The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [130]
He was not prepared for the scale of the banquet given for Nicholas by his landlord, who happened to be Abbot of Holyrood, and who invited to it all the men of business Gregorio had ever heard of, including Berecrofts Older and Younger in whose country-house Lucia had lain dead.
He was not prepared for an invitation to the other house the Bank owned in the High Street, nor to find that Nicholas had lent it to the convent of Haddington for the use of its Prioress and nuns. He was not even prepared (although he was content enough) to find there Mistress Phemie Dunbar, the sedate unmarried daughter of the late Earl of March, who had brought some order into the headlong, tumultuous ride from Stirling to Edinburgh instigated by Adorne’s crazy scrap of a niece.
However, he had not been surprised, except initially, by the part Nicholas had played in that, or by the intensity of his activities since. It matched what he remembered of the more extraordinary undertakings of the past: the revitalising of the Charetty company through the cunning of the alum monopoly; the trading and fighting at Trebizond; the setting up of the Bank; the fitting-out and execution of the African expedition. Of Cyprus his knowledge was second-hand, but he had read the accounts, and knew when the payments had stopped for their land and their farms and the army. They said there had been a famine there recently. He had sent the reports to Nicholas, as he sent everything, but it was Nicholas who decided what to act on.
Gregorio was not alarmed, therefore, at the scale of the activity, but he was critical of its content. The major investments were good: the Banco di Niccolò had property and land, and had expended money on loans in the right quarters. There was a foreign wedding afoot, and the King and his lords required all the jewels, clothes and furnishings that implied. Julius had been right in identifying a fine profit there, and insisting that the padrone should return in person to realise it.
To a degree, the Bank had been right, too, in placing money where it would encourage business. The San Niccolò was already carrying timber: there was room for a cart-building workshop to supplement the familiar skills of the monasteries. Draining experts could bring fields and salt-pans and coal layers into better profit – that was why John le Grant had been sent for. There were other schemes, not yet in place. Alum, brought direct from their own special contacts, would profit the Bank and still sell cheaply to the dyers and curers. Dyeing itself could be properly taught, and good weaving. And as the country grew wealthier, the demand for luxuries would increase.
At that point, drowned in calculations, Gregorio called a halt.
‘Nicholas? This is a small country, and remote. It can use some of your schemes – or could, when you first thought of them. But soap-making? Gunpowder? Paper? Cabinet-making? A workshop for embroidery looms? The demand for all those things is limited and will soon be satisfied. And almost none can be exported without meeting far greater competition in the south. You will be wasting the Bank’s money.’
They were meeting in the Casa di Niccolò in the Canongate where the uses to which the Bank’s money had already been put were very obvious. Travelling through the last weeks, Gregorio had visited many merchant-lairds in their castles as well as the ecclesiastics who kept house in town. He had walked with Forrester of Corstorphine to hear the new choristers in his church, and climbed the hill to Haliburton’s fine keep at Dirleton where his wife Cornelia kept a painting-room for Hugo vander Goes her kinsman, already full of coloured shields for the wedding.
He had visited the Earl of Orkney in Roslin and the Church’s mines at Tranent and the Hamiltons and the Berecrofts beside Linlithgow. He had seen the salt-pans beside the Lord’s house at Seton, and inspected the Bank’s own warehouses and lodging at Leith. He had