The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [36]
That evening he brought her a bracelet, and marzipan, and a dog, and a dress she was to wear only for him, once she had charming little breasts there and there. She didn’t mind now, when he showed her how he would caress them. Before going to bed she had another hot bath, and the new medicines that had come with the scent. By now she guessed what they were for and never objected. Sometimes, after the Flemish woman had gone, she got up through the night and took more.
By that time, the presence of a veiled midget (with dog) in Pagano Doria’s house was known to Nicholas, for the simple reason that he had the house watched. The woman didn’t interest him in the least. The plans of Pagano Doria towards the Charetty company were another matter. He was watchful in other ways too. The round ship was already manned, and its cargo was different from his. There was no rivalry there. But when he came to choose his own command and his crew, he tried to ensure that Doria was connected with none of them. And he took the best advisers—the Martelli, the Neroni, the Corbinelli—to help him find the men he wanted, down to the caulkers and carpenters.
The threat of mischief, however slight, however whimsical, helped him a little by drawing his own group together. It also disguised the real problems. One of them had been, of course, defined already by Julius. Nicholas’s position as leader was so far purely formal. He had the nominal power. He was married to Marian. He had ideas they respected and welcomed. But all he possessed, so far as anyone knew, was a freakish ability for intricate planning, and numbers. It had got him into chilling trouble already, and not even Marian believed him perfectly capable of controlling it. He knew very well that this was why Tobie and Julius were haunting his steps. They were the watchdogs. Whatever he did with his numbers, he was not to use them to kill people he knew. A fair bargain.
So, he had to show what he could do, both in his measures against Pagano Doria, and in the whole elephantine problem of equipping and launching a maritime trading expedition: a matter about which he knew precisely nothing. The miraculous thing was that, as soon as he started, he became so carried away that he forgot about impressing anybody. And did not know that, of all things, it was his rocketing high spirits that swept the other men with him.
He bought experts, and stripped them bare with his questions. But he also sought to learn at first hand himself. People enjoyed teaching him. He took advice from everybody. He spent a day in the dry dock at Pisa, talking to carpenters. He inspected the mature wood stocks in the citadel, and watched the new-felled timber floating down on the Arno (the storms were coming at last), and tried his hand at the planes and the saws. He examined canvas.
He peered into ovens and had long talks with bakers and soapboilers. He had dusty conversations with masons. He spoke to old men with warped hands and learned how to ram cargo. He found the wine-shops that seamen favoured, and sat and drank and ate liver-sausage and talked about weather and currents and landing-places, gaming-houses and brothels. He learned who took bribes in what harbours. He found out about the universal war between oarsmen and mariners, and useful tips about useful accidents, such as how to throw a man overboard in the night.
He had himself invited to supper with men who had farms in the country, and helped with the wine-making. He did a lot of comradely sampling before he chose the kegs he would carry to sell, and the kegs for his crew, and the special barrels for presents and bribery, and arranged for the pigs and hens and cattle and sheep he’d need for the first few days of the journey. He found a cook at a party after a cockfight, and a trumpeter at a wedding. He talked to Monna Alessandra about silk.
He began, of course, with other things. He learned that Monna Alessandra had been less than thirty when Matteo Strozzi her husband died in exile, leaving her with