The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [298]
Godscalc said, “Why do you think Gregorio is doing this?”
“Because he doesn’t know Nicholas,” Tobie said. “Oh, he’s trying to help. You thought you were going to help, when you tried to stop Nicholas playing God over Catherine’s future. Have you ever thought what happened instead? He had to play God with God.”
“Don’t exaggerate,” Godscalc said.
“For a few weeks he had the power to choose. The future of the last Roman emperor of the East. He was forced to put a value on one of the world’s great civilisations. The blend of Rome and the Orient and the Hellenes that will never happen again. The Byzantine world that preserved Roman government and classical culture all through the ages when the Latin empire lay in ruins and was reduced, now, to one small, silly court with its beauties and its bath boys and its philosophers. And against that, the Turcoman horde. And stronger than both, the Ottoman Empire, enemy of all the Christian Church ever believed in.”
“Tobie,” Godscalc said.
“You have an answer?” Tobie said. He turned on Gregorio. “You don’t know the ultimate irony? Nicholas does. They told us in Modon. The alum mine at Tolfa has been found, and all the alum it yields will buy a crusade to free the East from the Turks. It makes you think, doesn’t it? Nicholas and I found that mine months ago. If we’d gone to the Pope with the news, instead of taking money from Venice to keep quiet about it, would Trebizond have fallen? Or would the worthy Ludovico da Bologna and his Eastern delegates have gone joyfully back with alum gold and a fleet at their backs, and Christendom been saved?”
Julius said, “We discussed all that. The mine couldn’t have been opened in time. And even if it had, there was no one in Europe to call on. They were too busy fighting each other. Still are. Nicholas knows that. My God, you talk as if he was a woolly evangelist instead of a dyer’s apprentice. All he’s done is what traders do every day. Examine the options, and choose the one that is best for the shareholders. And then take all the steps he can to promote it.”
“Catherine, too,” Tobie said.
“Well!” said Julius angrily.
“No,” Godscalc said. “Tobie is right. In this, at least, Nicholas didn’t act as a trader. He knew what had fallen to him, and he carried the burden as long as he could; and then he had the good sense and courage to bring it to me. If he bears any blame for what happened, then so do I. It’s why I say he won’t go the way of Pagano Doria, nor will he take the easy way out. And Tobie is right in his warning. If Nicholas accepts this company you have evolved for him, you must expect trouble. He won’t take it seriously. It will not be the centre of his life as it should be, to please his investors. He has too many other things to do.”
Gregorio said, “Which now he can do.”
No one spoke. Julius said, “Well, I don’t mind. He knows how to enjoy life. I don’t want to grow fat in a counting-house. I say we duck him in the canal until he agrees. What’s the time? He’ll be coming back soon.”
“No, he won’t,” Godscalc said.
The interview at the Collegio lasted an hour, and took the course Nicholas had expected. He knew he would be offered some positive inducement to stay in Venice, but it was more than he had anticipated: the gift of a disused Corner house on the Grand Canal just down from the Rialto and near the Bembo palazzo. The families of Bembo and Corner were, of course, connected. As was the family of Violante of Naxos.
When he left, the Signory supplied him with a courtesy escort. It was small, since the Serenissima had few criminals, and these were suitably in awe of the Serenissima’s justice. They took him on foot through alleys he didn’t recognise, and he was thankful to walk in silence, in the privacy of the dark, while, for the first time since he heard what had