The Spring of the Ram - Dorothy Dunnett [95]
The Florentine agent nodded. “Yes. I have dispatches myself for the Medici. Da Castro is sailing, and will carry them.”
“Da Castro?” Nicholas said. He was looking at Tobie.
“The Pope’s godson. He had a dyeing business in Constantinople at one time. Now he works in the Apostolic Chamber, but spends all his spare time prospecting for minerals. Do you know him?”
“Yes, of course,” Nicholas said. “I met him at your cousin’s house at Milan. So did Messer Tobias. And he’s going home? I’m sorry to miss him.”
“I’m not,” said Tobie, as they stood at the rail, watching the four men depart. “Not if you remember what mineral that man Giovanni da Castro wanted funds to prospect for.”
Nicholas grinned. “He won’t find it. Anyway, you can’t protect Tolfa from here. My God, Tobie: mention alum and you’d think someone was trying to rape you. What’s so sacred about a monopoly?”
He could feel Tobie scowling. Then Julius, coming up, said, “Well, aren’t you going to pay your respects down below to your passengers? You’re taking their money, so you might as well offer some courtesy.”
The tone of voice was not one he associated with Julius; but then, since the Janissaries, Julius’s moods had been variable. Tobie said, “I’ll go with you, if you like.” The voice was his usual, inquisitive one.
Julius said, “Let him try on his own. The idiot’s got to learn some time.”
Nicholas beamed at Julius, which always annoyed him, and went off to the stern. In the event Tobie, perhaps held down by Julius, failed to follow him.
He thought he knew whom Bartolomeo Zorzi, brother of the Greek with the wooden leg, would have placed in his care, with a priest and two palatine servants, to be taken back to his office in Trebizond. Spiritual stews. He wondered how Godscalc would take it. Instead of Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli he was, after all, to have some sort of oracle.
He thought so all the way down the steps, and up to the curtain over the door, and even when he rapped on the timber, and the hanging was drawn aside by a man in Greek robes, with the forked white beard and black hat of a confessor.
Then he smelled the perfume: harsh, expensive, disturbing; and knew what had been put in his way; and by whom; and why.
Chapter 15
“THE PRINCESSES OF Trebizond are famed for their beauty.” So his one-legged daemon had said to him last autumn in Bruges, introducing this woman. “We need a Medea,” Julius had declared just the other day. Now, Nicholas thought, gazing at the presence enthroned before him, they probably had one.
Violante of Naxos, princess of Trebizond, was then, and long to remain, in the full bloom of her looks. In Bruges, she had been gowned in the rich and dashing Venetian style, as was proper to a lady whose husband had purchased the Charetty company’s silence over Tolfa. In Bruges, her husband had talked of alum, and she had been silent. But Nicholas remembered the gaze of Marian de Charetty his wife resting on her.
Not in envy of her spacious Byzantine eyes, underscored with amusement; or the severe nose with its brief dimpled apron; or the mouth made like grapes on the vine. Not even because of her body, boneless and lithe as a fish. Nicholas, who had long fathomed his wife saw the pain, and understood it owed nothing to simple jealousy. He thought perhaps it sprang from fear, and that there might be cause for it.
He thought so now, standing inside the doorway of the guest-cabin whose damaged wood was already half hung with damask. Behind a wall of silk tapestry a bed was being unpacked: he caught glimpses of two servants, a massive, clean-shaven man and an elderly woman. At his back, the Greek Archimandrite remained standing, black as a keyhole from his stiff veiled hat to his wide-sleeved black rhazon. Round his neck hung an old copper pectoral, lettered in blurred white enamel. He said in Greek, “Lady. The Fleming.”
The chair they had brought for her