Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [224]
The Candian wine was very good. Nicholas had refilled the cup, and Felix drank that off, too. His headache lessened and his stomach felt warm. “Do you remember …?” Nicholas had begun in the way he had so often begun to recall some exploit and embroider it. With a twitch of his shoulder, he had conjured up the austere, bearded Greek and his limp, and the whole hilarious business. Of the gun in the water, and the rabbits. Of the night in the Steen. Of the time the waterpipes burst.
Felix sat, cup in hand, against pillows and echoed, “An alum monopoly?”
“Yes.” Nicholas had seated himself again on the stool, the flask in his two hands. He seemed to be studying it. Without warning, the silly dimples appeared in his cheeks and disappeared again.
“What?” said Felix.
Nicholas looked up. “Nothing,” he said.
Felix waited angrily.
“That is,” said Nicholas, “I was just thinking. Wishing that you were sitting here and I was Felix de Charetty.”
“With a mother,” said Felix, his anger increasing. Why tell him now that he wanted to be Felix de Charetty? Most people did.
He had succeeded, anyway, in reminding the bastard who was who. The open eyes clouded over, and lowered. Nicholas said, “That was stupid of me. I’m sorry. About the alum. You’ve seen it. Casks of white powder in the dyeshop. Everyone needs it, to fix colours in cloth. It makes hides supple, and parchment last longer. It makes better glass, and better paper.”
“I know all that,” Felix said.
“I didn’t know if you did,” Nicholas said. “Then you probably know where it comes from. The poorer stuff from Africa. Spain. Up and down the west Italian coast in volcanic places like Lipari and Ischia. The best stuff from the Byzantine and Turkish end of the Mediterranean. And for hundreds of years, that’s been in the hands of the Genoese. You know that, too, of course. It’s been coming into Bruges for years in Genoese ships, and being handled by Adornes and Dorias, second cousins of the Adornos and Dorias in Genoa. That’s the connection between Anselm Adorne and Scotland. Antoniotto Adorno, Doge of Genoa, was visiting Scotland last century, collecting debts due him for alum.”
“That’s why you try to murder Scotsmen?” said Felix. “Over an alum monopoly?” A merchant would never show himself to be attracted by this kind of preamble. A kidnapped merchant might be forgiven if his heart was thumping with excitement.
Nicholas said, “When I’ve finished, you must make up your own mind about that. But listen a bit. You have to understand more about alum first. For instance, the purer it is, the better and costlier. And the best stuff, as I’ve said, comes from the eastern end of the Mediterranean. Deposits round the Black Sea used to be handled by Genoese trading colonies there, who had set up in Caffa and Trebizond under the Byzantine emperors.
“The best alum of all is south of Constantinople, in the Gulf of Smyrna, in a place called Phocoea. It was worked nearly two hundred years ago by Genoese brothers called Zaccaria, who had been agents in Constantinople. But the family lost its grip, and the Byzantine Greeks jumped into Phocoea and Chios, the island beside it, which didn’t suit the Genoese merchants at all.
“So just over a hundred years ago, an armed Genoese fleet arrived and took back Chios and Phocoea and established a sort of merchant’s co-operative, based on Chios, and run by the families and later the heirs of the original merchants who had paid for the fleet. Including the Adornos of Genoa.”
Felix said, “Thanks for the lesson. That was all ages ago, and anyway the Turks have it now. Have you done a deal with the Turks?”
“The Adornos did,” Nicholas said. “And the rest of the Genoese working the mines from the island of Chios. The Turks mastered most of the area, and the Phocoea Alum Company, to survive, had to pay 20,000 gold ducats a year to the Sultan. Then five years ago, Phocoea itself fell to the Turks, and the Genoese company kept Chios, but lost all the alum