The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [276]
For Nepeja, the two weeks were to pass in a welter of dedicated and unrestricted indulgence. Never before, so they said, had any ambassador been received in this country with the honours heaped upon himself. He passed, in his purple damask and his gold and red velvet, from table to merrymaking to seldom untenanted bed, drinking heartily, belching frequently and retaining, by a Muscovite miracle, a sort of regal and unsteady dignity which bore him through the most unlooked-for occasions.
He made the most of it, for he had their measure, this sordid nation gaping after wealth. Which after four centuries of kings could produce no monarch but this small, middle-aged woman, whose Secretary of State, whom he had been at such pains to please, turned out to be the son of a tanner.
In Russia, a man knew to whom he was speaking: boyar or peasant. Unless, by taking orders, a moujik turned into a clerk, a man in Russia kept his station, and his son after him through the generations. With this nation of madmen, where were you? They laughed at the stake, and boasted of relatives hanged: if you had no kinsmen quartered that you knew of, it was because you were not a gentleman, they remarked. They might well go to war, the other ambassadors said with resignation, for no other reason than a sheer love of novelty. And the Queen claimed she was poor, but where in Russia would you find such ostentation in living: the palaces of Whitehall and Westminster, Nonesuch, Chelsea and Oatlands, Richmond and Greenwich. And the clothes …
He had discovered that be was expected to retain the Queen’s gift of his clothes; that, in England, an ambassador’s perquisites were his own, and did not have to be handed back to his monarch. In this matter, and the freedom these traders possessed, unhindered by royal monopolies, Muscovy had perhaps something to learn.
On the other hand, he had found many particulars in which, however little the English might think so, the two countries were not so unlike. One of the Tsar’s greatest difficulties, everyone knew, was to find land with which to reward princely service: in England, the dissolution of the monasteries had served this very purpose and the reconstitution of a few of them by this new Queen had not, so far as he could see, altered the circumstance by a whit.
These Englishmen claimed to despise a régime which dared not maintain a printing press. But what of their own, pouring forth scurrilous and seditious leaflets? Could they claim that no one had tried to suppress these? Why, they had even caught and brought home one of their scholars, for the crime of producing such print overseas.
They claimed to shrink from the Tsar’s rough chastisements, but what of their own burnings? They had no cause to sneer when they heard of Muscovite coffins exhumed and dragged by a team of pigs to the scaffold. Worse happened in England. In England the heir to the throne, the Queen’s sister, was watched and suspected as Vladimir always had been, but the Muscovites had been cleverer. Prince Vladimir was already elected future Regent and guardian of the child Ivan in the event of the Tsar’s sudden death: he was satisfied and the country was quiet. They pretended here to be surprised that so great a monarch could not overthrow a few Tartars, but what success was the lord Henry having in Ireland? Why, if the Queen called herself monarch of France, was she content with owning two fortresses only?
He had come to this country with an open mind. The Voevoda had told him so, and the Voevoda had shown him those things from which he thought Muscovy should benefit. But, in time, a man grew tired of foreign ways, and foreign food, and the incessant chirrup and yowl of uncouth foreign tongues, and Osep Nepeja felt he owed England nothing, and himself a small rest from his labours, with his journey done and his treaty concluded and the prospect before him of the