Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [211]
The demoiselle smiled, and soon, rising, made her way slowly to where a pallet had been made up in her small parlour.
When the door had closed, Gregorio turned on his companion. He said, “She owes you a lot. So does the business. But listen to my advice. Intelligence is not enough to steer a way through this mess. It needs experience, and it needs caution. These schemes were always risky of their nature. You still want to pursue them. You’ve learned fast. You’ve gained confidence even faster. But you still haven’t the experience.”
Nicholas looked at him. He produced, surprising Gregorio, one of his larger, more encompassing smiles. It ended in a jaw-cracking yawn. “Goro friend,” Nicholas said. “Do you think I don’t know all that? But if all you’ve said is right, and it is, we need a great deal of money from somewhere, quickly. And whether I’ve the experience or not, I’m going to get it.”
Chapter 31
STOLIDLY UNAWARE that the Charetty business lay smoking behind him and that, even worse, the Charetty widow was no longer a widow, Thomas her under-captain proceeded south to do battle, accompanied by four squadrons of lances and fifty men willing if not yet fully able to use the handguns wished on him by that young terror Claes.
With him also went the two fellows, Godscalc and Abrami, also chosen by Claes. Thomas found he was glad of them. Abrami, a Hungarian crossbowman trained in Germany, knew more than he did about handguns. And Godscalc was not only a clerk but quite a bit of an apothecary. When Thomas’s horsefly lumps went rotten, as they often did, Godscalc was a wonder with pastes and powders. Thomas quite enjoyed the journey south, in spite of the rabble of horse-boys and camp servants and the rest that always had to come along for a long campaign.
That was the bad side of it. The good side was the women. The Widow always left that bit of it to Astorre and him, and didn’t often query the bills either. After all, you’d never expect a fighting man to forage for food, or grind his own corn, or wash his own linen. That was women’s work. And when a man had stopped fighting, he wanted more out of leisure than a game of dice and a drink.
There would, of course, be no shortage of women in Naples. An army waiting to fight attracted them like those God-damned horseflies, and they bit you as bad – or if they didn’t, the fights over them did. So it made sense to bring along a few good girls of your own. There were even one or two wives in the carts, one of them giving suck. Hers was the only infant he’d seen, but sometimes others turned up. That was up to the father. A man only got one lot of pay. It was up to him if he wanted to feed more than one mouth with it.
Thomas, and his cavalcade, crossed the Alps without incident.
In Milan, he picked up the handguns. He also received a surprise, but one that didn’t distress him unduly.
He reached Naples at the end of April, after a fair amount of tactical dodging, and found the city nearly invisible behind sheets of clammy rain. He had sent a runner ahead to warn Astorre he was coming, and hoped there were still some reasonable billets left with dry floors and no more rats in the thatch than a man might expect to deal with.
The castle was big enough to hold all the commanders and captains as well as this bastard Aragonese king called Ferrante. But lodging the men was another matter. Some towns put you outside, between the walls and the outer defences and built wooden huts for you. Sometimes you had to use your own tents. Sometimes you were shoved in with any family they could force to take you.
He was glad to see Julius, the Widow’s notary, waiting at the gates when he rode up, with a well-dressed man who turned out to be the Neapolitan commissary. Thomas watched with some satisfaction as the man rode briefly along the neat file of troops and carts and baggage and, returning, nodded. Then