Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [285]
Tommaso stared at him. ‘You are considering a Barbary trade?’
‘I have enough ships,’ Nicholas said. ‘Or shall have, when my litigation is over. I find I rather like going to law. What a pity you’ve let Dei go without revising his contracts. Never mind. How are your brothers?’
Walking back to Spangnaerts Street, Diniz said, ‘That was disgusting.’ He was still red with laughter.
‘I know,’ Nicholas said. ‘He was always easy to tease. He can command, and he can fawn, but he can never be anyone’s equal. Take it as a terrible warning.’
‘Did you mean it?’ Diniz said. They had reached the Charetty-Niccolò yard. ‘You won’t take the caravel route, but you might join the trade through the Sahara?’
‘I don’t know yet,’ Nicholas said. It was a reply Diniz was becoming tired of.
‘But you’ll buy Turkish alum?’ Diniz persisted. ‘Bessarion and the others won’t like it.’
‘I shall have to,’ Nicholas said. ‘Look. Come into my room. Not the counting-house. I had a visitor yesterday.’
Diniz had been in this parlour before. It was smaller than the great chamber in Venice, and inconvenient, and rather impersonal. He sat down while Nicholas hitched himself on the high stool at his desk. The desk was covered with drawings.
Nicholas said, ‘Do you remember Bartolomeo Zorzi? You will do. He came to offer me a great opportunity. The rights to sell papal alum in Venice and the whole of the region beside it. The Curia and the Medici have fallen out, and the Pope is inclined to seek other agents. Zorzi is one of the most skilled, but is bankrupt. He needs capital to buy basic stocks, and if I will provide it, I shall share in the profit. What do you think?’
Elbows on desk, he played with a pen and, lifting it, held it level between his two hands. It was a quill, of the kind they filled with gold dust in Wangara. Diniz said, ‘He was manager of the dyeworks in Cyprus. You apprenticed me under him. He encouraged me when I wanted to kill you, and let me escape, knowing I would end in Famagusta, and you and Katelina would come. He killed Katelina, in a way.’
Nicholas said, ‘Yes. The Vatachino expelled him from the dyeworks and he set up here in Bruges, and then failed. This offers a fortune. He doesn’t like either me or the Vatachino, but he would ask me first, because of his brother.’
‘And you said?’ Diniz asked. And then flushed and said, ‘I’m sorry.’
‘No. I might have been hard-headed enough to agree, but I wasn’t. I rather think I told him what to do with his alum. I shall have to buy it, to a degree – everyone will. But I shall make it up, as I’ve said, with its Muslim equivalent. You approve?’
‘Yes,’ said Diniz. ‘I had forgotten.’
‘What?’
‘That it was you who placed me in the dyeworks in Cyprus. To humiliate me, everyone thought.’
‘Well, that was a damned failure, too,’ Nicholas said. ‘Look at you.’
Diniz said, ‘So you meant me to come here.’
Nicholas laid down the quill and left the stool. He said, ‘Only if you wanted to. It was your own choice.’
‘And Tilde?’ Diniz said.
Nicholas didn’t answer.
Diniz said, ‘I should like to think that you meant that as well. I hope you did. I’ve been afraid that perhaps it was not what you wanted.’
‘It was what I wanted,’ Nicholas said. ‘Just occasionally, something comes right. You were going to have half the Ochoa gold for your marriage. Now there’s a challenge. If you find it, you can keep it, provided they don’t hang you first. Go and tell Tilde. You wouldn’t think it, but I have some work to do.’
Then May came, and the time for Gelis to leave.
Chapter 41
YOU WOULD SAY THAT, when everyone else was celebrating in the streets, a private life would be easy, but in these last weeks Nicholas had not found it so.
It was, of course, the first spring of the Duke’s accession, and although he had already made his restless, moody, thorough entry into his town of Bruges (as he had done or was about to do in his other towns throughout Flanders and Burgundy),