The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [161]
“Ask me in a week’s time,” Gregorio said. “If our agent Zorzi had alum waiting, it could have arrived in Pisa by now.”
“It is a pity, paying those prices,” de Camulio said. “But I suppose it is fortunate that we can get it at all. Before I joined the Duke of Milan, I remember the constant concern of the Adorno, the Spinola. No alum meant no cloth and no leather.”
Gregorio said, “In Bruges, it is the same. By the way, I asked Anselm Adorne about Pagano Doria. You know he left Florence as Genoese consul to Trebizond? I think we should have been warned about that.”
“By whom? By Messer Anselm?” said the Duke of Milan’s envoy. “But, my friend, are you not expecting too much? It is like the Fleece. Beforehand, it is not wise that men should know who the candidates are.”
“Do you know Doria?” said Gregorio.
“No more of him than Messer Anselm has already told you. But here is a man who knows everything about everyone. I give him my place. Messer Gregorio, my heart is touched by your hospitality. We shall speak more, and at leisure. I must leave.”
He got up, removing a trace of grease from his mouth with a little silk handkerchief. His pourpoint collar, though black, was edged with fine silver sewing. Gregorio made the correct sounds, rising also; observing Alighieri’s expression; guessing who the newcomer was even before he strode in from the door.
“Ah,” said Fra Ludovico da Bologna, leader of the Eastern delegation to Europe. He stood and stared, first at Gregorio, and then at Michael Alighieri, his fellow-traveller. “I find you both. You were to wait for me, Michael. You had forgotten.” The Duke of Milan’s envoy, bowing, left with a smile behind the friar’s back. The friar said, “And I find you in sin.”
His eyes were trained on the half-eaten meats on the trestle. It was, without doubt, the Minorite friar whose denunciation of Julius in Florence—encouraged by Pagano Doria—had so nearly stopped the whole Charetty expedition. “A bear,” Nicholas had written. “A bear taught young to dance. He will dance, too, into bearpits and out of them, and never notice the spikes. He is wholly innocent, I think, of any plot with Doria. He is wholly innocent of most things, including charity.”
Nicholas kept to himself, as a rule, what he thought of his betters. When he made an exception, Gregorio had learned to take note of it. Before him was planted a middle-sized man in an elderly cassock whose reddened face and tanned tonsure appeared to have been cleared by the razor from a carpet of cocks’ feathers. Gleaming hair sprang from the backs of his fingers and hung over his eyes, fed by pulsing, vigorous veins. Gregorio said, “Some of us have dispensation. Please join us, brother. There is some good fish going waste.”
“Dispensation?” The voice came from a deep chest, in good order.
“From the abbot of St Bertin.” It was a profound lie, but he was curious about how much Observatine monks knew of Burgundian politics.
“The son of a priest and a nun,” said Fra Ludovico. “The know-all of Burgundy.” He sat down on the stool vacated by de Camulio.
“The Chancellor of the Golden Fleece Order,” said Gregorio, on the mildest note of reproof. “I hear he and his predecessor have deposed Jason for his failure to meet private obligations and have replaced him as patron by the labourer Gideon, of the wet and dry fleece. Preferring the Holy Spirit to Ovid; the Holy Scriptures to the Metamorphoses; and truth, as ever, to fantasy.”
“Nôtre Dame, Bourgogne et Montjoie St Andrieu!” bellowed the friar. He helped himself, with calmness, to the fish. “That is, I understand, the Duke’s warcry. Since he has not attempted to combine it with the names of Jason or Gideon, I cannot understand why he does not revert to St Andrew, the Order’s first patron; missionary saint to both shores of the Black Sea. Until the rainy weather discommoded the knights, they always