Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [267]
Nicholas smiled. ‘I don’t think she would appreciate hearing you call her my lady. But she turned out to be a remarkable traveller. Tobie tells me she’s in Scotland.’
‘She was. She came back to Bruges for the winter. She’s due to go back to her Scottish princess in May. But you’ll see her. You’ll be going to Bruges soon.’
‘Not,’ said Julius, ‘if I have anything to do with it. Nicholas, look at that landing-stage. Look at the money on it. They’re all in your pocket. You’ve been where no one else has been. You’ve sent back more gold than anyone has ever seen in one load. You’re in the good books of the Pope, and your Bank is becoming one of the pillars of Venice. There they all are, standing waiting to welcome you and put you among the privileged in their Golden Book, I shouldn’t wonder. And you talk of going to Bruges!’
‘I didn’t. I’m not going to Bruges,’ said Nicholas mildly.
He turned out to be speaking the truth: Nicholas didn’t leave Venice. Indeed, he hardly left the Bank premises.
The Ca’ Niccolò with Nicholas in it was very different from the same establishment under Julius, quite apart from the somewhat moody departure of Julius from the middle floor to the top. Margot wondered if Julius had really expected Nicholas to leave the master chamber to him, and decided that he probably had. To Julius, it was just a freakish talent for opportunism that had taken Nicholas so far beyond his station; in other ways he was still the Charetty apprentice.
Apart from the fact that he was now twenty-six, the Nicholas of today was not even like the Nicholas of three years ago, never mind eight. Three years ago, he had been in the city all day, interviewing, discussing, prosecuting his business. He had given a feast, and been entertained in all the great houses.
This time, aside from his official reception by the Doge, and another at the Collegio, the only appointment he kept outside his house was one at the Camaldolite monastery on the island of San Michele, to which he went unaccompanied. For the rest, everyone who wished to see him, or he wished to see, came to the Ca’ Niccolò.
During the ghostly grey days of December, there arrived a procession of eager gentlemen who would pass from the mezzanine office of Julius to the big chamber with its bed and its desk which Nicholas had again made his own, there to resume the fascinating exchanges about cloth and carpets and rope-walks which had been interrupted by the hiatus three years before.
These he would entertain with great courtesy, but never keep long. Others, like Marietta Barovier from Murano, he would keep for a short while at his desk, and then lead through to the long central chamber whose front balcony overlooked the canal, there to talk and take some light refreshment.
Sometimes Tobie found himself asked to attend, and sometimes not. He became increasingly puzzled. After the visit of the extraordinary female glassmaker, Tobie invited himself to Margot’s room to discuss it.
He knew he was welcome, if only because she was weary of Julius and shared his misdoubting affection for Nicholas. She rose from her sewing to pour him some wine and, sitting, said, ‘They would have a lot to talk about. Barovier supplies the glass for the spectacles the Florentine makes. You know he’s taken on an assistant, and they’ve quadrupled the business? And now that the Strozzi sons have been allowed back from exile, they can help more directly.’
‘She was talking about mosque lamps,’ Tobie said. ‘And table fountains. And alum. It seems Venice needs a lot of alum now the glass business is growing. You knew that the first big trading deal Nicholas ever made was to do with an alum monopoly?’
‘I remember all the secrecy,’ Margot said. ‘It’s a powder, isn’t it? They dig it up in Turkey and Rome, and dyers and glassmakers need