Race of Scorpions - Dorothy Dunnett [310]
‘That man Crackbene of yours, he’s a hero,’ said the Patriarch. He seized the one remaining lamp and lit a candle from it. ‘You’ll need that for your room. Rang all the bells in Nicosia for him when Crackbene came back from Salines, and last night the King gave him a feast and a gold cup. Twelve prisoners he brought back, apart from the crew. The King expects to collect a good ransom.’
John le Grant remembered why he hated Ludovico da Bologna. He said, ‘Were all the men on the Adorno from Genoa?’
‘Most of them were,’ the Patriarch said. ‘One of them wasn’t.’ He was looking at Nicholas. Nicholas said absolutely nothing.
The Patriarch said, ‘But then, you were expecting that. So was the Portuguese boy. Vasquez. Diniz Vasquez. The boy thought you should go into hiding. But the lady Marietta said of course not; she’d send for you.’ He grinned at Nicholas. ‘Do you want to go into hiding? I could tell her.’
‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘But tell me his name. The name of the man from the Adorno who wasn’t Genoese.’
The priest lifted his immense, black-clad shoulders. The candle flared in its wax and his hatted shadow loomed on the white plaster behind him. He said, ‘Should I remember? I saw the man. I got a look at him once in St Omer. I made no note of the name.’
Nicholas said, ‘What did he look like?’ His voice was what you might expect, from a man just awakened from sleep.
The Patriarch lifted the ridge of his brows and surveyed both of them. ‘Had she more than one relative, the poor young Flemish lady? Who would you expect to travel to Cyprus, with the boy’s father killed, and now his aunt in her grave? I can only tell you that he is a rich man, or he would never have got so much flesh on him. A powerful man, because he treated the servants like vermin and addressed the King as if he were close to an equal. And a malicious man, because he said he had come to marvel at the King’s latest protégé, who had made his son a widower and his daughter a widow and himself groom to a strumpet, and all in the space of a twelvemonth.’
Nicholas looked at him, his face totally blank. John thought cautiously, his son. This could not, then, be Simon de St Pol, husband of Katelina. Simon de St Pol had been in Venice, and had tried to kill Nicholas then. Without being present, John had heard all the stories and he knew what Simon looked like, which was an Adonis. Nicholas had expected Simon. He had expected him on Rhodes as well. But Simon hadn’t come. He had been prevented, or had sent someone else, or had been forced to give way to someone else. And the someone else must be Simon’s father.
Nicholas said, ‘You are speaking of Jordan de Ribérac’
‘You have it!’ said Ludovico da Bologna. ‘Ribérac. Land of troubadours. I am Arnaut who gathers the wind; And hunts the hare with the fox; And swims against the incoming tide. The vicomte de Ribérac. Not a troubadour. Friend of René of Anjou. Financial adviser to the French King. Doesn’t like you. Perhaps you ought to go back to Famagusta.’
‘Or to sleep,’ said Nicholas. ‘Prayers at dawn?’
‘I’d advise it,’ said the Patriarch of Antioch.
Chapter 45
AMONG THE MANY who feared and detested the vicomte de Ribérac was his Portuguese grandson Diniz Vasquez. The news of de Ribérac’s presence in Cyprus reached Diniz in Nicosia on the same day that Nicholas heard it. Nicholas, immobilised under the Patriach’s roof at Psimoloso could, as yet, do nothing about it. Diniz, on the other hand, took immediate action.
Once, a child in Portugal, Diniz had feared this cold, obese man for the sake of his mother, who was de Ribérac’s daughter. Now he was afraid for other reasons. I can’t wait, Katelina van Borselen had said in her anguish; expecting her husband to come hunting vander Poele; fearing that without herself to mediate, murder would follow. But instead of Simon, Simon’s father had arrived on the relief ship Adorno. This gross man who spoke of her husband his heir with contempt; who had welcomed the proposition that a son of René of Anjou should kill Niccol