Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [161]
It reassured him, locating her tavern, to find that her entourage was well controlled and well armed, and that they had had the sense to bring food and conceal it. He thought, when shown into her chamber, that, long-limbed and fair as she was, she had the air of a pre-occupied man, of an upper seaman, you would say, preparing to tackle some puzzling duty. He saw that the rumours of what she had been doing in Venice must be true. Although they had met many times, from Scotland stretching back to Mount Sinai, his greeting was deliberately commonplace, and he plunged into business as soon as they were seated over the flask he had brought. ‘We need to take some decisions. Do you want me to speak, or would you rather wait and talk to Astorre?’
‘I want to talk. How is he?’ she said.
John le Grant grunted. ‘His joints ache. He’s still the best in the profession.’
‘You must both get offers,’ she said. He had forgotten what she was like.
‘We’re both daft,’ said John le Grant shortly. ‘So what d’ye want to know first?’
To his relief, she took company statistics for granted. Astorre and his guns and a hundred lances had been lodged on the river-banks of the corn port of Neuss ever since the end of July, when Duke Charles hit on the idea of intimidating Cologne by surprising and capturing its small Roman neighbour. Except that on the knoll of Neuss or Novaesium was a stout little town, stuffed with food, stuffed with arms, which declined to fall, and had chosen, vindictively, to allow itself to be besieged. According to history, it had already survived thirteen sieges, and clearly aspired to a lucky fourteenth. Meanwhile, it was successfully occupying Duke Charles and the finest army he had ever assembled.
‘Really?’ had said Gelis when John used the phrase.
‘I was exaggerating,’ said John. ‘Thirty bombards, fifty great serpentines, a hundred smaller pieces of ordnance, and twenty thousand Flemish, English, Italians and borderline Germans, all with their own whimsies, fancies, prejudices and silly ideas, led by Charles the Mange, who listens to nobody. And while his Castilian siege machine sinks, and the wheels come off his Italian castle, and the Neussois sally forth and kill hundreds, the Emperor Frederick and the French and the Austrians and the Swiss are making friends and arranging to dine off him.’
‘He wants Cologne,’ Gelis said. ‘He wants to tidy his frontier with Germany. He wants to join his lands in the Low Countries with Burgundy. Meanwhile, he’s accidentally opened so many fronts that he’ll pay you to fight almost anywhere. You think I’m here to get you to protect Dijon and Fleury for Jordan. I’m not.’
He felt like being sardonic. ‘Nicholas doesn’t want his son to have Fleury?’
Gelis said, ‘He couldn’t afford it. We’ve traced his grandfather. Nicholas has no provable right to the vicomté of Fleury.’
‘He could buy the land.’
‘Nicholas has no money,’ Gelis explained, in the same helpful, even solicitous manner. ‘Tobie mentioned a rumour, and I investigated with Govaerts. When the business in Scotland closed down, the funds passed through various accounts on their way to the Bank’s central ledgers. On the way, Nicholas arranged for them to sweep up all his own personal money and include it as part of the Bank’s commercial surplus from Scotland. No one noticed.’
‘No one noticed!’
‘It wasn’t difficult. Would you have questioned what the contents of the castle of Beltrees might be worth? Except that they weren’t worth anything: the money that bought them was borrowed by Nicholas. But Govaerts didn’t know that. The ledger showed a good sale, the equivalent money was there, and he accepted it. So what are the Duke’s chances at Neuss?’
‘Slim,’ le Grant said, though not immediately. He stared at her, his mind on Nicholas’s eccentric behaviour. ‘You’re saying that Nicholas made a camouflaged gift