The Ringed Castle (74 page)

‘On the West, my answer is as plain as I can make it. These lands belonged to the Tsar. Their loss has meant the loss of an outlet which we sorely need. I cannot pretend that the Tsar has forgotten this, but he sees daily, with the return of your ships, how this loss may be repaired, or partly compensated for, by this new link by the north with your country. I am therefore empowered to give you, and therefore the three nations of Poland, Lithuania and Livonia, a guarantee. My tenure of office in Russia is to last for five years: I hope longer. But I shall promise you, here and now, that for these five years I shall not send an army or permit an army to be sent against any one of these three countries, provided that in their turn they make no move to attack me or the Tsar.’

There was a brief silence. Then Petre said, ‘Can you make such a promise? I have Master Chancellor’s report on this man. He is a fickle ruler, Mr Crawford. Were he to change his mind, I would not give a fig for your contract, for five years or indeed for five minutes.’

‘But,’ said Lymond, ‘I have the army.’

‘So long as you live,’ the Bishop said bluntly.

Lymond smiled. ‘It is another risk you must weigh in the balance. I can only say that, fully trained and appointed, this army under its junta will be capable, with or without me, of keeping its undertaking. And that you must consider that the life of the Tsar, in that country, is exposed to quite as much danger as mine.’

‘And after five years?’ John Dimmock said heavily.

‘After five years,’ Lymond said, ‘we should offend no one, because we should be self-supporting, and need no country’s help. You find it profitable to trade with us now, when we are undeveloped and backward. You will find it ten times as profitable, whatever other outlets we have, when we are thriving. You fear, perhaps, the rise of a new power in the east, where you already have troubles enough with the competing claims of the Empire and France, of the Pope and the German states and Turkey. I can only say that these will change: that the Emperor has abdicated and that the fate of the Empire is not at the moment secure: that Suleiman is old and Turkey may not always remain the power that she has been. The secular power of the Pope is also in question. Affairs change; power shifts. You cannot stop it happening. And I should like you to believe that if you exercise your veto, and keep Muscovy in the backwater where
she has fallen, it will not serve your immediate ends, and it may bring about an explosion out of her ignorance and poverty and resentment which your descendants will have cause to regret.’

The Bishop of Ely was unmoved by the thought of his descendants. ‘Should we send hackbuts and teachers to the Gold Coast, so that the natives may greet us in Latin when we go to buy pepper?’

It was a mistake. Lymond looked at Sir William Petre and Sir William heaved a brief sigh and said, ‘As I am sure Mr Crawford is aware, we sent shiploads of pikes and armour to the Gold Coast with Wyndham, only five years ago. It was less a matter of education, it must be said, than of securing our trade there against other competition.’

‘In spite of the complaints of Portugal,’ Lymond said. ‘Perhaps, Sir William, we have covered sufficient ground for one day. There is the list of men and materials which my Tsar would wish you to send him. The profit to the Muscovy Company will be comparable to the profit they would be prepared to accept on the highest grade of their cloth. I propose that a thousand pounds of corn powder should yield the same profit as one piece of double-grain velvet; and that the same amount of serpentine powder should equate to one piece of a pile and a half, the rates for the rest to be settled between us. I am at your disposal at any time: perhaps your secretary would advise me when you wish to continue the discussion.’

It was the kind of list Petre had expected, if a little more specific than he had hoped: 3,500 hackbuts; 1,000 pistolets; 500 lb matches; 100,000 lb saltpetre; 3,000 corselets; 2,000 morions; 3,000 iron caps; 8,000 lances; 9,000 lb corn powder; 60 cwt sulphur; 52 fodders of lead. And the trained men one would also expect: ironfounders and engineers and gunners, physicians and apothecaries, printers, mathematicians; shipwrights.

Petre took the list and rose, Thirleby with him. ‘As you say, we shall place this before our colleagues and return. You are assiduous, Mr Crawford, in the service of your master.’ He bent an inquiring gaze, not ill-humoured, on the other man, twenty years younger, now standing before him with Mr Dimmock. ‘Your own country of Scotland then holds no attraction for you? I thought perhaps you were bent on repeating the great alliance between Scotland and Russia and Denmark, which was to result in the crushing of Sweden.’

Lymond did not smile in return, nor turn the matter as Petre expected. ‘I have had offers from that quarter, certainly,’ Lymond said. ‘But, so far, I have not been tempted.’

With an effort which contorted his stomach again, Sir William Petre refrained from looking at the Bishop. But outside on his horse, riding through the streets with his thirty velvet-dressed followers, he looked at Thirleby all right, and said with feeling,
‘My God!’

‘Yes. It was a threat,’ the Bishop said, ‘to make all other threats pale into insignificance. The question is, how far does he mean it?’

*

Behind them, Daniel Hislop put his head round Lymond’s door and said, ‘Yes, my lord? You wanted to see me, my lord?’

‘Come in and shut the door and stop being vivacious,’ Lymond said, without looking at him. Dimmock had gone. His papers, scattered over the table, had been gathered together and he was putting them away in his cabinet: Danny caught sight of glassware and licked his lips, audibly. ‘No,’ Lymond said.

‘But it went well?’ said Danny.

‘Well for whom?’ Lymond said. ‘It went according to plan. I want your report on the Vannes affair, please.’

He had shut the cabinet door, and locked it. Instead of sitting again, he stayed by the cabinet, tossing the key a little, idly, in his hand. He looked perfectly fresh, which was more than Petre and Thirleby had done. A clever bastard. Danny said, ‘Unless Peter Vannes lands off the south coast in a rowing boat, we’ll know as soon as he sets foot in England. I have men at Dover and Canterbury and Gravesend and Greenwich. And if it’s humanly possible, they’ll get his papers from him. It cost me a fortune. That is, it cost you a fortune. But if the Queen gets those papers and finds you’ve been corresponding with her sister and Courtenay, I suppose it will cost you your neck. It’s a pity we couldn’t take action earlier. We might have had Vannes waylaid in Venice or after.’

‘I am hoping,’ Lymond said, ‘that Hercules Tait has done precisely that. He was under orders to do so, if anything happened to Courtenay. The double precautions are simply because it has become doubly important. It now seems that Mistress Somerville has implicated herself.’

‘With Courtenay? Deceased?’ Danny said.

‘With the lady Elizabeth. Alive,’ Lymond said. ‘Through the Lennoxes’ efforts. They are merely attempting to control my movements: a popular occupation.’

‘They want you out of the country?’ Danny said, speculating generously. And as Lymond threw the key, with a sudden sharp gesture, on his bed, Danny said, ‘I simply love having secrets from Adam and Ludo, but I
am
risking my fair neck in the Cause. You are supposed to supply me with some basic information, if not to inspire me. Actually, I should love to be inspired. Why don’t we like the Lennoxes?’

‘Because they talk too much,’ Lymond said. ‘What are Blacklock and d’Harcourt doing?’

‘Blacklock, Adam, is drawing maps,’ Danny said. ‘Having been offered the position of cartographer with the Muscovy Company at twenty pounds per annum when you have departed, and having accepted with alacrity. D’Harcourt, Ludo, has got a new woman at Smithfield. Neither of them is likely to burst in on us.’

‘And you?’ Lymond said. He did not, to Danny’s regret, address him as
Hislop, Daniel
.

‘I,’ said Danny, ‘am risking my neck for Philippa Somerville. I suppose. When your divorce comes along, may I court her?’

‘You will have to discuss the matter,’ Lymond said, ‘with a number of other gentlemen, including one Austin Grey who may even fight you. As a reward for … what is your principal characteristic, would you say?’

‘Treacherousness,’ said Danny, gloriously.

‘That,’ said Lymond pleasantly, ‘is everyone’s principal characteristic. As a reward for bloody persistence, you may know that the Lennoxes have threatened Philippa if I leave the country. They may do it, it seems in two ways. One is by implicating her in my downfall, which is what you are contriving to prevent. The other is by accusing her of trading information to Scotland, which I hope the Queen Dowager is contriving to prevent. There is an inheritance which Margaret Lennox wants very badly. The Queen, I trust, is going to offer her a Chancery suit provided she exculpates Philippa in writing from any suspicion of treachery.’

‘But I thought,’ Danny said, ‘that you and the Queen Dowager of Scotland were no longer on visiting terms? Have you written to her?’

‘No,’ Lymond said.

‘Then——’ said Danny, and cut it off, because he knew now where Lymond had written. There was only one person in Scotland who both knew Philippa Somerville and stood well enough with the Queen Dowager to persuade her to take part in the stratagem, and that was Lymond’s elder brother, Lord Culter. Who at Edinburgh had knocked Lymond clean out of his senses.…

Daniel Hislop, in whose being a mad curiosity flourished at the expense of his undoubted acumen, said simply, ‘Christ! What did you say?’

Francis Crawford turned, and looked at him; and Danny’s smile became suddenly very pretty, if a trifle rigid. ‘I doubt,’ said Lymond dryly, ‘if it would inspire you.’

*

Sir William Petre took occasion to call on Cardinal Pole and ask him if he had discovered the Cicero he was looking for: Cardinal Pole, who shared his interest in rare books, admitted that he had not.
Several days after that, Sir William and the Bishop called again to hold soothing talks with the Muscovite Ambassador Osep Nepeja, and to pass directly from there to another part of the house, where they continued their rather more interesting discussions with the Tsar’s other envoy, Mr Crawford.

The grounds for negotiation this time were slightly more practical, and had to do with the very real obstacles in the way of supplying either men or material of the kind the Tsar wanted in these ominous days of impending war. While making this perfectly clear, it had to be admitted that, first, the current truce between France and the Empire was still, officially, unbroken, and that, secondly, although there was talk of war, informed opinion stated that war could not possibly occur until after the harvest, or June at the earliest. Which argued that since England—of course—was neither at war nor about to go to war, the lowering of her own stocks of weapons and powder was undesirable, but not completely out of the question, provided they could be replenished.

But that, of course, was a different story. For gunpowder and sulphur, as Mr Crawford surely knew, were imported to England from Antwerp. And the Low Countries, of course, were conserving every ounce of munitions against the feared counterattack by the French in the summer. Permission would never be given by King Philip’s advisers in Brussels.

Discussion, becoming speculative, lingered round the possibility that the Tsar, supplied with hackbuts and morions and lances, would feel that England had responded sufficiently. This was countered, quite as delicately, by the assurance that the Tsar would understand all England’s problems: none better. But that the less secure her frontiers, the less security Russia could offer her traders. Which left Sir William Petre and Mr John Dimmock with the prospect of explaining to their fellow members of the Muscovy Company why their privileges were being curtailed. Not because of the whim of the Grand Duke of Muscovy. But because King Philip needed the powder for his forthcoming war on the Pope.…

‘Unless,’ Lymond said at this point, ‘the Council cared to leave this particular aspect in Mr Dimmock’s most able hands?’

Murmuring, Sir William expressed the opinion that the conference might well break up for further individual discussions. Through the years until his son’s marriage, the Emperor Charles had made many attempts to prevent the export from the Low Countries to England of war materials needed for his own continuing wars. And for the further excellent reason that the English, having bought his supplies, were not above reselling them to the French to use promptly in battle against him.

Through the years, also, the English had found many ways of
circumventing this embargo, and none better than Master John Dimmock. Curious transactions took place between the owners of different warehouses: solid citizens of Amsterdam bought sulphur from solid citizens of Antwerp and resold it; and, mysteriously, hired ships from Antwerp were to be found unloading barrels of gunpowder at Harwich. The captain and searchers at Gravelines were rarely sober for work, so often were they sought out and banqueted, and each New Year’s Day, the captain received twelve ells of black velvet and his customars eight ells apiece of black cloth to encourage them to leave their gates open.

But that, of course, was before the fortunes of England were linked to those of the Empire through the marriage of the Queen to the Emperor’s son. As Lymond, bidding them all farewell, assured them that he fully understood. At the same time, he pointed out that he believed the Court was moving to Greenwich for Passion Week, and that if a cargo was to be collected, the time remaining for discussion was not therefore very great.…

Sir William Petre and the Bishop of Ely did not speak to each other on this occasion, when riding home. The book on the shelves, Sir William had taken occasion to check,
was
the
De republica
of Cicero. Mr Crawford had noticed his interest, and, taking it down, had let him look at it. ‘A fine copy, I think. I bought it from a man called Pierre Gilles for fifteen hundred gold pieces,’ Lymond said. ‘Or was it a thousand? I really cannot remember.’