The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [255]
So the official negotiators set out, most anxiously primed by the Company and bearing with them also, on the other side of the balance, all the concerted warnings of their fellows on the subject of the Crown’s present outlay and embarrassments, both fiscal and political; and the Crown’s commitments, apprehensions and expectations in all those areas which this inconvenient demand from the Tsar of Russia might affect.
Because of the secrecy of the matter, only Sir William Petre and the Bishop of Ely came to the house in Fenchurch Street for these talks, with a scrivener, who entered with them, and their servants, who waited below. And in the room where the Tsar’s envoy Mr Crawford greeted them was permitted only one other person: the owner of the house, Master John Dimmock. For although lion-hunter had been Ludovic d’Harcourt’s epithet for their host, he was much more than that. Now in his sixties, and older by ten years than the other two members of the commission, John Dimmock had spent the better part of the two previous reigns as royal agent on the Continent, with the care of buying provisions and levying soldiers. And the provisions he had been buying were the munitions of war. If the Queen’s Council were to decree that the Tsar should have what he asked for, Master John Dimmock was the man who would supply it. The house in Fenchurch Street had not been lightly chosen.
Nor were Petre of Oxford and Thirleby of Cambridge, both practised in civil and canon law; both experienced in negotiations at home and in embassies overseas also since the reign of King Henry. The French had complained of Sir William Petre during the haggling over Boulogne six years ago: We had gained the last two hundred thousand crowns without hostages, had it not been for that man who said nothing.
He said nothing now, listening to the man Crawford embark on his preamble. He had found him cordial, which was to be expected, and also a man of address, which he had been warned about. The exposition was brief and also lucid: it dealt with the geography of Russia and the nature of her government, with her income and her natural resources, and with the measures now being taken to lead the whole country forward to that prosperity which its states had once enjoyed before the incursion of the Tartars. It described explicitly the present threat to the nation’s security, and the steps the Voevoda Bolshoia had taken to counter them. It then proceeded to make the two obvious points on which the Russian case rested: that in order to trade successfully, Russia must have stability. And that in pushing the Tartars from her borders, she would be performing a service for the whole of Christendom, and particularly for those countries opposed to Turkey, who held the Tartars in vasselage.
Petre, who had a pain in his stomach, wished it was time to eat. However, so far, so good. Behind him he could hear the scrivener’s pen squeaking, and he hoped he had put down, and accurately, all the facts and figures Crawford had just given them. It was unusual, to say the least of it, to be quite so frank. Whether it was naiveté or the exact opposite, he was not yet quite sure. It was certainly an extremely large army, and well organized, so far as one could gather. Thirleby, beside him, said, ‘You are to be commended, Mr Crawford, on what you and the Tsar before you have achieved already. Two of your Tartar settlements have been disbanded, I gather, and you have already launched attacks on the third.’
‘It is the third which concerns us,’ Lymond said. ‘It is so placed, as I have said, that it is difficult for an army of any size to overwhelm it. On the other hand these Tartars can, and do, send raids up to and into Moscow itself. May I remind you also that they dwell on the borders of Turkey. Even if we exterminate the Crimean Tartars, Turkey is always a threat. More so now, when her attention is no longer occupied with the Persian wars. A Russia overrun by Turks, as Hungary was, is not something,