The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [156]
He had come prepared to launch a subtle attack, and found himself drinking wine in the mouth of a cannon. He said, “That is easily refuted, Messer Adorne. Ask Lorenzo Strozzi to show you his mother’s letters from Florence. There is no word of Catherine there. Also…she is a pretty child, but do you think that for her sake Nicholas would throw over his wife and all he has built up in Bruges for a precarious post in the East?”
Adorne said, “I am telling you only what people are saying. Of course I don’t think he would betray his friends or his marriage. Even though, perhaps, I have more cause for worry than most. The rewards for the alum treaty with Venice will go largely, they tell me, to Nicholas. It will create a substantial reserve fund in Venice, which must increase year by year. Until, of course, someone finds this secret alum deposit of yours, and Venice ceases to pay for your silence.”
Gregorio sipped his wine, his body relaxed and his feet still. Of course, this was all about alum. The white powdered rock without which cloth couldn’t be dyed. Until the Ottomans gave the franchise to Venice, the Genoese used to hold the world’s monopoly of first quality alum. Then the Charetty company had found alum on the Pope’s lands at Tolfa, and had sold the information to Venice in return for their silence. Venice, the sworn foe in the East of colonial Genoa.
Gregorio looked into his wine, wondering what Adorne was really saying. Tell me where the alum mine is, and I will tell you who is behind Pagano Doria? Or perhaps, We want cheaper alum. Or we might go to the Pope and say, Send your mining experts to the Papal States with one or two of our old Genoese quarrymen. With what you find, you might win back Constantinople.
He had not spoken. Adorne said, as if he had, “I must admit, I am a little jealous of Nicholas, whose genius will make the Charetty company and the Venetians and the Florentines rich. Bruges is my home, but Genoa is my mother city, beset by encroaching powers. She cannot be free without money.”
“You have cheap alum,” Gregorio said. “Nicholas arranged it with Genoa. Their agent Prosper de Camulio accepted it. You would be worse off with a papal monopoly.”
Adorne put down his wine. “We should have God on our side,” he said. He smiled suddenly. “But, of course, there is alum at Sebinkarahisar. It depends whether Pagano Doria or Nicholas remembers it first.”
Leaving presently, Gregorio was surprised to find his legs weak. These days he was not often matched, far less outmatched. He wondered whether Adorne, once a friend of the Charetty, was now inclined to be less so. He would have to weigh what he had heard, and try to come to conclusions. But at least the lord Simon had never been mentioned, far less linked to his trip to St Omer. That, he had told Adorne, was for business reasons. And, of course, to have speech with the envoy from Trebizond.
“Has he not called on you already?” Adorne had said. “Of course you must see Alighieri. And, since we have mentioned him, you should also look out for Prosper de Camulio, who is here on a Milanese mission. He is an acute observer, close to the Dauphin; and can be of use to a man with a business.”
Thanking him for the advice, Gregorio wondered why it had been offered. He had not planned to seek out de Camulio, expecting to learn little from him. As far as business news went, Gregorio was already well primed to conduct an enterprise based on money and credit, information and mercenary services. He had run the company well, since Nicholas left. Not perhaps adding much, but polishing and refining what had been begun. It must have struck more people than Adorne and Tilde de Charetty that he might become over-fond of his power. Perhaps, indeed, that was why poor Tilde’s romance was not being frowned on. Tilde was an heiress, like Catherine.
Himself, it had never crossed his mind that the demoiselle and Nicholas would fail to return as