Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [107]
The fat man turned to the Widow. “Without a change of expression! You see? I commend your teaching, demoiselle. The youth is a model of composure. He answers, they tell me, to the good farmyard name of Claes.”
The bright eyes quizzed Marian de Charetty, and she returned the look with hostility. She was wearing, Claes saw, a gown stiffened like leather, and her hair was locked into some sort of container. Her colour, too high to have left her entirely, had confined itself to a bloom on either cheek, above which her blue eyes glittered like lapis. She said, “Farmyard? Claes is merely a short form of Nicholas.”
“To allot him three syllables would, I think, be going too far,” said M. de Ribérac. “The Flemish form, after all, is proper for artisans.”
“It is true,” said the Widow, “that our artisans are worth more than another land’s aristocracy, but Claes is no longer one of them.”
She sat without moving, holding down but not hiding her anger. Claes stared at her, and then switched his gaze to the man. The older, dangerous man.
The fat man said, “Has he been made a burgess, then, since his last exploit? He has been chosen by some very strange people to run errands for them. So, boy. You run fast, do you?”
“If I have to,” said Claes.
“And carry letters for the Medici. And others. You open them, do you?” said the fat man.
Claes said, “I can’t, if they’re sewn with thread and then sealed.”
The chilly eyes stared at him and then, measuringly, at the hands that hung at his sides. “I think I believe you. And of course, even if you opened them, you couldn’t read, could you?”
The demoiselle’s eyes flashed, but he didn’t need the warning. He said, “I can read.” He added, his voice helpful, “I read the ones I can open, unless they use cipher.”
The fat man smiled. He said, “Now I am pleased with you. We are having an interesting conversation, are we not? You read the ones you can open, and the news that is not in code. And you pass that news on. Who to?”
“The people who pay me,” said Claes, showing surprise. “I earn money.”
“So I realise. And are you earning it for yourself, Claes, or for your employer here? For you still belong to her company, don’t you?”
Claes smiled at his employer. “Yes, of course. The demoiselle de Charetty employs me.”
“And so you take your wages, and bring her back all the profits. How kind of you. Do you imagine she and I are imbeciles?”
Pause. “No, monseigneur,” said Claes carefully.
The fat man moved. “Then why are you smiling?”
“Because,” said Claes, “I have had this conversation before. With Master Tobias the doctor. He wondered if I wanted to be rich, or powerful, or just get my own back on other people.”
“And what did you tell him?” said the fat man.
“What he wanted to hear,” Claes said. “But we fell out, just the same.”
Silence again. Then the fat man said, softly, “You spy. Don’t you?”
“I told you,” said Claes.
The fat man said, “Ah yes. But for yourself, not for the demoiselle here. You spend a great deal of time with Agnolo Acciajuoli. Have you told anyone? What use can these meetings be to the Charetty company? You fall in – was it accidental? – with Monsieur Gaston du Lyon, the Dauphin’s chamberlain, on his way to Milan for – what was it? The jousting? And when he suddenly breaks off his jousting and makes his way to Savoy, you know that plan too? Don’t you? And sell it to whoever pays highest?”
“Well, I’d be an imbecile if I did that,” Claes pointed out earnestly. “Because if I offended the Duke of Milan, or the Medici, or the Dauphin, they wouldn’t pay me any longer, would they? You have to think of things like that, you know, in this business.”
A smile came and went, on the demoiselle’s face. Good.
The fat man said, “I see you are someone who thinks deeply. So, when you earn money, after such deep thought, for your employer – why do you then invest it in your own name? And not in Milan, but in Venice?”
Claes looked at his employer. Then he hung his head.
She said, carefully, “I think you had better answer.”
Claes said, “The