The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [232]
‘A lion-hunter,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt, his eyes closed. ‘The man with the biggest house and the most money and a penchant for entertaining Russian Governors. I approve of the house. Did you see Nepeja’s rooms?’
‘Yes. It isn’t all Dimmock’s. Rob says the Queen supplied the bed and the hangings and the furniture. They’ve got some silver out of the Jewel-house as well. Rob says there’s a guard with pikes round the house twenty-four hours a day and they can’t sleep at night in case the old man draws a thread in the hangings. The Voevoda’s room is almost as good.’
‘Do you think he will notice?’ Danny said. ‘I sometimes feel if I placed myself nude on the floor between the Voevoda and one of his meetings, he wouldn’t even walk round me.’
‘Dedication is the word,’ said Ludovic d’Harcourt. ‘He has more patience with Nepeja than I have.’
‘Power is the word,’ said Danny Hislop. ‘If you control a large slice of Russia and are anticipating controlling the rest of it, that is how you behave.’
‘I think there’s something else,’ Adam said. ‘I think something happened at Berwick.’
‘We know what happened,’ Danny said agreeably. ‘He celebrated his return to English soil by hiring in one of——’
‘Not that,’ Adam said. ‘Or before that. I suppose being pushed in the face by your brother may be said to loosen the family ties.’
‘Adam!’ said Danny. ‘You mustn’t drop out of the choir. We have too much to do. What do we have to do?’
‘Wait about for three weeks,’ d’Harcourt said. ‘Tomorrow’s the first day of March: King Philip hasn’t set out yet from Brussels. And the Queen won’t receive Nepeja officially until King Philip arrives. The Privy Council won’t go near him either. He’ll have to kick his heels, and content himself with long talks with the merchants.’
‘In this house? What about us?’ Danny said.
D’Harcourt said, ‘I thought you were tired of the baubles of ceremony? Lymond won’t be received anywhere either; not until Nepeja is formally recognized. That means he can’t do his business. The Muscovy Company can talk about arms as much as they like but they can’t promise anything: only the Queen and Council can provide or withhold all the licences. All he can do is clear the air with the merchants by telling them what the Tsar wants and why. And Nepeja can do the same, on the trade side. My guess is that all our time will be spent with the Muscovy Company. Remember, all their records have been destroyed, and Chancellor’s eye-witness account. They know all Best can tell them. They’re bound to want our help as well.’
Adam said, ‘In full, deathless detail? How George Killingworth’s beard conquered Novgorod?’
‘What happened to the Emperor’s sugar?’ d’Harcourt said.
‘Who got carried out of the Emperor’s banquets?’ Danny said. ‘You know, it’s a funny thing, comparing England and Russia——’
‘No!’ howled Adam and d’Harcourt together.
‘No. We’ve had a lot of that. I was only going to say,’ Danny said, ‘how chastely agreeable it is to sit next to a woman again.’
Which only went to show, as the other two, exchanging glances agreed, that the sweet panacea of England was lancing the carbuncles of Russia already.
*
With Best and Nepeja, Gilpin and Hussey, Lymond and his three officers, it took the Muscovy Company three days to work through the obvious agenda: the progress on the wreck; the social news about the company’s officers still remaining in Russia: word of his son Richard for Sir Andrew Judde, of Richard Grey for his wife and daughter, of Charles Hudson for Sir George Barnes’s grand-daughter; of Thomas Hawtrey for William, his brother.
For the Company, it became slowly clear to all the outsiders, was one close-knit in friendship as well as commerce, and linked by intermarriage as well as by kinship of blood. And wealthy as these men were who inflicted on them, with such disarming apologies, long aching forenoons recalling the price of train oil and the terms of long, vanished documents, they were, many of them, Londoners of the first generation and merchants