Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [261]
In all of this, he was liable to find himself nudged, Nicholas could see, by the former papal ward, his portly young wife, aged nineteen. Since the elaborate obeisance that had drawn her eye, Nicholas had found himself many times in her presence. She was always heavily attended by her women, and her bulk was always encased in great parallelograms of stiff jewel-sewn silk, with the pendicles of Byzantium dangling at each round, painted cheek. She dressed as her Imperial forefathers had done; she spoke Greek, not Italian; and she adhered to the Orthodox faith, not the Latin she had been sent to encourage. Her shining obesity and the coats of bright colour that disfigured her fine-grained young skin were also part of her Greek and Russian heritage, and in themselves the mark of beauty and authority. No one had quite understood as much in Cardinal Bessarion’s palace in Rome, where, as he had heard, the catamite Nerio had smiled, and Jan Adorne had been tricked into bursts of crude laughter.
No one laughed here at the Grand Duchess Zoe-Sophia. Replying to her questions, you observed the etiquette of Constantinople, and bowed yourself out in the same manner. Sophia was not interested in gunpowder or weaponry, but she was interested in trade, and Julius’s company was already buying for her. She was also avid for craftsmen. Under Bessarion, she had probably had her fill of learned lecturers: she had no plans to begin an academy. But it was Bessarion’s enthusiasm for Fioravanti, whose very nickname was that of the Cardinal’s hero, which had inspired the invitation that brought the mason-engineer here to Moscow. Now she wanted others, but found it hard to attract them. There was as much money and a better reputation to be had in the comfort of Mantua or Buda as there was in this country — unless, of course, you drew double wages as a spy. Some of the earlier incomers had tried that, and been found out. Now both Sophia and her husband were wary.
Nicholas was not, now, short of money himself. He had some jewels left, adroitly hidden, but since joining the architect, he had increasingly been offered payments for his work: where the building was concerned, expense was no object. And though Julius was now back and holding the reins of his own business, Nicholas had drawn some personal profit for the deals he had made, and continued to do so. Because living was cheap, and there were so few outlets for money, wealth soon accumulated. Fioravanti had used some of his capital to turn his workshop into a training school. Instead of being paid, many of the young men who came to work on his site or at the drawing boards offered him fees for the schooling he gave them. Half the work he did was experimental. He drew plans. He used new tools — a compass, a level. A special kiln had been built to make the hard, prime-quality bricks he required: the walls of white Kama sandstone were to be filled with brick and cement instead of gravel and sand, and he had taught the masons new ways to cut stone. This building, on the brow of the hill, was to brush the sky; was to be higher and lighter than anything Muscovy had previously known. The Dormition.