The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [277]
So he did not seek to have the incessant pressure of instruction renewed, and went his own way, merely mentioning his surprise and disapproval to Robert Best over the undignified and expensive accident in the Office of Revels and Masques. The following day, the big Anglo-Frenchman, Master Ludovic, making light of his broken arm, had gone back up river to call on the young woman the Voevoda had married and had taken her an armful of spring bluebells gathered, so Master Daniel suggested sardonically, from the woods and fields outside Smithfield. The young woman, then recovered, had joined the Court and removed herself for Easter to Greenwich.
The Voevoda, as Master Daniel had also pointed out, had neither sent flowers to the young woman nor visited her, although he had dispatched a messenger the following morning to inquire how she was. Master Daniel, who found this inadequate, was properly caustic. The Voevoda himself had not accompanied Master Nepeja to any of his engagements that day, but had elected to spend it in contemplation, sitting deep in thought (or slumber? or post-revels exhaustion?) at the big desk in his room.
Danny Hislop, already staggered by intimations of unheard-of levity, made the most of the Voevoda’s changed plans for his day and put the reason down also to lassitude. He perceived his blunder the following morning when he was called to the same desk with d’Harcourt, to hear the outcome of the Voevoda’s day of silent retreat. It was, as he might have guessed, alarming and it did, as he might have guessed, entail a monstrous amount of work for Masters Hislop and d’Harcourt thus putting an end, as Danny expressed it, to his nice fineness and breathing desire towards effeminate and superfluous pleasures, not to mention Ludo’s visits to Smithfield.
The matter, as they might have guessed, was inevitably the business of Russia.
Through all the banquets and the routine engagements, the Voevoda’s work for the Tsar had continued, and since the treaty had been concluded, and they were free to engage men and seek expert advice, Lymond had been fully occupied. Now, with the help of Hislop and d’Harcourt, all that he had already done in this field was drawn together and intensified, so that in the short time still remaining in London his self-imposed task should be completed.
The Tsar had wanted men from every profession to advise him. This was not possible. But from those men who came forward, Lymond chose the likeliest, with the help of Dimmock and his colleagues. And in those trades where no men could be hired, he sought the best man he could find, and picked his brains mercilessly. He gathered books. John Dee, unearthing from his mountainous desk the plans, rejected, for a National Library, found for him the standard works, and men who, briefly, could explain or annotate them, however crudely. He sought advice on buildings and transport; on roads and law-giving; on finance and farming. He commissioned books and papers; he found those members of the Muscovy Company who were on the Privy Council and questioned them. He did what it was Nepeja’s place to do and what, unlearned and unable to communicate, the Ambassador had never contemplated.
And on top of that, with all the standing and authority he possessed, he set himself to force through the annulment of his marriage.
Of that, Danny Hislop was not made aware. Hislop only knew that leisure, always short, was now quite circumscribed. That as the ships were loaded and the lists came in of all the armour and weapons Dimmock found for them, he and d’Harcourt were set to make lists in their turn; to work out where and how to use this windfall; where to store it; how to allocate it; whom to train.
They sat with Lymond at his desk and worked, as they had done at the beginning in Russia, but this time not for the army alone. They saw illumined before them area by area the other regions in which Muscovy was backwrd or vulnerable and, together, discussed the solutions. Adam Blacklock, now a paid employee of the Muscovy