Scales of Gold - Dorothy Dunnett [42]
Searching, a little concerned, she found the girl outside the grand room, in the cooler air of the long gallery, looking down at the strung lamps and the glittering water and the swirl of gondolas departing from the garlanded jetty. Nicholas had been there for the final ten minutes; smiling, self-possessed, exchanging civilities as his guests settled back within their gilded silk canopies, visible in the dark only as jewel-sparkle, and teeth, and packs of bodiless lenses, withdrawing in silence, like wolves.
Tilde was crying. She said, ‘He’s going to lose me my business. Mother meant him to help. Now, when we need him, he’s useless. He’s only an apprentice, you know.’
‘You don’t need him,’ said Margot. She put her arm round the girl and drew her close. ‘I think he will help you, for love of you and your mother. But you don’t need him. You are going to be all your mother was. Don’t be afraid.’
‘It is not the end of the Bank of Niccolò,’ Gregorio said. ‘It is close to it.’
Dawn was near. They sat, supporting themselves in their various ways on the stools in the counting-house of the Casa Niccolò: Gregorio and Cristoffels; Julius and Godscalc; Nicholas and Lopez, who had admitted them. Tilde had been induced to go home by the Martelli, and Margot in her wisdom had retired.
Nicholas said, ‘Tell me what happened again.’ He sat at Gregorio’s table, and before him were the ledgers Gregorio had given him as soon as they had come in, and sheets of paper on which he had already begun, as he spoke, to scribble columns of figures.
He was not penitent, Godscalc saw. He was concerned with the Bank’s position, and nothing else. He also wanted to know why the man Martin had not waited to see him; what he had said to Gregorio; what he meant to do next.
Gregorio said, ‘Of course he couldn’t stay after that. He was quite badly bruised. He’d been laughed at. He made very little effort to elaborate on the paper he’d given you, but, if you read it, I’ll tell you what his demands are. Why did you do it? He’d given in once. You could have talked him round somehow.’
His voice died. Nicholas, making notes, skimming his way through the document, paid no attention. Godscalc, drawing on what he knew of him, saw that everyone here was irrelevant; that the mechanism in that twenty-three-year-old felicitous mind was performing its accustomed ritual and, like one of his own ingenious artefacts, would eventually present what it had wrought. He saw that Julius was watching Nicholas eagerly, and that Lopez was watching Julius.
The silence lasted no more than a moment. Then Nicholas threw down his pen and, pushing the papers away, flung out his arms, easing his shoulders. He yawned, shuddering, and re-opened his eyes. They were enormously bright.
‘Well?’ said Julius.
‘The Vatachino want twenty-five thousand ducats. If we pay, it is the end of the Bank of Niccolò. And, of course, the Charetty company, if you can’t manage without us.’
‘That isn’t possible,’ Julius said. He looked sallow.
‘You want the actual figures?’ Nicholas said. ‘Eighty thousand ducats in stock and capital, less the Vatachino’s twenty-five thousand. Less twenty thousand we’ve loaned to the Signory, less ten thousand Bonkle has loaned out in Bruges – that was the news Gregorio was looking sick about – less two to three thousand for the investments we’ve begun in hemp and printing and weaving, which we can’t now go on with, and a forfeit of at least five hundred from withdrawing from the lease of the island, and a loss of three thousand if we aren’t allowed to.
‘On the income side, a loss of up to eighteen thousand ducats a year if the Cypriot trade has been throttled – that’s the news I was looking sick about. Leaving a reserve of nineteen thousand ducats: too small to meet any major withdrawals, never mind pay for fresh business. Income from deals already completed might, added to that, keep this building