The Last Crusaders: Ivan the Terrible (27 page)

44

They camped one last night under the stars, the Cossacks now drinking wildly, and already, after just two days encamped, restless and ready to be off again. To the great and uncharted forests and rivers and ice-bound mountains of the East … They sang their melancholy songs of longing.

The wild falcon flies

Over the Volga

He stoops not nor bows

To the great Lords below

He drinks the dark water

At the gates of Saratov

At Tsaritzin, Svialsk,

And cries to the river,

‘O why are you sad, Mother Volga?’

Nicholas half yearned to go with them. But he yearned as much for something quite different.

Rebecca sat quietly now, overwhelmed, withdrawn, grieving deeply. Her father, her nurse Hannah – she was alone and there was nothing left for her here.

Hodge drank thirstily, still clutching his sable cloak and staring at it in disbelief. ‘Do you realise,’ he said, ‘what this could fetch in England, if you could find a nobleman to buy it off you?’

Nicholas shook his head. It was hard to reckon.

‘I’ll tell you what it could buy you,’ said Hodge. ‘An entire cloak of the stuff, in such condition … from sables caught in a Russian midwinter, you can tell that, the coat’s so thick and soft. I’ll tell you what you could get for it. A whole farm, that’s what you could get. Best land too. An orchard. Barns. My old man wouldn’t believe it.’ Hodge’s eyes were as dreamy and blue as the distant hills of Wales on a summer’s day. Already he saw himself master of five hundred acres, sheep of thousands … his own cider press, maybe! All for the price of one sable cloak. Then he wrapped it very carefully indeed in his own old travelling cloak. Maybe this daft jaunt abroad hadn’t been so daft after all, if a nice slice of Shropshire was what had come of it.

Hodge fell asleep, and Nicholas went over to her.

‘You are tired now?’

She nodded. Her face was streaked with tears. He sat near her.

‘Do you … Do you have family in England?’

‘I have cousins.’ She wiped her face. ‘Delighted to see a penniless relative on their doorstep, they’ll be.’

‘Your father will have money in his name, with a London bank.’

‘I suppose.’

‘Where are your cousins?’

‘Worcestershire.’

Worcestershire. Not far from Shropshire. But couldn’t he just say … ? He could not. He swallowed. Useless.

They rode south. What had they done? He glanced back one last time at the grim city. He had a vision of Czar Ivan, not just ­pacing the blood-red corridors of the Kremlin, sunk in madness and ­cruelty, but bestriding the continent of Europe now from north to south, the Tatars driven back for good, nothing to fear. Thanks to them, Ivan ruled unchallenged, it seemed, from the White Sea to the Black, and now his Cossack Army of Exploration would push east as well, into that vast and unknown land of Sibir. The Russian Bear was awakening from long sleep, opening its red jaws wider, wider …

He blurted out his thoughts to Stanley. ‘Are we sure we know what we have done? Making Ivan strong again?’

Stanley grinned, rolling along at ease on his horse. ‘Of course
not! We are no cautious, far-sighted statesmen! Only feckless knights errant and adventurers, the last crusaders born out of our time. Always seeking some new crusade against the enemies of the Cross, in a world long since grown old and cynical and become a new money-loving world of merchants and colonies, trading posts and city exchanges. Such a world must regard knights errant and crusaders as absurd anachronisms and old, doddering clowns.’

He still smiled, but his eyes were distant. ‘Do you remember the mad, emaciated Spaniard we met at Messina in Sicily, before Lepanto?’

Smith said, ‘Aye, I remember him. Don Miguel de Cervantes, wasn’t it?’

‘Remember how he talked ceaselessly of gallant quests and knights errant and maidens in distress and high and noble adventure, like some teller of old tales to King Arthur and his circle at Camelot? What a moonstruck loon. Yet the older I get, the more years pass and the world seems to grow harder and colder and more gold-besotted, the more I look back at that mad Spaniard and think I will stand beside him and his crazed dreams after all.’

They ambled on a little further then Smith raised an invisible cup. ‘Aye, here’s to it. Lunatics all.’

And they drank an invisible toast.

They took a river barge down to the Black Sea and found a merchant­man to the Bulgarian coast, then a filthy coaster that got them round to Greece, and thence Italy and so more easily home. Nicholas passed the time writing his careful report for Her Majesty. He wrote in measured prose, as befits a man trying to sound sober and wise, but could not avoid suggesting a mixed victory. Muscovy would rise to great power, he judged. A Christian power, yes. The Islamic advance had been held, though the Tatars hardly seemed the most fanatic of Mohammedans. He foresaw many more clashes between Russia and the Ottoman Empire to come. The eventual victor, he could not say. The Ottomans, with their vast resources, populations, wealth, armed forces without parallel in the world, and superb organization – or Russia with her vast and barely explored territories, her redoubtable peasantry, her apparently ­limit
less ­
ability to suffer, to be defeated and yet not broken? It was in the hands of the Almighty.

At Malta there were more farewells, too sad to relate. Stanley hinted they still had business in England, and not the business of assassinating Queen Elizabeth either.

‘But times grow ever more complicated,’ he said. ‘Perhaps one day …’

That was all any of them could promise, so instead they embraced and wept, and knew they would never have such friends all the years of their lives.

‘What we have lived through,’ said Stanley, shaking his head. Eyes bright. ‘Who would believe it? What we have lived through together.’ Then he laid his big hands on their shoulders. ‘If I had had children, sons – I would have wished them as you are.’

‘Come back one day,’ blubbed Smith, barely able to speak. ‘Come back to Malta, ’tis not a long voyage, and you will always be welcome.’

Nicholas said they might yet.

‘And this maid,’ said Stanley, laying his hand on her shoulder very gently, ‘you care for her now.’

Rebecca wanted to say proudly that she could care very well for herself, but knew she could not, and embraced Stanley with many tears.

And then they stepped aboard the Genoese merchantman and waved a last time and the two knights turned away from the quayside into the narrow streets of Valletta and were gone.

That night, Rebecca said softly, ‘They were truly like fathers to you, were they not?’

‘They were. After my father died.’ He smiled sadly. ‘Though the education they gave me was … unusual.’

‘Do you still miss your father?’

‘I do, and still talk to him daily.’

‘I too.’ They stood together in silence at the rail for a long time, and then she said, ‘So many have died.’

‘Aye. But more are being born all the time. Thank God.’

‘A great procession,’ she said. ‘From birth to death. What is it all for? Are we here to be tried?’

‘I think so, exactly,’ he said. ‘To be tried, and almost certainly found wanting. And then to be forgiven.’ And he reached out and took her hand, and then she turned to him and they kissed.

A gusty autumn day, the Palace of Whitehall.

‘So you do not advise that we should engage to marry this interesting Crowned Czar of all the Russias?’

‘I do not, Your Majesty,’ said Nicholas, hardly able to believe he was advising his Queen on marriage. Although he knew by the faint smile on her lips that she was not really taking him seriously as a counsellor. But she found the idea amusing.

‘Though his wealth and his empire are vast and growing, and he is not a Catholic?’

‘Nor an Englishman neither,’ put in Hodge.

The Queen smiled upon his interruption. Hodge could do no wrong in her eyes. What next, was she going to knight him or something?

Nicholas said, ‘He is not a Catholic, nor indeed …’ He had a sudden flashback to that grotesque moment when Ivan, appearing in the great square dressed in clownish conical hat and gold robe, poured boiling alcohol over the head of a man and set fire to him … and laughed. He drew breath. ‘His Christian faith is a complex one, Your Majesty. He does not always behave as one would expect of a Christian king. I fear your marriage would not be altogether happy. He is subject to a certain moodiness.’

‘Indeed?’

‘And has a certain fondness for … well, extreme violence.’ He racked his brains for something good to say about the Czar. ‘He had a difficult childhood.’

‘He is not alone in that,’ said Elizabeth sharply. But she disliked direct attention. She looked instead at what the two emissaries were wearing. Finely dressed indeed.

‘You know that by the sumptuary laws of our beloved father, it is forbidden for any man in England below the rank of viscount to wear sable.’

She had him there. He stammered, embarrassed, ‘I didn’t know, Your Majesty, forgive me.’

She stood and said with startling abruptness, ‘We wish you to marry. If you agree to marry a good Protestant girl, to raise your children as Protestants, then – well, would you?’

It was no facile answer that Nicholas made. He had thought endlessly about the truths of Christianity on his long adventures, seen so many men kill or die for their beliefs. Yet there could only be one God. A God with many names, perhaps.

At last he said, ‘I will live and die a Catholic subject of Your Majesty, loyal to you to the last. But my children – I could raise as Protestants.’

The earth did not shake, the ghost of his father did not appear. Nothing happened.

‘If you agree to do so,’ said Queen Elizabeth, ‘then your first son will be made Viscount Melwardine, in the country of Shropshire. Then he will be able to wear that fine sable cloak, at least.’

His mind reeled. His son, a viscount of England …! His father would like that very much indeed.

‘Is there no girl in the kingdom you can marry? Perhaps we can find you a compliant lady-in-waiting here at court. It is high time, you must be thirty.’

‘Only twenty-five, Majesty.’

‘You look a lot older. All that foreign sun and those wars, I suppose.’

Unable to argue, mind still reeling, he blurted out, ‘There is an orphan girl I have brought back from Russia …’

Hodge guffawed. ‘He hasn’t even asked her to marry him yet! Hasn’t got the bollocks for it!’ He shuffled. ‘Begging your pardon, Your Majesty.’

Elizabeth was thinking she wanted to keep Hodge by her side always. But he was a Shropshire yeoman, she could see that, and far too good for the Court. Ingoldsby angered her, though.

‘A Russian orphan!’ she cried. ‘This country is overrun with foreigners as it is, there are hundreds of Jews again in London, Frenchmen, Dutchmen, Flemings … and there must be a dozen blackamoor servants in the City now, we see them every time we go abroad, to our great distress. And you tell me you have brought back some wench from Russia!’

‘I have, Your Majesty.’

‘With child, I suppose?’

‘No, Your Majesty, I have not—’

‘Does she speak English?’

‘She does, she—’

‘Then send her in.’

A minute later, Rebecca was curtsying deeply before her and shaking visibly.

‘Speak, girl. What is your name?’

‘Rebecca Waverley, Your Majesty.’

‘Ah.’ The Queen glared at Nicholas. ‘You have a pleasant wit, Master Ingoldsby. You made me think she was a Russian wench, but she is as English as I. And you claim you have not broken her virgin knot?’

Nicholas and Rebecca both blushed together. The Queen was known to be blunt-spoken on matters of the body. She once mocked the Earl of Oxford publicly for letting a fart.

‘I swear I have not laid a finger on her,’ said Nicholas, not quite truthfully. ‘She is as pure as any maid in England.’

‘Hm,’ said Elizabeth, ‘that means little. But at least she is English.’

‘As English as roast sirloin and old ale, Majesty.’

‘A pretty simile for a maid,’ she scolded. ‘Say rather, as English as a white rose in June.’

‘As you say, Majesty.’

‘Rebecca Waverley. Are you the daughter of Thomas Waverley, the merchant at Moscow?’

‘I am, Your Majesty.’

‘A sad story, you have my sympathies. There is a good estate for you in London, my exchequer will see to it. And as for this aged vagabond here, this Sir Nicholas Ingoldsby – it seems he would be happy to take you to wife, though he is evidently as shy as a schoolboy in asking you. Doubtless because, despite all his many years of travel in sunny foreign lands, where the women are notorious for looseness and whorishness, he has never known a woman, or even come close to one. Is that right, Master Ingoldsby?’

God, she was nearly as cruel as Czar Ivan himself. ‘I, I …’ he stammered.

‘I, I …’ she mocked. ‘Well, you are either a pure soul indeed, or at least you will have some manly experience when you take this one to your bed. So tell me, girl – what say you to this man beside you? Would you take him as your husband?’

It was not the romantic moment of proposal that Rebecca had dreamed of in her girlish dreams. Her mind was in a dense Thames fog, her body burning all over, yet she heard her own voice say very far off, ‘Yes I will.’

‘Well then,’ said the Queen. ‘That’s settled.’

There remained just the matter of Hodge’s sable cloak. It was impossible to raise one so low-born to the peerage.

‘So what shall we do with it, Master Matthew Hodgkin?’ said the Queen. ‘Use it to cover a milking stool? Wrap a newborn lamb?’

‘Please, Your Majesty,’ he said. ‘I was wondering if, if I might … sell it. To a nobleman? If it might be sold in the Court … then I could buy a farm or some such …’