The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [217]
For their lodging, their food and their servants, they were indebted to the Queen Dowager of Scotland, and the following morning her officers came to call on the Tsar of Muscovy’s noble ambassador, to receive his thanks, and to inquire his further wishes. And also, by shrewd and courteous questioning, to obtain what information they could about this curious embassy, to take back to their mistress and regent. Two days after that, Robert Best and John Buckland arrived back from London with four Englishmen and a number of documents. They also brought money, the Ambassador was pleased to discover, and instructions to comfort, aid, assist and relieve him and his, and to conduct him forthwith south to London.
It was just before Christmas, the rites of which the Muscovite Ambassador celebrated privately with his servants, after his own fashion. Immediately afterwards, primed with all the necessary legal and political advice, the Queen Dowager of Scotland invited the Muscovite Ambassador to court.
It is doubtful whether, despite Adam’s incorrigible salesmanship, Osep Nepeja appreciated any of the draughty splendours of Holy-rood Palace; its music, paintings and furnishings, its trumpeters and heralds, its painted friezes and wainscoting and long suites of tapestries on subjects of which Viscovatu would not have approved. Boiling unseen within the ranks of the newly clothed Muscovite party was the battle which had raged ever since Master Hussey had arrived from Paternoster Row and the quiet legal ambience of Doctors’ Commons to supervise, as he thought, the proper disposal of the wreck of the Edward Bonaventure and all that remained of her cargo.
Firstly, there appeared to be, according to the news from Pitsligo, very little wreck and no cargo to dispose of. And secondly, the Muscovite Ambassador Osep Nepeja was not prepared to leave Scotland until he, personally, had received back the merchandise, crates and possessions that he had intended to barter in London. In vain, Lewis, Roberts and Gilpin, Hussey’s associates, tried to persuade him that the matter could be left in their hands: that no quirk of Scots law would escape Master Hussey or public notary Lewis; that no sharp dealing would be tolerated by George Gilpin, the resident secretary in Antwerp of the Society of English Merchants or by Edmund Roberts, a leading London merchant and charter member of the Muscovy Company. Nepeja simply announced that, until the pilfered cargo was recovered, he was staying in Scotland.
The argument raged for the better part of twenty-four hours, and Lymond took no part in it whatever, thereby reserving, as Danny Hislop cynically remarked, all the undoubted respect and awe which he already inspired in poor Osep. Only, on the day of the royal reception, the Voevoda Bolshoia drew Roberts and Lewis aside and said agreeably, ‘You represent the Muscovy Company. May I ask what reception the Company intends to give Master Nepeja in London?’
‘Oh, you need have no doubts of that,’ Roberts said, expansively. ‘The best. No expense will be spared. Your friend Nepeja, Crawford, is about to find himself esteemed like a king. And yourself, of course,’ he added comfortably, for he and his colleagues, after the closest questioning of Buckland and Best, were resigned to the fact that the Tsar had sent not only a trading Ambassador but an envoy of another kind, whose business the State would negotiate. ‘The Company,’ said Edmund Roberts, ‘wishes the Tsar to understand the importance English merchants attach to the growing bond between our two nations.’
‘And the enjoyers thereof to be as men living in a golden world,’ Lymond said. ‘I merely wished to point out that the Muscovites are not the most trusting of races.