Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [216]
At that time, it seemed to Gelis that Jodi was safer in Scotland than within reach of the cannons of France. She had a journey to make, and a letter to wait for. Then she would go to Scotland.
IN ROME, packed with the Easter pilgrims of a jubilee year, the name of Nicholas de Fleury had begun to irritate Anselm Adorne’s eldest son, a lawyer in clerical orders in the household of Cardinal Hugonet. Jan Adorne, who was thirty, had known de Fleury from boyhood and already despised him as a jumped-up apprentice, even before the present ceaseless reports of de Fleury’s doings in Poland, linked as they were to the dismissal of Jan’s own father. First, prominent at every Roman reception, there appeared a Persian mission led by Caterino Zeno the Venetian diplomat, who had advanced de Fleury money, it seemed, to help take his own father’s place. Then came further tales of de Fleury’s friendship with the Queen of Poland and the traitor Buonaccorsi, related by his father’s friend Cardinal Barbo, the papal legate to Poland.
The saga even continued in Naples, where Jan Adorne found himself on both papal and Burgundian affairs, since his master was brother to Hugonet, the Duke of Burgundy’s Chancellor. The Duke wanted soldiers, and had sent the Grand Bastard his brother to pick up a mercenary army under the nose of the Pope. It would be awkward, of course, since the army was intended to fight the Holy Roman Emperor, not the Turk. The Duke trusted his brother to explain that Burgundy was already opposing the Turk by sending to the court of Uzum Hasan the worthy Patriarch Ludovico da Bologna, and the excellent Nicholas de Fleury the banker, whose former partners in Bruges and at Neuss were so ably assisting the Duke. The Duke trusted that if, as a consequence, Uzum Hasan were to march on the Turk, due honour would be paid to these two intrepid men.
Jan’s noble Genoese blood boiled. Someone said (at the reception that followed), ‘Any such honour was deserved, of course, by your father. The Mission should have been his. I cannot understand why Lord Cortachy was recalled.’
‘Venetian jealousy,’ Jan Adorne said. He could only have said it to someone else of Genoese extraction. This was Prosper Schiaffino de Camulio de’ Medici, once the peppery Milanese envoy to France, whose Camogli ancestors had exercised their fishing skills close to Tana, and who knew all about Venetian jealousy. Jan turned fully, and gave the man a smile. Beside Camulio, he now saw, was a courtier of quite another kind: a man whose beauty of feature and hair quite overcame his lack of height, and whose lustrous eyes, dwelling on Jan, caused Jan’s smile to widen quite naturally.
‘Ah, Venice!’ the stranger said, casting a glance, half affectionate, half comical at his companion Camulio. ‘At least in Scotland you will be free of her.’
Jan Adorne, changing his smile, turned his gaze back to the Genoese. ‘I should have congratulated you! They have extended your remit! Papal notary, collector for the Apostolic Camera and nuncio of the Pope in England, Ireland and Scotland! My father will be ravished!’ He kept his smile in place. His father, no admirer of Pope Sixtus, was not likely to be entranced by the appearance in Scotland of Camulio, a middle-aged protégé of the Pope’s nephew.
‘And so will the Pope’s dear Giuliano,’ observed the beautiful stranger gravely from behind. ‘But not enough, I fear, to send Prosper so far from his side. Fortunately for me, it seems that I may act for him as his business adviser. I hope to be in Scotland by June. I may even be fortunate enough to meet your dear father pursuing his duties. Or your cousins, Sersanders and Katelijne. Or even the wife and son of poor Nicholas de Fleury who, I hear, is pursuing some dreary task in the Levant.’
Jan gazed at him, reddening. ‘I am sorry …?’
‘My dear Jan, why should you remember your visit to Cairo, exalted as you now are in