The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [15]
“He should have taken us with him. You know he should. That’s what we’re here for. To keep him out of trouble.”
“Well, so far as I know he isn’t in any yet,” remarked Tobie. He picked up the scissors. “Let’s get on with the other ear, or Monna Alessandra will personally send you her barber.”
Alessandra Strozzi, high in Florentine society, low in means, owned the house they were staying in. Julius gave, unthinking, the smile that made people follow him, sometimes, in the street. He said, “Have you seen her glaring at Nicholas? She isn’t going to be duped like her son and her daughter. Mother Strozzi is regretting that she offered to lodge us.” He twitched the towel over his shoulders.
“Rubbish,” said Tobie, snipping steadily. “She’s getting free medical attention from me, and free legal attention from you, and we are the dear friends of her poor son Lorenzo in Bruges. It’s only Nicholas she’s regretting. Once a servant always a servant. Keep still, can’t you? I’m only quoting. Has she asked you yet why you haven’t married? She will. Florence needs babies.”
“What’s that to do with marriage?” Julius said. “My God, she shouldn’t spurn Nicholas. The stud of Flanders. They’d have to build new city walls if Nicholas let himself go. Not but what…”
“Gossip, gossip,” said Tobie reprovingly. “But I take your point. Since he married the head of the company he’s led the life of a committed eunuch. But then, she’s his livelihood.”
“Unless he finds something better,” said Julius. For two years as employee and tutor to the Charetty son, he had encouraged this cheerful lout Nicholas to better himself. Tobie could understand how Julius, more than almost anyone else, had been flummoxed by Nicholas’s marriage.
Tobie said, “Who, for example?”
Julius turned his head and was nicked without even feeling it. He said, “Or someone worse. Could you do without girls at nineteen?”
Interested, Tobie considered. The topic was a new one for both of them. For all the months he had known Julius, Tobie had failed to catch Julius toying with anything. He said, “Maybe he prays.”
Julius grunted, frowning. He said, not entirely obscurely, “I wish Godscalc would come.”
“Perhaps he won’t,” Tobie said. “Perhaps he and the army have written a note excusing themselves from joining Nicholas. For Alexander the Great our leader is not. He was falling off his horse until yesterday.”
“I thought—” began Julius. He yelped and restarted. “Do we expect Astorre’s soldiers to fight? I thought we were taking them just to protect us.”
“That depends,” Tobie said, “on what the young man our master has found out at the Franciscans’. He should know by now if it’s worth going on with the venture. Then all that matters is whether the magnificent Cosimo de’ Medici will allow us to run it. That’s surely Nicholas now.”
Julius rose to his feet. The towel dropped, showering cut brown hair over Monna Alessandra’s elegant tiles. His hair, finely tailored, clung to a thick-boned face with slanting eyes and a blunt profile which would have looked well on a coin. Tobie, who had almost no hair at all, gazed at him sadly. Julius peered through the segments of window glass coloured pink, green and yellow, and said, “Oh, Jesus Christ, yes. And he’s got the toy with him. And his hose are mud up to the knee and his hair needs a cut. That’s the spokesman of the Charetty business.”
“Well, get the coffer out,” said Tobie roundly. “You find his clean clothes and I’ll cut his hair round his cap and wash his ears out. Then, when we get to the Palazzo Medici, you imitate his voice and I’ll sit him on my knee and move his arms up and down. Where is the problem?”
“There in front of you,” Julius said. “And I don’t know if I want to solve it. I want to lead a quiet