The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [203]
“I’m prejudiced,” said John le Grant. “He got me out of impaling back at Stamboul. And Julius. And all Astorre’s men. He liked his privacy, but I never thought that a sin. I’m surprised you’re surprised he went to all this bother to prime us when he seems to have known he’d be dead. What the hell turned you against him?”
Tobie said, “Something you would condemn as much as we did. To excuse it at all, you’d have to believe it wasn’t deliberate. We thought it was.”
“So you made a mistake?”
Tobie studied him. “Maybe,” he said. “But he’d done similar things in the past. He made a wicked enemy, John. You wouldn’t know. But his friends seemed to be safe. And beside Doria, he had some…qualities. Doria thought that, with Nicholas dead, we’d want to go back to Bruges.”
The golden, bristling brows drew together. “You bloodied him, I hope, where it’ll ruin his drawers.”
“His wife was there. I’m glad you feel like that,” Tobie said. “Because it’s possible we were hard on Nicholas. It’s possible matters were maybe not quite as they seemed. I think Doria, on the other hand, made capital out of it. So I don’t mean Pagano Doria to get a dead cat belonging to the Charetty company. This business is going to be what Nicholas was hoping to make it—one of the richest and best in the Levant.”
The other two, he became aware, were looking at him. Behind, he saw Loppe’s face change. John le Grant said, “Medicine, now. The only proper calling for scientific man, for whom trade is fair walloping rubbish. What happened to yon?”
Godscalc said, “The same thing that happened to the profession of countermining, I suspect. He has made you his heirs in more ways than one.” He spoke without looking up. And well you might, Tobie thought. You, too, have had your confidence shaken. You, too, have had to look again at your toys.
John le Grant said, “You’re tired. Why not rest? We’ll be busy enough, once the news goes round that you’re back. And when you’re fresh, you can hear all the details.”
He was a good man, for a Scot and an engineer. He was better than any of them had suspected, except, of course, Nicholas. Tobie found his own bed and half undressed and knew nothing more until he woke to a dark room, and a half-open door, and Loppe saying, “Master Tobias? They’re all in the parlour with the lady Violante. She has something to ask us in private. Master le Grant says you should come.”
“Ask us?” said Tobie. “Here? In private?” He sat up. None of that conformed to what he knew of the princess of Trebizond. From the time of the voyage from Tophane, he had been sharply wary of the lady Violante, who had befriended Doria in Florence. Who had got Julius out of trouble outside the Chrysokephalos. Who had shown inalienable contempt, ever since, for the lot of them. He knew Julius had been smitten. He couldn’t believe that she was in mourning for either Julius or Nicholas. So why was she here, except to pull the wool over the eyes of Godscalc or le Grant or Loppe? But not over him. Tobie got up and dressed.
Tobie Beventini had been right in his conjecture. It was not the habit of Violante of Naxos to traverse her own city, hooded, alone, to pay secret calls on the fondaco of a foreign company. She had, at first, intended to send a servant. She had concluded, at last, that there was no one she could sufficiently trust. There was no one, either, who could size up the situation as she could.
At the gateway, she was obstructed because she would not give her name. It was only when she insisted on having John le Grant summoned that the porter gave way. Then the red-headed man arrived; the engineer and ship-master she had interviewed at the Palace, and at once she was inside, and being handled with swift efficiency.
A woman of small patience, Violante of Naxos had been unimpressed by her initial experience of the officers of the Charetty company. The priest, who should have been a wrestler, was no doubt as inconvenient as the man Diadochos she was forced to take everywhere with her. The doctor had certainly learned no manners from a lifetime of staring at