Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [169]
He was shown in. The large, unencumbered smile. The hair turned to seaweed because he was sweating-damp from the intensity of his day. She wrinkled her nose. The smile widened a little. “I ought to beg your pardon. But it’s the smell of money,” he said.
She sat up in her tall-backed chair and looked at him. She said, “I would rather have the eight shillings parisis.”
He had quick wits. “Ah,” he said. “John Bonkle? Who paid him? Not you?”
“It appeared,” she said, “to be a debt on the Charetty household. Incurred by whom and for what was not quite clear. Except that you were trying to collect it. I have told Felix he can repay me when he can.”
He threw back his head and laughed and laughed. He said, “Felix will never forgive me. We quarrelled on the way. I’ll put it right.”
“I suppose you will,” she said. “I should tell you that I have no idea whatever of what happened at Louvain, except that Olivier has gone, and Felix has installed someone else. Was he ever there?”
“Yes,” said Claes. “But it isn’t easy for him to pick up the threads. It’ll come. Would the demoiselle like me to tell her how I saw it?”
“I should like someone to tell me something,” said Marian de Charetty. “I think you should sit over there, not too near. And then tell me also what you mean about the smell of money.”
And so he came to tell her not only about Louvain, but about Tobie Beventini and his uncle and Quilico, and the Pope’s godson and Prosper Camulio de’ Medici, and the relatives in Milan and in Constantinople of Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, the Greek with the wooden leg. From whose affairs the first germ of a vast idea had sprung.
At the end, she sat absolutely still. She said, “And Tobias has located this mine?”
“Yes,” said Claes. He was flushed and a little breathless, and his eyes shone. He said, “I didn’t think he’d do it. Or want to share with us. He got help from Messer Prosper. He’s an ambassador in Milanese service, but privately a friend of the Adorno.”
“And a friend of Anselm Adorne’s?” she said. “Hence your success at the lottery. I thought you said this was a wholly Venetian monopoly?”
“So far,” he said. A little of the elation had gone. She was not exhibiting rapture. He said, as if presenting a normal report, “None of the Genoese know where the mine is, except that it’s in the Papal States. All the evidence about location and volume and quality is being prepared and tested and notarised this spring for the Venetians alone. Then they’ll pay us.”
“How?” she said.
“In several ways. It has to be worked out. That’s why I have to go to Milan. Or one of the reasons.”
“I see,” she said. She shifted her position in her chair, and swung her sleeves into two new, uncreased folds at her sides, and placed her hands one over the other on her lap. She said, “What you are talking about is appropriating a share of the profit from the world’s only supply of good alum?”
He said formally, “For two years at the most. Perhaps less. But the profit is there to be made. And it would let you develop this business into something worth having.”
“Yes. The business,” she said. “Perhaps we should descend to the mundane. Perhaps we should see how all this is going to leave the business. For example, you’ve heard about the mishaps in the yard?”
The white flame of excitement had vanished, but his manner was still wholly natural. “Yes. They couldn’t find the man who usually keeps the pump in repair. The leaking