Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [245]
He had unwrapped it at home. Inside were six jewels, of such a size and such a quality that they would pay for their house, their food and their journey home or, alternatively, the deposit necessary for any new business venture. Julius had been flushed. ‘He got them from Uzum Hasan, and meant to keep them to live on. But he wanted us to have them. He thinks that, if we stay, we could be rich.’
Examining them, she had caught her breath, despite herself. ‘He is so generous,’ Anna said. ‘He strips himself, for our sake. But Julius, we must go back. I have Bonne.’
He had agreed. But the sale of just one of the gems had paid for a better house, and her furs, and good servants. So, escorted, she was enabled to pay visits to the small merchant quarter, where wives were not common, and to improve her acquaintance with the Italians whom Julius had already met. One of them was a fellow graduate from Bologna, here with his son and a pupil to create a cathedral for the Grand Duchess. Anna called on the architect, at his invitation, in the rectangular house he had been given close to the far from rectangular pile of the Grand Duke’s antiquated timber castle-palace. Her host, a powerful black-haired man in his forties, was there with his son. And with him was another visitor from the West: the elderly Florentine called Acciajuoli, whose intermittent dealings with Nicholas had so often been related to her, with mirth, by her husband.
After the rough ways of the Muscovites, the amused eyes and smooth manners of the old gentleman were undoubtedly pleasing. Tall and slender and bearded, his wooden leg skilfully hidden by impeccable velvets, he spoke with all the gentle authority of a member of a great Italian family, a kinsman by marriage of the Medici, and a nobleman of the Morea, that part of Byzantine Greece once ruled by the Grand Duchess’s family. The fall of Constantinople had ended all that, and nearly ended the life of his brothers, who traded there. Travelling Europe to raise ransom money, he had come from Scotland to Bruges, and to Nicholas.
‘Claes,’ he said, ruminatively, when she reminded him. ‘He used to be an apprentice called Claes. And now he is in prison again. Should I find it surprising?’
She had enjoyed his company, despite the insistent presence of Andrea, the architect’s son, a good-looking young man of modest attributes, who nodded and smiled at Signor Acciajuoli’s every word. After the meal, his father sent him off on an errand, and Anna did not stay long after that. It was not her purpose to further Julius’s awakening interest in the market for engineering supplies. She wanted, as soon as possible, to go home.
Having watched her departure, her host turned back to his other guest with a small shrug. The Florentine Acciajuoli smiled from his chair. ‘You need not have sent Andrea away. I am not about to seduce him, and I am perfectly capable of indicating as much. By the same token, Maestro Fioravanti, you are not about to kiss the shoe of the Gräfin?’
‘What makes you think that?’ said the engineer. Fioravanti was not a name he had used often since graduating in mathematics at the University of Bologna. He had been city engineer there in the mid-fifties, when the lady Anna’s husband had become secretary to Cardinal Bessarion. He remembered receiving a bonus of fifty florins from Bessarion for his skill in shifting a tower from one place to another (shifting towers was his speciality). His trade name these days was Aristotele, but Julius still called him Rudolfo. He had been glad to see Julius married