The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [17]
“You’re beautiful,” said Tobie quickly.
“Ravishing,” agreed Julius, staring also. “How?”
“By impressing the lord Cosimo de’ Medici with our honesty, worth and acumen, which he is already inclined to credit us with, from the mere fact that we lodge with Monna Alessandra. Madonna, you are perfectly right. I shall dress. I shall be responsible. I shall listen to the wise heads around me. Has anyone cut Tobie’s hair?”
“Find it,” said Julius, “and I’ll cut it. That extraordinary woman said we could make a fortune. So you believe her now?”
“What extraordinary woman?” said Monna Alessandra with some sharpness.
Julius, pulled up short, had the sense to answer carefully. “A lady from the Levant. Nicholas and his wife met her in Bruges. They valued her interest, of course, but we don’t expect to see her again.”
Tobie had forgotten the lady in Bruges. Optimism possessed him. Toys. Toys for the pillow. He turned his back on his hostess and lowered a lascivious gaze upon Julius. “Don’t we? By God, don’t we?” he said.
Attended by two servants in Charetty blue jackets, Julius and Tobie walked to the palace of the Medici, one on each side of Nicholas.
There was no need to ride. Florence was a town you could cross from side to side in twenty minutes, using the butchers’ bridge over the Arno. Tobie, a native of northern Italy, was accustomed to Florentine fripperies and strode between stone and marble, bronze and ironwork, like a dog going home to his dinner. His attention, as in every city, was solely drawn to the skin, the limbs, the gums, the lids of the people he passed. Some, resenting his stare, spat in his wake, upon which he was quite likely to turn back and examine the sputum, which annoyed them even more.
Julius, trained in Bologna, looked about him with pangs of nostalgia. Throughout his time of rebellious exile he had tried to forget the things Italian money could do; the skills it could buy. But even in five years Florence had changed; become richer. Between the hill-mounting walls there were churches and towers and piazzas, gardens and loggias and galleries, doors like carpets and ribbons of arcaded windows. There were statues and shrines, fountains and cloisters. The market booths and their awnings were laid out like pigment on parchment. And through the city, the swift, yellow river. And about it, the pastures and the comfortable shapes of the hills.
Florence was smaller than Venice, although it was bigger than London. Venice (Julius had never been there) had long since lined its canals with the mansions of merchants made rich by carrying goods to the East.
Florence was rich as well, but from making and selling particular goods of its own—silk and fine woollen cloth and gilded leathers. And, of course, there was the income from banking. In the Old Market in summer, they said, you could count seventy-two bankers and bill-brokers seated behind their baize tables.
Somewhere in Florence was the branch bank of the Medici, just as there were branch banks of the Medici in Bruges and Milan and Venice, Geneva, London and Rome. They were managed by trusted families whose sons and nephews followed one another, selected by Cosimo de’ Medici, the head of the company. Cosimo’s home, where they were heading, in the Via Larga, was not a branch of anything: it was the centre of Florence, where all the real business of the Medici was done. In the large house lived Cosimo and his wife and his sons and his grandchildren. Pierfrancesco his nephew stayed in the next dwelling. And as well as his household staff Cosimo entertained all the famous who visited Florence: gave permanent beds to the representatives of the Pope or the Duke of Milan; kept his records and dictated his letters to the clerks of his chancery. For although he claimed to be a private citizen within an elected republic, Cosimo de’ Medici was Florence.
Built straight on to the street, the Medici palace was monumentally square, with corbelled eaves wide enough to shelter the foot of its walls, where the servant benches were fitted.