The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [0]
Copyright © 1993 by Dorothy Dunnett
Introduction copyright © 1994 by Judith Wilt
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, Ltd., London, in 1993, and subsequently published in hardcover in the United States in slightly different form by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, in 1994.
Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Dunnett, Dorothy.
The unicorn hunt / Dorothy Dunnett. — 1st ed.
p. cm.
1. Vander Poele, Nicholas (Fictitious character)— Fiction.
2. Fifteenth century— Fiction. 3. Bankers— Europe— Fiction. I. Title.
PR6054.U56U55 1994
823′.914 — dc20 93-35692
eISBN: 978-0-307-76243-6
www.randomhouse.com/vintage
v3.1_r1
Contents
Cover
Map
Title Page
Copyright
The House of Niccolò: Preface
Characters
Introduction
Part I - Open Season: The Waiting Game
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Part II - High Season: Doubling
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Part III - Close Season: The Empty Field
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Chapter 39
Part IV - The Whipping-In
Chapter 40
Chapter 41
Chapter 42
Chapter 43
Chapter 44
Chapter 45
Chapter 46
Part V - The Prise
Chapter 47
Chapter 48
Chapter 49
Reader’s Guide
About the Author
Other Books by This Author
The House of Niccolò
PREFACE
When my chronicle of Francis Crawford of Lymond ended, it seemed to me that there was something still to be told of his heritage: about the genetic lottery, as well as the turmoil of trials and experience which, put together, could bring such a man into being.
The House of Niccolò, in all its volumes, deals with the forerunner without whom Lymond would not have existed: the unknown who fought his way to the high ground that Francis Crawford would occupy, and held it for him. It is fiction, but the setting at least is very real.
The man I have called Nicholas de Fleury lived in the mid-fifteenth century, three generations before Francis Crawford, and was reared as an artisan, his gifts and his burdens concealed beneath an artless manner and a joyous, sensuous personality. But he was also born at the cutting edge of the European Renaissance, which Lymond was to exploit at its zenith—the explosion of exploration and trade, high art and political duplicity, personal chivalry and violent warfare in which a young man with a genius for organization and numbers might find himself trusted by princes, loved by kings, and sought in marriage and out of it by clever women bent on power, or wealth, or revenge—or sometimes simply from fondness.
There are, of course, echoes of the present time. Trade and war don’t change much down through the centuries: today’s new multimillionaires had their counterparts in the entrepreneurs of few antecedents who evolved the first banking systems for the Medici; who developed the ruthless network of trade that ran from Scotland, Flanders, and Italy to the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and ventured from Iceland to Persia, from Muscovy to the deserts of Africa.
Scotland is important to this chronicle, as it was to Francis Crawford. Here, the young Queen of Scots is a thirteen-year-old Scandinavian, and her husband’s family are virtually children. This, framed in glorious times, is the story of the difficult, hesitant progress of a small nation, as well as that of a singular man.
Dorothy Dunnett
Edinburgh, 1998
Characters
October, 1468 – February, 1471
(Those marked * are recorded in history)