Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [266]
‘I want to leave now,’ Nicholas said.
‘You can’t,’ the Patriarch said. He opened his mouth and filled it with something.
‘Then I want to see the Adjudicator,’ Nicholas said.
He waited. The Patriarch munched. The Patriarch swallowed, and picked up a small bird, and stretched his lips open again. Nicholas said, ‘You are the Adjudicator.’
‘Of course,’ the Patriarch said.
EVEN IF IT DROVE HIM to the edge of his sanity, the violence with which Nicholas resisted this decree at least released part of the pent-up energy which had made the preceding weeks so tormenting. Now the torment was of a different kind. It was some consolation to discover, as he importuned everyone within sight, that he was not alone. Although they could not know his reasons, Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli was not unwilling to intercede for him with the Grand Duchess, and Fioravanti, against his own preference and interest, was ready also to petition that Nicholas should be allowed to go home. It surprised him, finally, to discover that the Adjudicator’s embargo had not been born of indifference or mischief. Father Ludovico had recommended to the Duke that Nicholas should be released after a week. The Duke had refused, and the Patriarch had not tried to insist.
In the past, when inconvenienced by Ludovico da Bologna, Nicholas had expected to manipulate his way out of the difficulty, and had generally found the process enjoyable even if, surprisingly, he did not always win. He realised, by now, that he had never understood Father Ludovico nor expected to understand him. It was not until this long exile that he had begun to learn, largely through other men’s eyes, what impelled this gross caricature of a priest in his burst sandals, to inflict his criticisms and trumpet his impossible demands in the faces of scared monks and Imperial rulers alike. Josaphat Barbaro, speaking of him in Persia, had said, ‘One meets him everywhere, does one not, as one might expect to see the ubiquitous God? But what one meets is not God, but one’s own conscience.’
He was not a man, therefore, to whom one took one’s petty concerns. What lay between Anna and Nicholas was a matter only for the two of them, and for Julius. The Patriarch already knew, very likely, about the danger from David de Salmeton. If he thought Nicholas despicable for not going home before this, he had never troubled to mention it.
He had never mentioned, either, the obvious fact that Nicholas was once more seeking reassurance through his pendulum. It frightened him that he had felt nothing last summer, when de Salmeton’s attack on Jodi had been made. And yet, another time, months ago, here in the Troitsa, he had stood in the cathedral and experienced a sense of loss so vivid that his heart thudded, as if he were swimming against a great tide of death. But no one dear to him had died, that he knew of, and when the visitation of grief had occurred, there had been no one else in the church, except the lanky person of the youth Andrea Fioravanti, about to leave on a well-prepared trip to Milan. The boy had shown no previous interest in the ikons, but had presumably been told by his father to study them. A decent enough lad; he had talked about gerfalcons all the way home.
Now, the cathedral in the Kremlin was beginning to rise. Tied by his invisible leash, Nicholas lived again with Fioravanti and helped him to build. He saw it in his mind’s eye as one day Fioravanti would see it in reality: stepping through the prodigious hooded door and standing in unimaginable space, between the tall painted pillars, and enclosed on three sides by the figured walls soaring up to the sky, and on the fourth by the heavenly plates of the golden iconastasis. One day, a son of Ivan would be crowned Grand Prince in this place, and would father another Ivan, perhaps, in his turn. Above, there were to be five golden domes.
In theory, he could have escaped: concealed himself in a cart with money sewn in his dress and