Niccolo Rising - Dorothy Dunnett [91]
The ushering servant had gone. The men thus summoned to help were two of the three standing guests, the third being a young and pretty girl. Tobie knew none of them. Smiling his social, doctor’s smile, he took a precise inventory.
Of those playing cards, the speaker was no doubt his host. This man, thickset, sallow and commanding, must be the banker – Agnolo Acciajuoli, grandson of Donato, Prince of Athens and kinsman of Messer Nicholai, the one-legged Greek who had travelled from Scotland to Bruges. And the woman next to him must be Laudomia, his sister, wife of the absent Pierfrancesco. Or half-sister, perhaps: a handsome woman, many years younger than Agnolo and dressed in Florentine fashion, her hair and sleeves crossed with jewels and her unveiled bosom and neckline in elegant partnership.
Next to her, there sat someone familiar who was not a Greek or a Florentine. A lean, dark-skinned man, young but soberly dressed, whom Tobie had last seen somewhere quite different. In the party of Lancastrian Englishmen. In the English party which had stopped to rescue Brother Gilles and had been caught in the first of Claes’ avalanches.
An Englishman, here?
Then the supposed Englishman, smiling, said something to Claes in an idiomatic French which was quite patently his native tongue, and Claes, replying politely in the same language, addressed him as “Monsieur Gaston.” The woman, laughing a little, put down a card and herself spoke to the apprentice, this time in Italian. He answered at once: not entirely correctly, but with the clear Bologna inflections he must have picked up from Julius, instead of his early Savoyard. He had an exact understanding of the question.
They were, of course, toying with him. Tobie’s uncle, cup in hand, murmured in Latin, “Why not try him in this language? Or Greek?”
Claes gave a smile, his eyes on his cards. “Maestro, spare me,” he said. “I cannot both walk on my hands and contest a game with such players.” He laid down a card and shot a glance at Tobie. It was full of conspiratorial delight. If he could, Tobie would have cancelled on the spot both the misguided, cavalier deeds at Damme and Geneva which had linked him with this dangerous lunatic. He glared at Claes, full of suspicion.
The boy’s manner, damn him, was perfect. Deferential, with glimpses of spirit and simple humour which made his elders laugh. He was clean. Beside the others, his clothes were those of a servant; but the Charetty livery was the best that the Widow could afford, and despite all the travelling, the blue cloth of Claes’ doublet had enough stiffness in it to set off his straight dyers’ shoulders. The soldier’s belt cinched his waist where the stained apron had always hung, and the high collar defined a well-placed throat and neck. His monstrous gaze and wide grin nothing could be done about, but there was equally nothing vacuous about them. It was a discovery Tobie had made at Bruges.
It was the youth’s turn to play again. The hands holding the cards were no less calloused than they had ever been, but at least the fingertips were not blue. As Tobie watched, they strayed over the sheaf of oblong cards and, picking one, laid it on the table.
There was a short silence which Tobie, ignorant of the game, could not interpret. Then the woman Laudomia, her grey eyes cold and clear, looked at him smiling and said, “Again!”
“Arabic,” said Claes. “You should have asked me to talk in Arabic. Then you would have won it all back.” The cards were hand-painted, in red and blue and gold. The pack was worth everything Claes was wearing, Tobie calculated, from his head to his toes.
“Wait,” said the Frenchman called Gaston. “Before we all lay down our hands. Niccolò my friend: what cards are we holding?”
Niccolò?
He was looking at Claes, whose colour had risen. Claes said,