In contracting for the paper Borrow showed himself quite equal to the commercial finesse of the Russian. He scoured the neighbourhood round St Petersburg in a calash at a cost of about four pounds. Russian methods of conducting business are amazing to the English mind. At Peterhof, a town about twenty miles out of St Petersburg, he found fifty reams of a paper such as he required. “Concerning the price of this paper,” he writes, “I could obtain no positive information, for the Director and first and second clerks were invariably absent, and the place abandoned to ignorant understrappers (according to the custom of Russia). And notwithstanding I found out the Director in St Petersburg, he himself could not tell me the price.” { 123a}
Eventually 75 roubles (£3) a ream was quoted for the stock, and 100 roubles (£4) a ream for any further quantity required. Thus the paper for a thousand copies would run to 40,000 roubles (£1600), or 32s. a copy. Borrow found that the law of commerce prevalent in the East was that adopted in St Petersburg. A price is named merely as a basis of negotiation, and the customer beats it down to a figure that suits him, or he goes elsewhere. Borrow was a master of such methods. The sum he eventually paid for the paper was 25 roubles (£1) a ream! Of all these negotiations he kept Mr Jowett well informed. By June he had received from Earl Street the official sanction to proceed, together with a handsome remittance.
For some time past Borrow had been anxious on account of his brother John. On 9th/21st November, he had written to his mother telling her to write to John urging him to come home at once, as he had seen in the Russian newspapers how the town of Guanajuato had been taken and sacked by the rebels, and also that cholera was ravaging Mexico. Later { 123b} he tells her of that nice house at Lakenham, { 123c} which he means to buy, and how John can keep a boat and amuse himself on the river, and adds, “I dare say I shall continue for a long time with the Bible Society, as they see that I am useful to them and can be depended upon.”
On the day following that on which Borrow wrote asking his mother to urge his brother to return home, viz., 10th/22nd November, John died. He was taken ill suddenly in the morning and passed away the same afternoon.