The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [197]
‘Greedy?’
‘Of life. Of energy. It is German, I think.’ She smiled.
He said, ‘Why do you say that?’ Presumably she had been told to do this. He could not guess, yet, what she wanted.
‘Because the civilised world regards us as boors. We think it a banquet to lay a plain cloth and put on it a dish of poached and boiled eggs, a plate of minnows, a bowl of turnips and a platter of peas in the pod.’
‘You are quoting?’
‘From the Burgundian envoys recently entertained by the Duke. They were offered bread on the point of a knife, and wine from two brimming silver-gilt cups, the squire holding the lid of each cup under Duke Sigismond’s chin as he drank. The Duke wore a robe he had already appeared in at Arras.’
He summoned his energy. ‘They must eat heartily, who inhabit fierce lands. They hunt in France and Scotland and Italy, but face only the beasts.’
‘Other travellers have been less generous,’ the lady said. ‘Our nauseating food, our bitter wine, our coarse customs, our unsafe roads and disputatious, turbulent unlettered peoples – that is how the German States are regarded by those from softer countries. Cardinal Bessarion is godfather to the Emperor’s only son, but was thankful to leave. Prosper de Camulio – do you know him? – thought us barbarians. And Pope Pius! How he hated Vienna, and his time as the Emperor’s secretary.’ She paused. ‘Aeneas Piccolomini, he was. He came twice to the Tyrol. Duke Sigismond took him stag-hunting.’
Nicholas kept his voice mild. ‘They knew one another, I heard, when the Duke was a boy at the Emperor’s court.’
‘He formed the Duke’s tastes in many ways, Piccolomini. He taught him which books to esteem. He was not in Holy Orders as a young man, of course.’
‘He had elevated standards,’ Nicholas said. ‘As I remember, he was critical of the common people of Scotland as well – poor and rude, with their cabins covered with turf. Although the women were white and beautiful and very prone to love, he remarked.’ He waited.
‘One of them gave him a child. He was less impressed by the Duchess’s father, who was murdered the following year. He considered the King small, fat and hot-tempered, and content with less state than one of the meaner burghers of Nuremberg. I have heard the Duchess quote that.’ She was silent. Then she went on.
‘When Duke Sigismond was sixteen, he asked Piccolomini to write a love poem he could send to his mistress, and he did. She succumbed, I am sure: his verses were paeans to desire. “He who has never truly felt the flames of love is but a stone, or a beast,” he wrote to someone else. “Into the very marrow-bones of the Gods has crept this fiery particle.” He was a good teacher, Aeneas Piccolomini.’
‘You are explaining a marriage,’ Nicholas said.
She smiled faintly. ‘Oh, the Duke of Burgundy arranged the marriage, not Piccolomini. Rude though it is, the Tyrol lies on the highway to Rome. It is the way the barbarians came. It has to remain in Imperial hands. So the Duke of the Tyrol was married to Eleanor, Princess of Scotland, a country too distant (whatever its aspirations) to endanger the imperial succession. And the Duke of Burgundy won an ally north of England. Indeed, the Duke married his niece to King James, the Duchess’s brother.’
Nicholas stirred. ‘You are saying that the third King James is showing an inclination to aspire?’
‘I am sure he would not be so ill advised,’ his hostess said.
‘No. And you are also saying that the marriage between the Duke and the Duchess Eleanor must endure, because any other alliance would be dangerous?’
‘Fortunately,’ said the woman called Gertrude, ‘my lady has studied him, and he is comfortable with her. She is level-headed and can achieve much when he is absent, although she cannot cross him – few can – when he is here. She knows the courts of France and of Brussels, and has effected what changes she can without many resources. She has made him into