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now to enlarge and complete projects in the small, unsteady country of Scotland—which the priest Godscalc, half guessing his intent, had compelled him to abandon for two years—Nicholas carries out two coups de théatre which have consequences and resonances unexpected by their designer. He spends ruinously of his time and the kingdom’s money on a nativity play whose single performance, a glory of thought, feeling, and art which makes transcendence of all its illusions and momentarily unites its fractured community, hints at the strength and value of the wounded spirit who has devised it. And he mounts a merchant expedition to the fish-fertile waters of Iceland, whence he lures and bests his old rivals the Adornes and the Vatachino company, as well as a new one, the Danziger pirate Pauel Benecke.

Sharing this adventure are Kathi Sersanders and Robin of Berecrofts, a Scottish youth whose courage, and desire to break free of the bounds of his sturdy mercantile heritage, bring him to the magnetic Nicholas as an admiring squire. Together they explore the new world of the north, learn from the hardy generosities of the Icelanders, and, transformed in the end from actors and designers to spectators, experience in awe and humility Nature’s own nativity play, the re-creation of a continent in the double explosions of Katla and Hekla, the volcanoes of Iceland.

Nicholas’ well-wishers will need this glimpse of his humanity. For in the matters he controls, Nicholas’ plans are coming to dark fruition. Gelis has a climactic announcement to make—she has won the war between them because she has secretly been working for years for the Vatachino. But Jorden de St Pol, whose painfully rebuilt career in France Nicholas has undermined once again, brings a devastating illumination: Nicholas knew of Gelis’ connection with the Vatachino and skillfully played with it; further, all his projects in Scotland, from the nativity play and the Iceland expedition which brought him a barony, to more secret investments of the bank’s and the country’s money in worthless mines, poisoned grains, and debased coinage, were meant in fact to financially wreck the country whose gentry, the St Pol/Semples, had terrified and rejected Nicholas’ mother, and Nicholas himself, thirty years before.

He has carried out this plan because he could: he could not draw back from it because it was his. In this final spectacle, the work of an angry child, of an obsessed artist, even his friends believe they see the death of Nicholas’ soul, and desert him. Stunned by his own dire success, Nicholas agrees with them: as the novel ends and the abandoned and pitiless banker allows himself to be carried East by the newly ascendant emperor of Germany, he seems ready for burial. Or, possibly, resurrection.

If he seeks his grave, there is no lack of deadly alternatives available: the perils of ruthless private enterprise with pirates like Paúel Benecke, or of the ever-beckoning Eastern Crusade which was the dream of another of Nicholas’ mentors, Cardinal Bessarion, now dead, and the latter’s hairy acolyte Friar Ludovico. If there is to be a renewal of spirit, there are incentives to this as well. The alienated but still beloved family of Gelis and Jodi, who are still endangered by the St Pols. The now-engaged young people, Kathi and Robin, who remember stubbornly that the Machiavellian Nicholas did, after all, momentarily desert his Scottish plans and the Scottish King James, whom he did not love, to go, tragically too late, to the side of the Venice-threatened Cypriot King James, whom he did love. The handsome and exasperating Julius and the Countess Anna, his loving and beautiful wife. Or perhaps renewal will be triggered by a more mysterious set of forces, crystallized in the mystics and astrologers drawn to Nicholas and in the sometimes devastating shafts of foreknowledge through which Nicholas seems to be excavating the buried trauma of his own nativity.

Judith Wilt

Boston, 1997

Part I

POLONAISE

Chapter 1

THE WIND BLEW from the north, from Siberia, and the clatter