Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [258]
In their holds they carried Barbary wax and elephant tusks and brown sugar. They had gingers this year from Damascus, and violet camlets from Cyprus. There were forty caskfuls of currants. There were jewels, as always: rubies, turquoises, diamonds, and seed pearls to powder for medicine. There were wimple silks and lake gum and white comfits and thirty bags of good cotton. There were tabby silks packaged in Syria. Messina had sent astrakhan lambskins. There was also sulphur from Sicily and porcelain from Majorca and rosewater from gardens in Persia. There were Mass bells and missals and music books and glass drinking-cups of several colours, including pink. There was indigo from Baghdad, and oak galls and madder and kermes. There were one hundred and fifty butts of Malmsey wine; and a ballast of alum.
The commander this year, it was well known, was a Venetian nobleman named Piero Zorzi.
Marian de Charetty, with her household, was as usual in Bruges for their coming. Nowadays most of her interests were in Bruges, and now she had a good man at Lou vain, she spent less time there. Everyone said how drawn she had looked after the boy Felix went off in April, and of course the terrible fire. She hadn’t looked herself for a month or more, until word came in June that the boy was safe in Geneva with that young rascal Nicholas. And then four weeks after that had come this letter, brought to Bruges through the Medici.
Young Nicholas, the boy she married, had gone off somewhere in Italy and was not coming back as expected (or at all, like as not). And her precious Felix, who wasn’t even allowed to joust when he wanted, had ridden off to war, if you please: gone south to Naples to fight for King Ferrante.
Now who encouraged him to do that, you might wonder? And whether he was encouraged or not, what else could you expect, if you set aside proper womanly matters and thought you could run a soldier company? Sooner or later any boy worth his salt would want to put on armour and show what he was made of. She had only herself to blame. Herself and that terrible boy.
All the same, you missed Claes. She was probably missing him too, and the jokes. If nothing else.
She knew, of course, what was being said. She was helped a great deal by the need for hard work, and by the men Nicholas had chosen for her. Gregorio was her right hand. But she had the devotion also of Bellobras and Cristoffels as well as Henninc and Lippin. Everyone worked to restore and reshape the business in the way they had planned, in those early days after the fire.
To begin with, it was bitterly hard. But then, in the first days of July, Tommaso Portinari had come to her, bringing both good news and bad. With the letter which said that Felix and Nicholas had gone beyond her reach, to the Italian wars. And the package that contained bills drawn on the Medici bank for sums she had never expected. Money for the condotta: for the extra soldiers so skilfully raised and armed at minimal cost. And sums, unbelievably, which appeared to originate with the Fleury company. Somehow, Nicholas had obtained a reckoning of Fleury debts, and persuaded the Medici to pay them. At the time, it had seemed miracle enough. She hadn’t recognised the later visitor for what he was, because she didn’t deal with the Venetian merchants called Bembo. It was only when he was alone in her office that her visitor of that name had drawn from his pouch the paper that was more amazing than all the rest.
After he had gone, she had called in Gregorio, and shown him what Felix and Nicholas had sent. It held their signatures, as well as those of names Genoese and Venetian she did not wholly recognise. The sum of money it represented was enough, of itself, to clear every debt. The sums it promised would make them wealthy.
She realised that she had been looking for a long time at the signatures. That of Nicholas, black and firm and exact, because he had been taught very young, and then tutored in late months by Colard. Felix’s sprawl,