Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [192]
‘Excellent!’ said the woman. ‘Now, Messer Niccolò, I am able to give you your answer. My secretary will draw up and sign the papers required, and the birds will be delivered as and when you desire them. You dislike my wine?’
‘Highness …’ Nicholas said.
‘Then pray drink it. We propose a salute to your new venture. Your new venture, and your new neighbours. You have heard that Messer Marco and his wife are already in residence?’
‘In Episkopi. Yes, Highness,’ said Nicholas.
‘And with them, of course, Messer Vanni here and his family also. And, of course, their charming guest, your compatriot.’
‘Guest?’ said Nicholas. He held the cup to his lips and gave a good imitation of sipping.
‘The demoiselle Katelina van Borselen,’ the King’s mother said. ‘She does not go home until autumn, and Nicosia is trying in summer. She will enjoy Episkopi, the garden of Cyprus; the home of Apollo and sacred to foam-born Aphrodite. You can supply her with eggs.’
‘I told you not to,’ said Tobie. ‘If one glass does that, thank God they didn’t give you a refill.’
‘It wasn’t only the wine,’ Nicholas said, while maintaining the ceiling in focus. ‘It was the wine and the news.’
‘You didn’t get the hens,’ Tobie said, wringing cloths.
‘I got the hens,’ Nicholas said. ‘I also got Katelina van Borselen in the next house all summer, in company with two of the Naxos princesses. Diniz knew what he was doing. I tell you, Diniz had the right idea from the beginning.’
Chapter 28
NICHOLAS MOVED to the sea, and was glad to trade the oppression of Nicosia for the bewitching attractions of business. Katelina van Borselen, forced to abandon the Clares and enter a high Venetian household at Episkopi, exchanged a cell for a honeycomb, and found herself drowning in sweetness.
The villa of Marco Corner was white-painted, airy and full of delicious apartments of which Katelina and her servant had one, the Imperial sisters another. In a twitter of crystalline Greek, or Greek-French, or Greek-Italian, the wife of Marco Corner and the wife of Vanni Loredano fled across the cool inlaid floors and between the delicate furniture and out among the blossoming lemon trees, bearing their Flemish guest with them.
By day, their oval Byzantine faces glowing beneath enchanting straw hats, the ladies Fiorenza and Valenza would take her fowling: cantering through clouds of wild lavender to the saltflats. Or they would press through meadows of poppies to the white-pillared groves where Apollo (admirer of Ganymede) was himself anciently worshipped; or climb through anemones to scented forests of pine and fine cedar. Or they would stroll by the shore, and eat curds and sesame bread by the red rocks where Venus was born (without embarrassment, effort or afterbirth) out of the sea that foamed over the sand, with no more than an antiseptic odour of brine to taint the scent of crushed myrtle and narcissus. Lucky Venus. Lucky Venus’s mother.
Towards evening, when the swifts darted and screamed, they took her indoors and played checkers or dice or backgammon, or made music, or read poetry or talked among their Venetian or Saracen friends. Sometimes their husbands were present; but not always. In the afternoons, when even the children were sleeping, other footsteps were heard, and at night also. The husbands, if they knew of them, made no remark. Like the fine clothes, the exquisite furnishings, the corps of servants who accompanied them everywhere, such things were accepted in the household, part Syrian, part Greek, part Byzantine, in which she was an unwilling visitor.
They were at pains to put Katelina at ease: they had exquisite manners. It was only at night, when the frogs pulsed, and the lizards hung on the walls and obscure flying creatures prodded the bed-veils, that Katelina, freed from the silvery feminine speech, heard breathing