The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [32]
“Then he is an adventurer?” Nicholas said. All the time he was talking, Godscalc saw, his eyes were moving, from face to face, from building to building. Sometimes an adult would return a slight bow. Twice, a child shouted a greeting. In two days, he seemed to have met a lot of people. They were now in the Orsanmichele quarter, and passing the silk merchants’ counting-houses. Soon they would come to the Via Por Santa Maria, where the Bianchi silk offices were. In their wide sheds and basements, the manufacturers received the sticky raw silk and sent out their scurrying messengers to low, dark homes all over the city where the spinners, the weavers, the throwsters, the warpers, the dyers each did their work, until the bales lay ready for export: the deep, glossy silks and profound, jewel-bright velvets for which Florence was known.
Soon, Nicholas or Tobie or Julius would be calling on all these men—the Bianchi, the Parenti, the manager of the Medici silk workshop-to contract for silk to sell in Trebizond, and obtain orders for rare dyes and raw silk to bring back again. Pagano Doria was to sail east after Christmas. February was the earliest any round ship could normally leave, and as early as Nicholas, too, would be able to cross the seas safely. The two might well set out for the Black Sea together, the round ship depending on wind, and the galley depending on oars.
Normally, there would be no competition, for different ships carried different cargoes. Nevertheless, thought Father Godscalc, it would be interesting to find out what Genoa was sending to Trebizond. If they discovered. He knew, from his encounter with Pagano Doria, that there was about the Genoese sea prince a polish, a subtlety, that no apprentice, however gifted, had the means to acquire. He didn’t wish ill to the youth now walking beside him but, like Tobie, he felt he had been made party to a piece of arbitrary management and, lacking Tobie’s clinical detachment, he could not find it in him to approve, no matter how clearly he understood it. Embarking on his first major project surrounded by older, capable men, Nicholas had to seize what chance he could of ascendancy. But he was of obscure birth, and just nineteen years old. And Pagano Doria was not Julius.
The sea prince’s house, when they reached it, was not large but exceptionally elegant. Something about the lanterns, the courtyard, the greenery spoke of the feminine, and the chaplain felt no surprise when, on being ushered up the wide steps to the salon, the first impression he had was one of a thick, citrous scent not unlike incense. It had no obvious source, but resided in the carpets, the heavy fringed cloth of the table cover, the pierced container from which warmth drifted into the room. It seemed to say that the owner of the house was not Pagano Doria, and that she was not far away. He looked at Nicholas. “Au revoir,” Nicholas said, walking forward. “As the foxes say at the furrier’s.” Godscalc chuckled.
Doria entered almost as soon as his manservant departed to summon him. He came in on his toes, like a swordsman or a dancing-master, as if in mockery of the two tall, stolid men standing before him. But there was nothing malicious in his expression (if nothing contrite either). He said, “My dear friend Father Godscalc, how happy I am to see you again, even if you have come to chastise me. And this is your genius, the gifted fellow all Florence is talking of. Messer Niccolò vander Poele, is it not?”
Nicholas took a step forward. Beside tawny velvet, his cloth pourpoint and jacket looked undoubtedly workmanlike. In the scarred and unscarred sides of his face, the dimples made pits