Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [48]
‘I don’t believe you. Why?’ Benecke said. They were already moving out into the river.
‘Why am I going? I’ll tell you some day.’
‘Don’t trouble. You’re right. I’m not in the mood to exchange confidences either. Go off and kill yourself without me.’
The raft jerked, turning into the current, and the priest’s knife jabbed deeper in sympathy. Benecke yelled. The priest, viewing the space which now existed between the raft and the bank, withdrew his arm, and then the knife, which he wiped on his robe and resheathed. Benecke lifted his fist.
Colà, on shore, called for the last time over the water: ‘Krzywousty! He’s the Patriarch of Antioch! They really would hang you!’
And, of course, they would. He had to let the old man sit down, the stupid priest whom he and Colà had been going to make fun of. He was going to have to take him to Danzig. He was going to have to sail without Nicholas de Fleury.
Benecke stood, his kerchief pressed to his wry neck, and voiced his opinion of Flemish bastards and bougres of Italian priests in a way that would have earned him excommunication, had not Father Ludovico found himself temporarily occupied with his satchel. But secretly, the captain was not quite so angry. Colà had come, risking something, to tell him himself. And one day, surely, they would terrorise the sea lanes of Europe together.
Chapter 7
ON THURSDAY the nineteenth of May, Anselm Adorne, Baron Cortachy left Danzig to lead his Mission of the Three Princes to Thorn. With him rode two Danzig councillors whose task was — of course — to smooth the way of the ducal ambassador, to oversee his reception in Thorn and to make quite sure that nothing happened detrimental to the interests of Danzig. Thick-set, hard-drinking and voluble, Jerzy Bock was related by marriage to Bischoff, whose second wife had been so hospitable to Kathi. Johann Sidinghusen, elderly part-owner of the Peter von Danzig, was even more insistently affable. Adorne suffered it all with civility. He was on his way to Thorn, knowing that Nicholas de Fleury would have arrived there before him.
Until recent years, Adorne had thought of Nicholas, if he thought of him at all, as his protégé. Only gradually had it become apparent that Nicholas, grown, was a man of exceptional ability, whose genius for finance and trade brought him to vie for the same markets as Adorne himself. Adorne had accepted the challenge with equanimity, as a good merchant should: giving no quarter and expecting none. But he had also learned, as the years went by, that the whispers about Nicholas were probably true. Other men, suspecting injustice, fought it in the open. Nicholas met it underground, by devious channels that ended in ruin and death. Especially the death of his own closest relatives.
It was because of his family — the dead mother, the foolish husband who repudiated her — that Nicholas had done what he had done in Scotland. Now, barred from the West, Nicholas was here — looking for power; perhaps looking for vengeance against those whose trust, at last, he had destroyed. Adorne had never believed that Nicholas would waste his time at sea.
The success of his mission mattered a great deal to Adorne, the more so that he was alone and the future of his house lay with him. He was uneasy about Nicholas de Fleury, and hurt, although he would not admit it, that his young Kathi seemed more concerned over the wretched man than over himself. He had felt relief, therefore, when Katelijne and her husband returned unharmed from their visit to Mewe, even though their encounter with Benecke had produced no advice, good or bad, that affected the affair of the San Matteo. And from what Robin volunteered, nothing seemed to have emerged, either, from their foolhardy encounter with de Fleury, except that the man had convinced them that he did intend to spend the summer at sea. Adorne had hoped it was true. From Kami’s face, he guessed that the meeting had been a disappointment and, on the whole, he was glad.
Then,