Caprice and Rondo - Dorothy Dunnett [97]
Gregorio thought of his letters. He said, ‘I understood she was selling his plans to his rivals.’
‘She secretly joined them,’ Tobie had said. ‘She told Nicholas that to his face on that bloody day of reckoning between them at Trèves. She did it to win their God-awful contest and found, when they’d finished tearing one another to bits, that she’d failed because he was more ruthless than she was. At any rate, she’s not likely to try it again. After what he did, she left Nicholas, and she couldn’t return to the Vatachino if she wanted to. As it is, she’s done the opposite. She’s written down all their trading secrets for you, and she’s willing to invest her own money to replace something of what Nicholas squandered. If you want, she’ll stay and help with the business. She’s had some experience.’
‘I know she has,’ Gregorio had said. ‘But might she not want to use it to finish the Bank, as she has finished with Nicholas?’
And Tobie had listened, his cap dragged off and his balding scalp gleaming, and had said simply, ‘She is offering a large sum of money. Take it. Make no promises. And see what she does.’
And what she had done was prove herself, bit by bit, to be almost as able as Nicholas. She could deal with the minutiae of running a company — she had shown as much in the short spells she had already spent in their branches: with Julius in Cologne, Diniz in Bruges, Jooris at Antwerp and here in Venice with himself. She had displayed it, there was no doubt, with Father Moriz and Govaerts during the term of the Bank’s stay in Scotland. And what she had done for the Vatachino was evidence of another kind.
It was apparent also that she was a strategist: that rare person who could absorb and analyse current events, and construct from these a policy for the future. She did not have Nicholas’s instant comprehension of numbers. She did not have his imagination: the intuition that took the facts and drew from them some project so unlikely that only Nicholas could have thought of it. But she was, she proved over and over, prodigiously gifted, hard-working, and beyond every doubt trustworthy in all that she did. And all those hours when she was not in the bureau, or representing the Bank in the Republic, she was to be found with her son and his nurse.
Venice had learned to admire her. Gregorio himself had eventually accepted her, with the others’ approval, as a working partner of his Bank. And from Margot his wife he knew that the joint household was running in harmony and that, one day, even the nurseries might blend. His own son was nearly three, but Jodi was three years older than that, and had found himself separated from a father to whom, Gregorio had been astonished to discover, he seemed to have been deeply attached. The best remedy for that was the constant attention of his mother, which for the first time, perhaps, he now had. Soon the memory of his father would fade and then (said his excellent nurse) he would welcome a small friend such as Jaçon.
The Bank was slowly climbing the path to recovery. Nicholas’s wife and his son had found a haven. The ugly wound left by his perfidy had been forcibly stanched and bundled out of sight, and the small group of folk he had deceived, now scattered, were methodically remaking their lives. And now Caterino Zeno had come to disturb them.
Well, thought Gregorio, let him come. Six months ago, it might have been different. But now, surely, they were secure. He settled his gown and was calling a servant when Gelis herself appeared at the door of his chamber. She said, ‘They tell me Caterino Zeno has called.’
She looked