Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [36]
They sat in Gregorio’s sanctum on the mezzanine floor, its low windows open on the Grand Canal. Noise floated inwards, and a little air. Gregorio said, ‘You should see him when threatened with Julius.’
‘Is that so?’ said the priest. ‘In that case, I should be sorry for Julius. I hear another man tried to make his mark on our friend in Murano. May I?’ He picked a book from Gregorio’s shelves and opened it up. He said, ‘It’s quite a good copy.’
‘I know,’ Gregorio said. ‘The man at Murano wasn’t an assassin, he was a spy.’
The priest replaced the book and took down another. He said, ‘Was that all? In that case, I am truly sorry for Julius. Does he pose a terrible threat? I’m surprised. I even thought – I may be wrong – that you summoned him.’
Gregorio said, ‘Nicholas had been away a long time. Catherine and Tilde are his step-daughters.’
The priest said, ‘You didn’t send for Catherine or Tilde.’
‘He knows Nicholas,’ Gregorio said.
‘Now that makes sense,’ the priest said. ‘You were disturbed about Nicholas. Why?’
Despite everything, Gregorio felt an obligation to his senior partner. ‘He sent me a letter from Cyprus. He told me he was coming back, because Simon’s wife and his sister’s husband had died, and he would be blamed for it. Also he had kept a boy of the same family as his prisoner.’
‘Diniz,’ said the priest thoughtfully. ‘His grandfather rescued him.’
‘Nicholas had already freed him,’ Gregorio said. ‘His grandfather stole the roundship Doria and got Crackbene its master to sail him home with the boy.’
‘Did the boy want to go?’ Godscalc said.
It was the kind of question Julius asked. It was followed, as a rule, by allusions to Zacco, King of Cyprus, who was young and unmarried. Gregorio said, ‘Nicholas hasn’t said.’
‘No, he wouldn’t,’ said Godscalc. ‘Now that is an edition worth having. You and I will have a talk about that. Meantime what does Loppe think about it?’
‘About the book?’ Gregorio said curtly. It was recognised that Lopez knew a great deal about Nicholas, but he still disliked the question in this particular context. It also reminded him of a recent excursion from Murano from which he had been excluded.
Godscalc closed the book and laid his broad hands on it. He said, ‘You were concerned enough to invite Julius, who has many qualities, but is not the most discreet of men. There are some ambiguities therefore that you have already weighed and dismissed. For those that remain, I am a willing listener, and a silent one, and one who has more experience, maybe, than either of you. So what is Loppe’s view of the boy Diniz?’
Gregorio said, ‘I thought we were talking of printing. Lopez says that Jordan de Ribérac took the boy from Nicholas against the boy’s will. He says the boy fears his grandfather.’
‘Do you tell me?’ said the priest. ‘As for printing, it is my own fault for opening a book. You would hear that Nicholas took himself to Germany a year or two back, and I was in Cologne myself recently. I was sorry to miss you in Bruges. I wanted to talk to you then about Nicholas.’
He scratched his chin and spoke slowly, giving Gregorio this time all his attention. ‘So he would be shocked, you would suppose, when the young lad he’d freed was snatched away from the island by de Ribérac. Are you not surprised that he didn’t take ship and try to stop them? And wouldn’t you expect an innocent man to rush to disabuse the minds of all those poor wretches who think they’ve been wronged? Apart, indeed, from saving himself from their arrows? But I hear the insurance claim was happily met. That done, it might be felt that there was no call to waste time on a voyage.’
‘Nicholas couldn’t leave Cyprus,’ Gregorio said. ‘He had no ship. And by the time he had settled his affairs, Diniz had been with the old man for weeks; they were both home, and the tales had been spread.’
‘But even so, he came here,’ the priest said. ‘Was it the wife, now, that held him up? That was a marriage soon begun