Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [96]
She thought that was true. The winter of desperation was over, and something must now take its place. Fate was carrying Nicholas where the Patriarch always intended to have him, and Christendom might get some good of it by mistake. She knew, as well as the Patriarch, that he had chosen to go for no spiritual reason. The Patriarch would assign the credit to Anna, but it was Elzbiete who had supplied the real lure: the secret that Kathi herself had sent Nicholas. The whispers about some lost gold, and a Spaniard, and a trail that led to the pirate haunts of the Black Sea around Caffa.
He might find his gold. He might create a merchant empire in Caffa, Circassia, Trebizond. He might settle in Poland. He might never find wealth, but still discover a purpose. And at least the journey itself would separate him from the dangerous life he was living. Although time had taken care of some of that. Benecke had gone, and Julius would lead no one astray for a while.
Robin was stroking her arm, his cheek on her shoulder. He treated her breathlessly now, as if she would bruise under his touch. She ran her fingers lovingly over his skin, to give him leave. She said, ‘Julius. We’ll have to tell Gelis. Shan’t we?’
His head moved. Then he said, ‘You don’t really think he meant to kill Julius?’
She said, ‘He sometimes loses control when he’s goaded. He blames himself afterwards.’
‘I know he blames himself,’ Robin said. ‘It was his fault, and he was trying to say so. But he wasn’t upset when it happened. They were laughing.’
‘So we tell Gelis it was an accident?’
His hand had moved lower. He said with sudden half-genuine annoyance, ‘How did Gelis get into bed with us anyway?’
After that, because she had invited him, everything became rather pleasant and serious. But before her thoughts turned away, her mind heard again the drugged cry that contradicted all Robin’s fine theory.
‘I am sorry,’ Nicholas had been driven to plead, although not to her. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry.’
Not to her; for he had not used her tongue. He had spoken in the language of Homer, and of the great poet-librarian of Alexandria whose follower he had known, it seemed, for so long. He had reverted to the speech of the ruined empire to which he was returning, and of the man, also lost, in the end, who had belonged there. It was their forgiveness he had asked for, not hers.
Part II
CIRCASSIAN CIRCLE
Chapter 13
ARRIVING IN VENICE that summer, Caterino Zeno paid an enjoyable visit to his wife Violante, a lucrative one to the Doge and Senate whose servant he was, and lastly, with the mixture of opportunism and malice for which he was noted, directed his barge to the Bank called Ca’ Niccolò where, landing, he enquired for the lady Egidia van Borselen of Beltrees. He was amused, lingering in the ornate marble hall, to hear from somewhere behind and outside the competing voices of very young children.
The message, conveyed to the counting-house, was received by Gregorio, the Bank’s long-time director. He did not immediately take it to his new partner. Instead, withdrawing to assume his lawyer’s silk robe and black cap, he took a moment to think, while sending to have the man taken aside, and offered a dish of fruit and some wine.
He needed to think, if Zeno had brought news of Nicholas de Fleury. For eight months now, by silent consensus, he and the others struggling to uphold the integrity of the Bank had taught themselves to envisage Nicholas as not only departed but dead, his ostracism regretted only by his army captain and Julius, neither of whom had any particular grasp of business morality, and by his son, who was too young to understand.
The arrival in Venice of Nicholas’s wife and son Jodi had taken place in December, just as letters of warning about Nicholas were arriving from Trèves. Gregorio had greeted the beautiful Gelis with extreme caution verging on panic, and had been confused but relieved to see his own wife