Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [242]
Simon’s sister was there, though, on the quay, dragged by Diniz her son, although she needed little persuasion. With them was the whole staff of the Banco di Niccolò and the Charetty, including the two Charetty girls. The merchants of Bruges were there, every last one of them, including Anselm Adorne. And although her parents were dead, Gelis received her own welcome, from the comte de Veere her uncle himself, and from his son Wolfaert her cousin, and from Paul, Wolfaert’s son by his mistress.
Once, Paul would never have appeared at a ceremony, but Wolfaert no longer had either a wife or a legitimate son. The Scots princess and her son had both died, and the Scottish prince they were rearing had left. Small wonder the Borselen family longed to see Katelina’s four-year-old Henry: see him, bring him up, make him their own. It was why Simon hid him away.
They all came crowding on board. Gelis left Gregorio to tell the worst of the story: she saw Lucia’s eyes light up at the news of the gold; she saw Diniz bite his lip and, leaving, scramble below to kneel beside Godscalc; and Tilde de Charetty running to follow. She saw the smile on Adorne’s long, poet’s face alter to a look of concern. She saw all the expressions man’s face could hold of greed and envy, calculation and pleasure.
She saw dark, long-lashed eyes resting on hers, belonging to a man of middle height with loose dark hair, and fine jewels, and two beautiful hands, one of them stretched gracefully to gather one of her own, and raise it to his lips.
‘Unless you have been warned to avoid me?’ said David de Salmeton.
In Timbuktu, the Feast of St Nicholas came and went, such a celebration having no place in the Muslim calendar. If Nicholas felt rather more than a year older, he didn’t say so. He had, in any case, other things to occupy his attention.
In January, Umar’s first child was born. It was a son. By March, Zuhra was pregnant again. Nicholas felt only delight on Umar’s behalf. He himself had no yearnings as yet: his body had been too abused, too broken. If he did, he knew that some gentle child would find her way to his bed, not from Akil this time. He was not sure what he would do. He was not sure how he wanted to order his life, except that he needed to know more.
Now he could walk, he spent half his time with the imams; with the teachers, the thinkers of the Sankore Mosque; the judges who passed on their learning; the scholars attached to the other great mosques, the Sidi Yahya al-Tadulsi, the Jingerebir.
Latterly, the imams had allowed him to enter the Sankore, 120 feet long, eighty feet wide, with its five naves and forest of masts. Of columns. Of slender columns, like those of a caravel. He had been admitted, dressed as he always was now, in the loose robes that men found comfortable, with his hair bound with a scarf, rakishly knotted.
Afterwards, he would talk about what he had heard, and even dispute it, but never with heat, and the habit of orderly, dispassionate appraisal was one he gladly acquired. He spoke and thought in Arabic, and could make himself understood in Mandingua and some of the other vernaculars. He had almost forgotten his French, his Flemish, his Tuscan.
There were exceptions. Abstract thought, for him, could never occupy all his mind when there were also practical things he could do. The deficiencies of the city were well known to him, and some of them could be simply repaired. Going about it, he was taken aback, now and then, to find that some problems had already been touched on, and even attacked. Umar had not told him that Gelis had been active in Timbuktu during the six months he had been absent. It raised, again, the question of why she had left. For a while, Nicholas returned quietly to his teachers, to think about it.
About that time, he was called upon by the cloth merchant Abderrahman ibn Said, of whom he had heard, and who, breaking into unexpected Italian, seemed to be offering him a consultative partnership