Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [198]
He left a day later, and they talked of him.
Gregorio said, ‘I’d forgotten. I’d forgotten what he was like.’ He sounded angry, and resentful, and even afraid.
‘But he is different,’ said Tilde. ‘I remember him joking all the time. Now the good humour’s still there, but it’s more a solid contentment, inside. And he makes time for the laughter, but there are other things that mean as much to him, or more.’
‘He is needed. That’s the difference,’ Diniz said. ‘He made a mistake, he went back to make reparation. He found a purpose perhaps.’
‘Perhaps,’ Gregorio said. ‘But he isn’t sure yet. And which Nicholas should we hope for? Not Claes: he has gone. But there is a place short of hegemony, surely, for the considerate nature, the gift for happiness which made him such a good friend, such an easy business partner? Or would constraint be a sin, now his arts have developed, so that even rulers begin to depend on him?’
‘A life of duty?’ said Diniz. ‘He obeys his conscience, when brought to it. It is one of the things that I love him for. But a life of duty?’
‘It depends,’ Gregorio said, ‘on what you think life is for.’
Chapter 24
Off gret corage he is that has no dreid
And dowtis nocht his fais multitud
Bot starkly fechtis for his querell gud.
JULIUS OF BOLOGNA was in no doubt about what life was for, although others frequently disagreed with him.
At his school for indigenous orphans, it had been for rebellion. In Paris, at the Bologna college of notaries, it had been for drinking and gambling and other forms of light entertainment, which had got him into trouble with his subsequent master, the Cardinal Bessarion. Later, with reasonable qualifications and no money, he had traded briefly on his good looks (briefly, because he was not a particularly sensual man) and obtained this post and that until, one day, he had taken himself in hand, looked at his life, and decided what he was going to do about it.
He had been to Geneva before, during his training, and had been intrigued by Jaak de Fleury’s cloth business. They had no vacancies then, and he wasn’t yet qualified, but that was where he saw Nicholas for the first time, although they called him Claes, and he was young. Cheeky, and nine years younger than Julius was. By the time Julius came back, aged twenty-four, and became Jaak’s poorly paid company lawyer, Nicholas had gone to the Charetty at Bruges, and it hadn’t taken Julius long to decide that he wanted to follow him. He had met few people as unpleasant as Jaak, and not many who made him as uncomfortable as did Jaak’s wife Esota.
Marian de Charetty, the widowed head of the firm, after some typical female delay, had appointed Julius as notary and also as bear-leader and tutor for Felix her son, who went to the University of Louvain, and was to be killed not long afterwards. Nicholas went to Louvain also, as Felix’s servant, which was where he picked up the education he had. Being not only illegitimate but disowned, he would have had little chance otherwise. Then, of course, Nicholas, aged nineteen, had married Marian de Charetty, the little whelp, and was on his way to becoming wealthy and powerful.
It was what Julius had always tried to hammer into him, when they were being serious about anything, Julius and Felix and Claes. If Nicholas had discovered ambition, he could thank Julius for it.
And then, after the golden years, Julius had made a disastrous marriage to a woman he thought he knew all about, and found that his money had gone and he hardly knew her at all. Adelina had been related to Nicholas, and when she died, she had been in custody for trying to kill him. It made Julius feel ill even to think of her. He kept remembering that there was a daughter of hers, subsisting at Nicholas’s expense in a convent here in Cologne. The girl’s name was Bonne, and she