Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [230]
Felix said, “But the dispatch you brought to Tommaso said the Duke wanted one.”
“Yes,” said Nicholas. Three dogs were following him, and several children.
Felix said, “So you made it up? You made up the whole thing? No one wants an ostrich at all?”
“Nonsense,” said Nicholas. “I do. Tommaso does. Lorenzo does. And once I’ve told the Chancery that it’s coming, the Duke will as well. If no one wants it, we’ll put it into the lottery like your porcupine. We’ll harness it to the waterwheel and watch it eat all the buckets. We’ll make it run in the Crane. We’ll use it to dredge the canals. Winrik can keep his money in it. Everyone should have an ostrich. Or an orange. Catch.”
He didn’t catch it, and it fell in the wall-fountain they were passing, so that the splash went up his nose.
Felix didn’t mind. For a moment – for how long? – Claes was back amongst them.
But it was Nicholas, not Claes, who accompanied Felix that night, to the house of Prosper de Camulio de’ Medici.
A warm, strong breeze had risen which made it pleasant, in spite of the dust, to walk through the narrow streets under the shade of the crimped red eaves and the balconies and between the crooked steps with their pots of bright flowers. Swifts swirled overhead, random as gnats, their distant fluting turning into a thin, snarling whistle as they swooped. The house of Messer Camulio was in the southern quarter of the town, and close to the inner, encircling canal. Between that and the outer ring of water were some important churches and hospices, lodged on the specially-cut channels that brought freight-barges close to the heart of the city. The brothers Portinari supported two of such churches and, in return, were given favours.
Trade. Wealth. Renown. With high spirits and a new confidence, Felix de Charetty trod the paved streets beside Nicholas, who listened receptively to Felix’s detailed account of the afternoon he had spent at the Duke’s tilting-yard at the (half-rebuilt) Castello, with the Duke’s jousting-master.
Then they arrived at the Casa Camulio, which had a coat of arms over the entrance and pillared arches, underlit by the sun, in the small, warm courtyard within. Here, since the sun had lost its heat, they were invited by Prosper de Camulio to sit by the fountain and take their ease. He had one companion only. Four men, eating and talking, with no ladies present. A group of men talking, in low voices, about money.
Prosper de Camulio de’ Medici, a man in his mid-thirties, possessed what Felix was beginning to recognise as the style of a diplomat and a politician. He was lightly dressed in a linen shirt and fine overtunic, and he wore a silk scarf embroidered with violets which had certainly come from France. With him was a Genoese called Tomà Adorno. Camulio and Adorno. Felix knew what they had in common, for Nicholas had told him.
Tomà Adorno was short and meaty and middle-aged, and his pale hair was bleached to wrack by the Levantine sun. Nothing of the slender, quizzical beauty of Anselm Adorne was visible in him, yet (said Nicholas) Anselm and he must be related.
So long entrenched in Bruges, so well-thought-of, so splendidly Flemish, the tribe of Adorne might have known no other roots. But six generations ago (according to Nicholas) the loss of Acre had driven the Adornes’ merchant ancestors from the Holy Land: one branch to Flanders, and one branch to their native Genoa. And even sooner than that, the shrewd seamen and traders of the Genoese fishing village of Camoglio had begun to settle in the Genoese colonies, and one Vivaldo de Camulio had a trade in cloth in Byzantium.
Four generations ago, in the time of Anselm of Bruges’ great-grandfather, Gabriel Adorno had become the first Adorno Doge of Genoa, and his kinsmen and fellow merchants had mastered the island of Chios and the alum trade of Phocoea. Within a couple of years, a Niccol