Gemini - Dorothy Dunnett [236]
It brought compensations. He and Adorne need no longer work apart, but could be seen to be partners. With Adorne were Wodman and Andreas and Sersanders, and Archie of Berecrofts and Robin. They met, on occasion, in Adorne’s house, but more regularly in the prime Berecrofts home in the Canongate, where Archie’s diminished household was small, and there were chambers at need for them all.
The tall building next door, once the Ca’ Niccolò, had reverted, against all probability, to Nicholas, its original owner. The house in the High Street remained the family home, but the accretions of Gelis’s investments and Nicholas’s inventiveness had, in three years, profited themselves as well as the kingdom. Nicholas had money now, and some of it redeemed the premises that he had himself built as the Scottish home of his Bank. Nameless ever since, it instantly became known, in the arbitrary Canongate way, as the Floory Land.
Colin Campbell, who did not belong to the Canongate, preferred to refer to it mockingly, as Tigh a’ Nicol. Since de Fleury’s decision to stay, the relationship between himself and the Lords Three had changed in quality, as had that with others. While Scots merchants in England were taking out letters of denization by the score; while agents like Sersanders were being harried by their foreign clients into calling in all Scottish debts, Nicholas de Fleury remained, and consolidated his presence by collecting a company.
The new house was needed, because the men, once of the House of Niccolò, had come back to him. Some were in Scotland already: Crackbene the big Scandinavian shipmaster; Tobias the doctor from Pavia; John le Grant, the Aberdonian gunner and skipper. Where once had stood Marian de Charetty, there was Gelis van Borselen, also from the Low Countries: a business-woman of a different kind, but respected as once the small, gallant Widow had been. And for master, Nicholas the Burgundian, husband of them both.
Then, at the beginning of summer, to these five were added a final two: Father Moriz, to take the place of that other German, his friend, Father Godscalc. And Julius of Bologna, to be what he had been before the wretched days of Adelina: a vain, eager, attractive man of huge and disarming ambition, who had tried in vain to instil the same into Nicholas since he was a boy and had watched, puzzled, as Nicholas seemed to succeed, whether Julius advised him or not.
Seven partners from all over Europe. Reconstituted, the company that had once made its mark in the merchant world—but this time under a man who was not the youth Donatello had drawn, and who was not following the wishes of anyone but himself.
Returning to the country he had left eight years before, Father Moriz concealed his excitement: two weeks on shipboard with Julius could only be endured in a state of deep calm. It seemed sometimes that Julius actually yearned to meet pirates, if not the entire English fleet, hurriedly mobilised to pursue and sink notaries. From Leith roads, with a content heart, Moriz saw again the familiar outline of Edinburgh against the bustling white and blue sky, and welcomed the small, broad-spoken party, equipped with wagons and mounts, which confronted them when they berthed. As he had hoped, news had travelled from Berwick to Nicholas. They were expected. And when they reached the familiar house in the Canongate, Nicholas was there, running down the stairs to greet them both.
He was the same. He was totally different. He was large and easy-moving and well dressed, with direct eyes and a rich,