Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [30]
Nicholas stepped forward, sinking and sliding on glass. He called again. ‘Come down. We shan’t harm you.’ Not surprisingly, the dim, scrambling figure didn’t stop.
No one was running now. They had all come to a halt, blocking the light so that the wall of crumbling glass gave back only sound; the continuing punch and slide of the footsteps, the cadenza of an uneven fall. Julius said, ‘We’ll have to go in and get him.’
Perhaps he was overheard. At that moment, the crowd shifted and parted, and a shaft of diluted red light fell on the glass, turning it into a cliff of rock amethyst. Near the top, a black figure stood, its white face made rosy. From behind, someone lifted a brick, and took aim, and threw.
It struck its target. The man threw his arms up and fell. As he thudded into the glass, its hoarse chatter turned into a roar as it rushed over and round him. Even then, you could see the mound heave, the rattle of still-falling glass by turns cushioned and brittle as the buried man tried to move, tried to push the mass off with his hands, to jerk free his limbs, to twist his face and find air among the split blocks and knuckles and shards that pressed down on him.
They had started forward with their shovels when the final fall came, and they jumped back, choking and coughing in the abrasive white dust. This time it lasted a while; a complete collapse of the stack, loud and continuing and final. And after that, there was no movement at all.
Once they had dug it out, they put the body on canvas, and took it back to the shed it had come from. The soldiers, silent now, helped. After that, Nicholas sent them back to the boat, with a message to collect Messer Gregorio and the lady. Julius and Loppe he dispatched to the office to find water and a brush for their clothes; they went without speaking. He himself stayed in the yard.
His mind, by that time, had all the options assembled. He would have to remain, to deal with the officers and the paperwork with which, as from yesterday, he was familiar. It would be most convenient if the boat left without him, and Loppe and Julius with it. He could hire another and follow, when he had dealt with the two other matters.
One of them was already to hand, in the person of Marietta Barovier, standing before him in the wavering light. There was no shouting now, and even the dogs had ceased barking. Round about them the men, low-voiced, were closing down all their work for the night. On the maestra’s orders, the cullet had been left until daylight. She had said other things to them too, which they wouldn’t soon forget. Her face, tired before, was now haggard.
He didn’t know what she would say to him. But for him, and the Florentine, the intruder would never have come; she would never have had to keep him; her good, skilled workforce would never have escaped her authority.
Nicholas said, ‘The blame for all that was mine. I shall report the death as an accident. He was an assassin; he escaped, and ran into the glass.’
In the lights that remained, he could see her eyes, and the bruise on her brow. She said, ‘He escaped because your bodyguard thrashed him.’
‘They will be punished,’ Nicholas said. It was one of the smaller lies of the evening. He had made a very precise bargain with the two soldiers of the Serenissima.
He continued in the same subdued voice. ‘Men act in such a way when they are excited. Even your father could not have quelled them, any more than we could, or the soldiers. They are not bad men, your people. They will feel shame tomorrow, and be easy to manage. But still, it should not have happened. If you want, we shall tear up the contract.’
‘He