Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [250]
There were not so many men about now. Some had gone back to their villages; some to the pottery; some to begin the maintenance tasks that would take place, at the yard or by the hearth, all through the winter. The rest were employed at present between Stavros and Episkopi, loading and transporting the casks to the warehouses to await the arrival of the all-important galley which was to take them to Venice. Later, he would have to go there. But first, Nicholas walked uphill back to the manor with Loppe, and in the office there read the ledgers and saw what had been done. Then he said, ‘Loppe, it’s a miracle. You’ve doubled it.’
Loppe smiled. Throughout the tour, his bearing had been one of well-mannered gravity. It was not perhaps natural but it had served him well, Nicholas knew, from the beginning. Cyprus society did not readily recognise the management skills of a negro. Loppe knew better, of course, than to expect to enter any nobleman’s house as a friend.
He never seemed to let it trouble him. But now, in private with Nicholas, Loppe said, ‘What’s this, a miracle? This is the result of my experience and your money and a touch of genius that follows me whatever I do. If you’d been quicker over the refining equipment –’
It was an old story, and Nicholas did no more than pull a molasses-type face. Left under-equipped by the Martini, it had taken him too long to realise that copper vats were not now to be had; that all the pottery stores had somehow been requisitioned; that skilled men had been seduced away to serve elsewhere. Someone cleverer or luckier than he was had noticed that the way to make money wasn’t this way, risking the mice and the drought and the locusts, managing the men and the beasts and all the complexity of arrangements that ended here, in the yard, with crushed cane and coarse syrup fit for refining. Someone had noticed that the easy, clean way was simply to buy the end product and refine. He said, ‘How much do we have to send as unrefined sugar?’
And Loppe said, ‘A quarter. We lose the profit of half the increased production. It will be better next year. I have three vats on the way from Damascus.’
‘And this one firm are refining?’ said Nicholas.
‘There are others, but their rates are far higher. These are moderate. It is a question,’ Loppe said, ‘whether it would not be cheaper to let them do all the refining. You could sell the vats, let the men go; run down the pottery. All that would offset their charges.’
‘For one year,’ Nicholas said. ‘After that, they could charge what they pleased. And what would all these people do? Not praise Zacco, at any rate. The Corner are still refining?’
‘They are in the same difficulty,’ Loppe said. ‘You will see them at Episkopi. What is happening at Famagusta?’
He deserved an answer, and Nicholas gave it. He supposed his reserve was apparent. John le Grant had viewed him, it was obvious, as a child enjoying rough play, and brought up suddenly short by reality. He had meant to point out to John le Grant that they had both engaged in extremely rough play at Trebizond, and if he chose to carry out another war contract, he was not doing it blindfold. But it was true that he had forgotten, in the turmoil of Famagusta and Sigouri and the turbulent wake of the Bastard, that there was another régime which lay entirely under his hand, orderly, productive and satisfying to heart and head. He had felt the same, momentarily, stepping into the dyeyard at Nicosia, but put it down to a foolish nostalgia. Or perhaps he