, next to the master’s. Arriving there, he glanced round and then turned to the Englishman. ‘What honours will the Lennoxes and their friends heap upon you?’
Chancellor was wise enough to hide the anger which filled him, and even, a little, to quench it. He said, after taking thought, ‘They will lift the promised arraignment for heresy.’
Lymond said, ‘You mentioned nothing of this until now.’
‘It was my affair,’ Chancellor said. ‘I could hardly become a peddler of arms. I imagined the Tsar would give the commission to Nepeja.’
There was a short silence. Then Lymond said, ‘For what it is worth, I believe you. It is not on your account I am sailing for England.… Did your sons know that you faced the stake if you came home without me?’
‘No,’ said Chancellor irritably. He added, ‘No free man should be coerced by such means. However close to the Queen, this family must learn that such things do not lie in their power.’
‘They lie in Gardiner’s power,’ Lymond said. ‘Where would you have