Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [156]
Anna didn’t have Robin. Anna only had Julius.
‘I can’t go to Neuss. I don’t want to. What are you thinking of?’ Robin said.
‘That I’m tired of painting,’ said Kathi with infinite pathos.
Chapter 22
BY DECEMBER, winter had fallen with unusual severity on the merchant city of Caffa, fraying the palm trees and congealing the seas to the north. Although daily awaited, no message arrived from the seamaster Ochoa de Marchena. The lost gold remained lost. After some weeks of deepening anxiety, Anna von Hanseyck cornered her elusive Circassian steward. ‘You have been divining.’
He wondered how she had guessed, for his hands were unmarked and he worked only at night, when the toll it took would not be obvious. Now he did not deny it, but told her the truth. ‘I didn’t want to distress you or the Patriarch. I did think I ought to try, for Ochoa’s sake. He is alive, but not near.’
Her voice, striving for calm, sounded strained. ‘You will harm yourself with that pendulum more than you harm either of us. So now you have found him, can you stop?’
‘For a bit. The occasional question won’t kill me. He’s on the other side of the Black Sea, probably waiting to sail when the weather clears.’ He smiled. ‘What will you do when you are rich again? Buy an estate and become a great lady, with Julius? Give up the business and raise children, and teach them to sing?’
‘What will you do?’ she said.
‘What would you have me do?’ He tried to speak to her with his eyes.
For a space, she made no reply. Then she said, ‘Send for Gelis. That is what we have told you from the beginning. Send for Gelis and Jodi.’ With whatever effort, her manner was normal, even admonitory. But her amazing eyes, scanning his, now held pain.
Enclosed in an alien place in one house with this remarkable woman, Nicholas had never thought it would be easy to keep the promise he had made to himself. He had not anticipated its effect upon her.
The mansion, in itself, was the best managed he had ever lived in: everything in it formed for comfort and striking in its simplicity. The staff, all of them good Christians chosen by Brygidy, had learned to treat Nicholas, when alone, as their master, since it was impossible to maintain his pretended race at close quarters for so long. Yet in all that time, he had never touched Anna. So far.
He managed it partly by absence. Fortified now by the coins from Qirq-yer, he was free to explore at least some of the business openings he was seeking for Julius. It had helped to authenticate his reasons for remaining so long with the Khan. The threatened meeting with Squarciafico and the Genoese consul had not been unreservedly pleasant but Nicholas had convinced them, he thought, that he had been lustfully revelling in the stews of Qirq-yer, rather than interfering with the Tuduns of Caffa. He had taken the consul some fermented liquor, and gratified him, as they drank, with a number of tales of a breathtakingly physical character, some of them true. When he left, Squarciafico was sweating.
To Father Ludovico da Bologna, on the other hand, he told everything.
The Patriarch listened. At first, his comments were purely political. He turned to the personal later. ‘Russia. The Tartar-Muscovite betrothal seems likely. Your pretty lady may well get her furs, but you would have to prepare the way first. Confess to Dymitr Wiśniowiecki that you are not a Circassian. He may betray you to the Genoese, but I rather think not. If he is sufficiently pleased, he will support the Khan’s Tudun when he comes. The pretty lady in the meantime should know nothing. Joy is an uncertain emotion, always indiscreet and often short-lived.’
‘I must remember,’ Nicholas had said. ‘Shall I tell her about the gold?’
‘Oh yes, you wish me to congratulate you on your fiendish divining.