The Ringed Castle (38 page)

I believe we carry on our ships someone paid to kill you
.

So Diccon Chancellor had found himself saying to Lymond. And as he toiled through those dark months of winter, exercising his spurious authority and disentangling the assorted affairs of his drapers, Chancellor found himself no nearer discovering which of them he could trust.

What of the four whom on the surface he had learned to know so well in Moscow—statuesque, bearded Killingworth; burly Rob Best, Ned Price, the young, clever wits of Harry Lane? Or the two company sons, Judde and Hawtrey, who dashed back and forwards, overturning sledges, from Vologda; or Barnes’s protégé Christopher Hudson, the first to get through with the delayed stock from Yaroslavl, and the man with the keenest nose for a bargain? It was Hudson who picked up sturgeons at seven altines each, which would cost nine marks for worse bought in Danzig. It was Hudson who reported that hemp was cheaper too, by two shillings and sixpence a hundred than in Danzig, and that George had been right to refuse twelve roubles for his cloth at Vologda, but should have jumped at the price for his sugar. As it was, Hudson had scraped up enough of the Tsar’s spilled chest to make a small profit, and had even sold the empty cask seasoned with Holland, largely because of the crest on the bung.

Diccon thought Hudson was too keen to have much care for English politics. He thought the same of Richard Grey, who had gone back from Vologda to Kholmogory to arrange for the storage of their unsold goods and those ready for shipment in the spring, and to set up a counting-house, with invoices, ledgers and cipher books, helped at intervals by his two veterans, Sedgewick and Edwards.

What did any of them have to do with a petty feud two thousand miles behind them in London? For they had got their charter. It had come from the Tsar’s
lordly house and castle the Moskva
, grandly cased, with a small red seal depicting a naked and stunted Saint George demolishing a no doubt Roman Catholic dragon. The wording had a sycophantic English ring about it, largely because it had been drawn up with his tongue in his cheek by Fergie Hoddim, and retranslated twice since, gaining drama as it progressed:

Considering how needful merchandise is, which furnisheth men of all that which is convenient for their living and nourriture, for their clothing, trimming, the satisfying of their delights, and all other things convenient and profitable for them, in such sort as amity is thereby
entered into, and planted to continue; and the enjoyers thereof be as men living in a golden world …

It granted to all members of the Fellowship and successors for ever the right to buy and sell without tax or levy or safe conduct, to choose and discipline shippers and packers, weighers, brokers, measurers and wagoners; to govern and rule any Englishmen in Russia, and to deal with lawbreaking and complaints. It promised redress in case of injury, reparation for robbery; and enthusiasm for all the Company’s pious practices: in every possible particular, it was unspeakably generous. On paper.

After enjoying his golden world for a week or so, George Killingworth fell into the habit of quoting it, with a coda entirely his own.

‘Russians! Vipers! The cunning, wicked progeny of vipers!’

And Lane and Price and Best, holding him down, would talk him into a rational mood again.
Hold a daily meeting of agents and factors
, the Company instructions had said,
and have the secretary note the decisions in his books of proceedings. A weekly vetting of reckonings is to be made by the agents, and the ledgers are to be accurate monthly. All possible information is to be collected on customs, coins, weights, manners and wares so no harm may be done or dispute caused by ignorance. You shall avoid all quarrelling, fighting or vexation; abstain from all excess of drinking as much as may be, and in all use and behave yourselves as quiet merchants doeth …

‘It’s war!’ shouted George Killingworth, and dented the committee table with his fist. ‘They treat trading like warfare, and think every stratagem justified. If a lie will be swallowed, they’ll use it. From the biggest to the smallest, they disbelieve what I say, and what they say themselves you would trust like the tongue of Beelzebub. What dishonesty will they not practise? Fraud and misrepresentation! They cheat me over the quality; they falsify the origin; they juggle with weight. What I buy is not what they deliver … look at that flax! They delay sales, and raise prices and argue. The more they swear and protest honesty, the greater the knavery.’

‘It works the other way,’ Harry Lane said ill-advisedly. ‘Don’t trust them if they agree too promptly, either.’

George Killingworth, who had just bought five hundredweight of flax yarn at eightpence farthing a pound, and who had since learned from the indefatigable Mr Hudson that hemp at Novgorod, had he waited, would cost him one and a half roubles the bercovite compared with two and a half anywhere else, lifted his beard above the table edge and turned a snow-bloodied eye on Mr Lane. ‘What’s a pood?’

‘Thirty-six pounds,’ said Mr Lane, obediently.

‘An areshine?’

‘A Flanders ell.’

‘A bercovite?’

Mr Lane was tactfully forgetful.

‘You see?’ said George Killingworth, and slammed shut the minute book. ‘If you don’t know your facts, you can’t blame the Russians for taking advantage of you.’

There was silence, as they all digested this remarkable volte face. ‘Anyway,’ said Harry Lane, ‘we’re selling them cloth for three times what it’s worth.’

George Killingworth looked at him coldly down the magnificent beard.

‘That’s different,’ he stated. ‘They need it.’

Chancellor conducted his battling merchants to Novgorod. He had been there before, but not as fast as this, travelling non-stop with their fleet of sledges, and changing horses in droves at the yams on the way. The first night they by-passed Klin and St Elias and drove ninety miles straight through to Tver, where they got food and fresh horses, and raced on their way, past Volochek and the deep-frozen Msta, to complete the six-hundred-verst journey in three remarkable days.

Two of Lymond’s men were with them: Chancellor was not sure why, except that Lymond had ordered it. He had seen the Voevoda only once since receiving their charter: he was much out of Moscow, and only occasionally Christopher reported seeing the powerful sledge, with its team of six horses, flying up to the gates of the Kremlin, or out across the river ice and into the flat, snow-filled country, to guide his commanders and visit his strongholds and garrisons. In their one brief meeting, in the big merchants’ hall near the Kremlin, Lymond had asked his plans, shaking the snow from his cloak, and on hearing them said, ‘I see. A town of price, like Paradise.’

‘Novgorod?’ had asked Chancellor, faintly surprised.

‘No. Ipswich, in fact. Who are you taking?’

George was going, and Rob Best. He thought he would take Christopher.

Lymond listened. ‘You’ve been there before. The merchants carry much more weight than they do in the east. You’ll find a good many Swedes and Livonians and Germans. The Germans are rarely sober in the daytime, but the Flemings may give you trouble. They have no privileges since they incurred the displeasure of the Tsar, and you’re going to be milking off at Vologda all the Russian goods they used to be offered at Novgorod. By the same token, the Dutch have just paid thirty thousand roubles to have their Customs indemnity restored: and you’re going to be odious to them as a toad.… I think you might find Fergie Hoddim useful. And Plummer. No, he would bore you to death. Danny Hislop, and he can tell you all the gossip.’

There was a note of private amusement in the pleasant, assured voice which Chancellor did not quite follow, but the unforthcoming demeanour of Mistress Philippa’s husband had undergone no change since that surprising evening at Vorobiovo, and they completed their conversation on strictly impersonal lines, to Christopher’s clear disappointment. Which was why Christopher accompanied his father to Novgorod, along with Mr Killingworth and Mr Best, in the large covered sledge provided by an indulgent Muscovite government, with Mr Hoddim and Mr Hislop riding informatively alongside.

What happened at Novgorod was not entirely George Killingworth’s fault, although Danny Hislop afterwards blamed his beard, which he claimed had a life of its own like Chang-kuo Lao’s miraculous donkey, which could travel thousands of leagues a day, and then at rest could be folded like paper.

In the event they were not popular, as no pensioner of the Tsar was popular in this city which had once ruled from the Arctic to the Urals, until taken and planted by Muscovites. It was still great in size, despite the fires which fourteen years before had destroyed the whole Slav quarter of the town, and the previous year had burned 1,500 izbas to the ground. It was still great in trade, forming the market for barter between the east and the trading routes to the west, and it employed a western mode of transaction, and a suavity missing in the oriental ambience of Moscow.

Primed with warnings; aware of the anomalies in the Company’s position; reminded that on Chancellor’s previous visit petitions had been made to the Tsar denouncing the English as pirates and rovers, George Killingworth quartered the markets of Novgorod, and was overwhelmed with enchanting discoveries. Tallow, sold at sixteen shillings in England, could be bought at seven shillings the hundredweight here. A piece of cloth worth six pounds, including transport, could sell here for seventeen roubles, or fourteen pounds at the lowest.

There was no competition. Flemish cloth travelled nine hundred miles overland to market at Novgorod: he could undercut it with ease. There was no product he could not buy cheaper or sell dearer, unhampered by taxes, while the peasant selling twenty geese for a rouble, or ten sheep, or two cows, or four sleighs, would have spent a quarter already on customs and tolls. ‘My people are like my beard: the oftener shaved, the quicker it will grow,’ had said the Tsar; and so the taxes flourished, and the usurers, extorting their furtive twenty per hundred in corners.

So it was perhaps inevitable that a scuffle should begin in the bazaar, among the Flemings, and that the Englishmen should be followed to the flax and hemp market and then to the warehouse for tallow by a growing crowd of angry, powerful-looking people in
bedraggled skin and sheepskin coats and felt hats. There, Killingworth explained for the fifth time, to a group of booted officials, that he and his company possessed new duty-free privileges, and for the fifth time Chancellor produced and unrolled the creased document, and for the fifth time everyone waited while the customar sent for someone who could read.

Unfortunately, this time Killingworth’s patience expired before the end of the long wait, exposed to the jeering, quarrelling crowd. Shaking off Chancellor, he simply strode into the warehouse, picked up a billet of wood and proceeded to make his own examination of the casks.

Rob Best made to follow, but Chancellor stopped him. ‘Wait here, and hold the parchment. Christopher, go and fetch Hoddim and Hislop. Mr Killingworth will have to come out.’

The crowd were already pressing into the warehouse. Christopher saw his father begin to fight his way through the doorway to Killingworth’s side and then, with a clap on the shoulder from Best, began to burrow his way in the opposite direction, swimming upstream like the idol Perun until he came to the building where he knew he would find the Voevoda’s men.

They were doing some haggling of their own, but in a civilized way, at a table, with a full jug of mead at their elbows. There was no question by this time of the Voevoda’s authority in any of the principal cities under the Tsar. In theory, he could requisition what he wished, at his own price, for the use of the army. In practice, policed by Plummer and Hoddim, the bargains were struck if possible without antagonizing anyone. Now, Fergie Hoddim got to his feet as soon as Christopher was shown, gasping into the room and reaching for his new fur coat said, ‘Oh, aye. Is it spuilzie or wrangful detention?’ while Danny Hislop, less philosophic, said, ‘That bone-headed ox Killingworth?’

‘In the wax and tallow warehouse,’ said Christopher, wheezing.

‘I’ve informed the Namiestnik. I’ve shown the document to every petty office-holder in Novgorod. They can’t be in trouble,’ said Hislop.

‘They can’t read,’ said Christopher.

‘They can read,’ said Fergie, shoving papers into his pouch and embarking on a hasty round of handshaking. Hislop had already gone to round up his men. ‘They just dinna want to offend their well-furnished friends in the city. It’s natural. Is it a case of litigation, d’you fancy, or just simple manual force?’

It was a case of both. By the time Christopher got himself on a horse, and with Hoddim and Hislop and twenty trained cavalry charged across the frozen snow of Novgorod to the warehouse, you could see the glare of its burning against the grey winter sky, and the
trampled snow was overlaid like a lava-bed by a creeping carpet of mingled tallow and blood.

And Chancellor, Killingworth and Best were in prison.

‘It was a grand case,’ said Fergie dotingly afterwards, when they had been to Pskov and bought all the flax and felt and hemp and tallow and wax that four ships could hold, and Diccon Chancellor’s black eye and Rob Best’s bruises were turning yellow. ‘Mind, in a decent country they would hae had you under Ejection and Intrusion, Molestation and Spuilzie, and a plea for dampnage and skaith sustained forbye. Man, they lost their warehouse.’

‘It was a public market,’ said George Killingworth, from sheer furious habit, through the scarf which shrouded the lower part of his face.

‘Aye. But ye were tellt not to go in by the customar. And then ye flung a cask at his heid.’

‘Well, they were coming at him with hatchets,’ said Chancellor mildly.

‘Aye. It’s the Lord’s wonder ye werena killed,’ said Fergie. ‘I never heard of a fire more opportune. They tell me the flaxbox they found in the tallow was melted out of all recognition, which is just as well, because they’re death on incendiarism. For theft now, they’d just put you to the pudkey, unless it was your second offence; and if ye had enough gold in your palm, maybe not even that. But traitors, church robbers, kidnappers, men who murder their masters and incendiarists—death. And not even an attorney. Man,’ said Fergie, carried away. ‘The crown must make a fortune. No costs to speak of, and for every simple arbitration, the roubles pouring out to the judge and the clerk and the notary, and the losing plaintiff to pay ten in the hundred of the sum in dispute to the Tsar.… D’ye know he owns all the
cabacks
, the drink-houses?’