The Ringed Castle - Dorothy Dunnett [61]
Perhaps, when rulers have short lives, the state profits best from devious men who can give it long service. A matter of common sense, brains and experience, and not of religion or ethics at all. Oh, Kate … your only error in life was to make me a girl, instead of a man.
… How is Kuzúm?
She completed the letter and sent it off later, with a servant of Austin’s. She did not add that the celebrations attending the last stages of the framing of the Muscovy charter had brought enough merchants to St Anthony’s to enable her to indulge her new interest in Russia. She met some of the company’s agents: Lane, Price, bearded Killingworth, and the big man Rob Best, who broke a tasselled stool wrestling with Chancellor. She met old Mr Cabot and some of his coterie of cosmographers: Richard Eden and Thomas Digges and Clement Adams and Dr Records and Mr Chancellor’s friend and instructor, John Dee. And she listened flatteringly to Sir George Barnes and Will Garrard, Lord Mayor elect, who had promoted Diccon’s first trip to Russia, and were now planning the second.
‘Diccon can do it,’ said Garrard. ‘Wyndham couldn’t do it, poor devil. I couldn’t do it. Don’t want to. Snug in Southfleet and Dorney, counting my money like George, not in Mombasa, dying of the bloody flux. We’ll fill the ships up with broadcloth, and maybe a little sugar to sweeten the Tsar. And send them off in the spring: April perhaps. The Philip and Mary. And Diccon will have the Edward Bonaventure again.’
‘Back,’ said Sir Henry, ‘to the inferior and exterior lights, Mistress Philippa. Richard Chancellor, you have a gleam in your eye. You complain when we send you sailing north to the ice floes but you know very well that you would pay from your pocket to go there. How long will it take you?’
‘From here to the Dwina? Two months by sea, I should reckon. The ships can land us and our cargo, and then sail back to England to winter. From the Dwina to Moscow I don’t know. There is the cargo to carry, and a thousand miles of Rusland to cover. Last time we did it by horse sleigh. This time,’ said Diccon casually, his spare frame supported on the upright of Philippa’s armchair, ‘this time, I thought I’d take Christopher.’
Philippa opened her mouth. ‘As an apprentice?’ Garrard said. ‘The lad’s surely too young.’
The black beard and clear charcoal eyes were both directed ominously upon Philippa. She shut her mouth. ‘Nothing hardens like sea water,’ said Chancellor.
‘You mean,’ said Philippa smartly, ‘nothing pickles like brine.’
‘I mean——’
‘Did you know,’ said Henry Sidney’s smooth voice, interrupting, ‘that Mr Garrard knows your Mr Bailey? I had forgotten to tell you.’
Her mind engaged in battle for the future of Diccon Chancellor’s son, Philippa did not, for the moment, recollect possessing a Mr Bailey. ‘I beg your pardon?’ she said.
‘Leonard Bailey. God confound you, Philippa; you made an eminent fuss about tracing him. The brother of Honoria Bailey, your husband’s grandmother. You will observe that whatever you have forgotten, the relationship is engraved in my memory.’
But she had already remembered. Covering a genuine shock with a great deal of discreet and well-mannered acting, she learned that Leonard Bailey, whose sister had married a Scot from Midculter, Lanarkshire, was indeed a neighbour of Garrard’s in Buckinghamshire.
‘That was it, Henry … Mistress Philippa,’ said Will Garrard cheerfully. ‘You’ll find old Lady Dormer knows him as well, shouldn’t wonder. Of her generation, although it’s a while now since all the tattle. A self-willed old gentleman, so I’m told, always complaining of poverty. And certainly, Gardington could do with some upkeep, although he must take quite a good sum in rents.… He’s a relative of your husband’s?’
‘He cut himself