Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [262]
When he and Nicholas talked, it was generally about the cathedral, but it might as easily be about road-making or bridges or dams. Often, he would draw Nicholas to speak of John le Grant and his cannon, and they would discuss, yet again, the problems of countering heavy artillery, and how to break the impasse of costly, time-wasting sieges where neither side had the ability to prevail. After these sessions, the wall-boards would be black with impassioned drawings. Nicholas lived, from day to day, in an agony of uncertainty and apprehension, but his work concealed his feelings and preserved them from crumbling, like Rudolfo’s strictly mortared new walls.
As the weeks went by, there were cracks in the rampart of silence. He knew, before the winter was over, that Mánkup in Gothia had fallen; that the fratricidal prince Aleksandre had been executed and his wife and daughters sent to harems. It moved him more to hear, later, that Abdan Khan the commander had escaped, leading his Circassians east of Kerch to the valley of the Kuban, and safety. They said that his pregnant wife had given birth on the vessel that took them, and that he now had a son, Kesa. The name, picked in pride and defiance, was neither Cairene nor Gothian, but Cherkess.
He knew his own son was alive, but only because of the pendulum. He carried with him Gelis’s letter, brought by Julius and therefore read by him. It added little to what Julius had already told him: that the danger from David de Salmeton was known, and would be dealt with, and that he was not to come back. And so he was not coming back.
He did not, of course, cut himself off from all connection with Julius or Anna: he simply entertained them in his house, and discouraged appeals to his better nature by filling the room with other people. Fioravanti generally had some business to talk over if Julius was present, and Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli never absented himself from a social occasion on any level, whether to shine at it or deride it. Impatience overcame Julius once, to the extent that he upbraided Nicholas in public for neglecting his family and overstaying in Russia, when company business required them both elsewhere.
To that, Nicholas merely answered, ‘Then go back yourself. I’ll come when I can.’ And, when pushed: ‘Then expel me as your partner, and keep the loan you were given as my forfeit.’ He thought, then, that Julius was within a fraction of going, but Anna restrained him.
The next time they came, Julius was called away suddenly, and left Anna behind, promising to return to escort her home. Fioravanti was absent, but there were three eminent boyars in the room, an Italian goldsmith, and a few of the absent architect’s more promising trainees, who sat as close to Anna as possible, and gazed at her, awed. She smiled and spoke to them all, but spent more time, as was right, with the boyars, interrupting herself on occasion to spar with Acciajuoli, who liked to inject a light irony into the unrisen dough of boyar discourse, increasingly thickened by drink.
Watching the pretty woman and the elderly gentleman, so socially adept, Nicholas saw, yet again, how they took pleasure in their exchange. Both were solemn; only by the tone of their voices could you tell they were bantering. Anna’s face was illumined. Nicholas remembered the times when he, too, had been free to talk to her like that, and the sound of her laughter. He could not risk that now. With Julius here, God knew how it would end.
In fact, of course, Julius was not there. The light waned, the youths reluctantly left, and still he had not returned. The princes one by one fell asleep, and their servants came, as was the custom, to carry them home. One roused on leaving, and broke into song, and then vomited. Acciajuoli said, ‘I shall escort the Gräfin to her home. Her husband has been delayed.’
Anna smiled. She had bought silks in Novgorod, and her slender skirts moved upon one another, layer on layer, as she changed