The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [196]
John, attempting to assess his expenditure, had based his guess on the size and quality of the Duchess’s hunting-party, on the magnificence of its hounds and its horses, its birds and its weapons and the priceless harness of its mounts.
Now they were familiar with painted chapels dressed with silver and gold, with libraries of singular books, with chests and shelves which carried, still, the remains of the ancient treasures the House of Habsburg had acquired or been given: the silk dalmatics, the sabres, the crowns with their jewels and enamels, the crystal goblets and altar-frontals, the caskets and relics.
In Brixen, significant and well escorted as they were, the company of the Banco di Niccolò merged into a community of many hundreds, of which the Duchess, lately their apparently sole companion, was the hub. In their daily excursions abroad, there were others now to guide them. And once they were in the hills, there was no longer any pretence that their business was hunting.
They visited mines, and the mountain slopes beside mines. In the Tyrol, the word for a miner and for a mountaineer was the same. And Nicholas used both the pendulum and the hazel rod he had been given and found silver twice in a week. The first time, it was a bag of coins concealed underground. The second time, it was genuine. An hour with pickaxes showed what they had discovered.
Each time, wet and exhausted, they came back to the warmth and bustle of the town and the castle and, retiring, wrote out their reports, once in code for themselves and once in edited form for the Duchess. These were carried to her by Lindsay. All the rest of their entertainment lay in the hands of noblemen who were her household officials, who introduced them to the sweating halls, packed with people and dogs, where the castle’s lesser guests and resident household supped; and conveyed them to the quarters where the other guests of great estate, with their retinues, received them in rooms equally packed.
There was a great deal of noise: so much that even the clamour of the Cathedral bells hardly penetrated the walls of the castle. It was at Brixen also that they discovered the Duchess’s pipers. She employed three, as well as a number of trumpets. Nicholas slept very little and, when he did, kept senselessly dreaming of Kerasous, once in the empire of Trebizond. He couldn’t imagine a reason, unless it had to do with alum or Amazons, both of which Kerasous and the Tyrol had in common. At the end of the first week, the mistress of the Duchess’s ladies took him in hand, appearing at his side in the hall when a gambling dispute between Teutonic princelings was reaching its height, and both the singers and the dogs had become inaudible.
In the quiet of her chamber, he thanked her. Her name was Gertrude. A graceful woman, no longer young, she had been in attendance all through his first expedition with Eleanor of Scotland. Here, she was in charge of the cohort of young, well-born maidens who formed the Duchess’s retinue. Most of them had been educated at Sonnenberg, the convent whose laxity had so enraged the late Cardinal Bishop of Brixen. It reminded Nicholas, briefly, of Haddington, which reminded him in turn of other things. The woman said, ‘I know you prefer water, but the wine is weak, and has nothing in it that will harm you. Sit down. Close your eyes, if you wish.’
‘That would be ungracious,’ Nicholas said.
She said, ‘I brought you here for your own sake, not mine.’ She was thin as a gazelle, with a long face and deep eyes below her elaborate headdress. The jewelled bands on her sleeves were