Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [0]
Niccolò Rising
Dorothy Dunnett was born in Dunfermline, Scotland. She is the author of the Francis Crawford of Lymond novels; the House of Niccolò novels; seven mysteries; King Hereafter, an epic novel about Macbeth; and the text of The Scottish Highlands, a book of photographs by David Paterson, on which she collaborated with her husband, Sir Alastair Dunnett. In 1992, Queen Elizabeth appointed her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Lady Dunnett died in 2001.
Books by
DOROTHY DUNNETT
THE LYMOND CHRONICLES
The Game of Kings
Queens’ Play
The Disorderly Knights
Pawn in Frankincense
The Ringed Castle
Checkmate
King Hereafter
Dolly and the Singing Bird (Rum Affair)
Dolly and the Cookie Bird (Ibiza Surprise)
Dolly and the Doctor Bird (Operation Nassau)
Dolly and the Starry Bird (Roman Nights)
Dolly and the Nanny Bird (Split Code)
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise (Tropical Issue)
Moroccan Traffic
THE HOUSE OF NICCOLÒ
Niccolò Rising
The Spring of the Ram
Race of Scorpions
Scales of Gold
The Unicorn Hunt
To Lie with Lions
Caprice and Rondo
The Scottish Highlands
(IN COLLABORATION WITH ALASTAIR DUNNETT)
FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, APRIL 1999
Copyright © 1986 by Dorothy Dunnett
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, London, and in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1986.
Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Dunnett, Dorothy.
Niccolò rising.
(The House of Niccolò)
I. Title. II. Series: Dunnett, Dorothy. House of Niccolò.
PR6054.U56N5 1986 823′.914 86-45306
eISBN: 978-0-307-76235-1
Author photograph © Grazia Ippolito
www.randomhouse.com
v3.1_r1
Contents
Cover
Map
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Preface
Characters
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
The House of Niccolò
PREFACE
When my chronicle of Francis Crawford of Lymond ended, it seemed to me that there was something still to be told of his heritage: about the genetic lottery, as well as the turmoil of trials and experience which, put together, could bring such a man into being.
The House of Niccolò, in all its volumes, deals with the forerunner without whom Lymond would not have existed: the unknown who fought his way to the high ground that Francis Crawford would occupy, and held it for him. It is fiction, but the setting at least is very real.
The man I have called Nicholas de Fleury lived in the mid-fifteenth century, three generations before Francis Crawford, and was reared as an artisan, his gifts and his burdens concealed beneath an artless manner and a joyous, sensuous personality. But he was also born at the cutting edge of the European Renaissance, which Lymond was to exploit at its zenith—the explosion of exploration and trade, high art and political duplicity, personal chivalry and violent warfare in which a young man with a genius for organization and numbers might find himself trusted by princes, loved by kings, and sought in marriage and out of it by clever women bent on power, or wealth, or revenge—or sometimes simply from fondness.
There are, of course, echoes of the present time. Trade and war don’t change much down through the centuries: today’s new multi-millionaires had their counterparts in the entrepreneurs of few antecedents who