The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [221]
Nevertheless, the fact remained that he did not want to go to Alexandria soon, or stay long; and he resented being manipulated. So his first impulse had been to refuse. He had refused.
But he knew all the time that he would go, because he could not stomach what else he had heard. He didn’t like what had happened in Scotland. He objected to the fact that, having been pleased enough to see the Bank in the Tyrol, the Duke of Burgundy had now apparently given Adorne the key to the Levant. He could not allow all his plans to be endangered by an adversary as smooth, as adroit, he now knew, as Anselm Adorne.
The Duchess Eleanor gave a farewell feast for her three visitors in the early spring, when the ways had cleared and all the preliminary work for the mining was done. She held it at her preferred castle of Meran, for the tumultuous double courts had again separated, with their horses and dogs, their hordes of servants and permanent and semi-permanent guests; the chaplains, the entourage of honour, the Court Master, the stewards, the Marshal, the chamberlains (lacking one). The men she and Sigismond liked to keep about them: the lawyers who were also humanists; the highly qualified churchmen who collected books and advised, and wrote poetry in their spare time. They had an astronomer. They had had the Patriarch of Antioch for a short time and had been thankful, as always, when he left.
Her father had been a great poet, writing in English and Scots before and after he was freed to rule his country. Her sister the Queen of France had composed verse. She and Sigismond collected books and commissioned translations: there was always a room full of scribes somewhere, some of them men of renown. Sigismond had good Latin but little French: she had had a French romance put into German for him, and had helped with it herself. German was very like Scots.
Books kept her company when he went off to his castle on the lake to put the romances into practice. There was a fiction that she didn’t know what went on in Sigmundsburg, even while she was sending doctors to women in childbirth, and bringing their young to fill places at court. But she had friends: Albrecht of Bavaria, who sent her books, and Mechtilde of the Palatinate. And books and manuscripts were always coming from Augsburg. She had got one from Rome to give to the Abbot at Neustift. She had used books, long ago, to placate the Archbishop. Their advisers borrowed them. Their advisers stayed with them, she sometimes thought, because of them. And they were a pleasure, sometimes, in themselves, if not always. She was not as intellectual as Mechtilde, who had founded a university.
She had found that the young merchant Nicholas had an interest in medical and mechanical treatises and was reasonably familiar with the classics, but had read few romances. He was comfortable to chat to and play cards with, and he could sing. She called him Nicol, which indicated a measure of guest-friendship but not more. He and the priest and the engineer had been accepted by their equals well enough once it was plain they spoke German, and were not the Welsch, the French-speaking Burgundians no one could tolerate. None of them presumed.
She thought, and so did Cavalli and Lindsay, that Sigismond had dealt with the mining contracts extremely well, and he was happy, in any case, to leave the detail to others. He would want to know, however, exactly how and when the loan money would come.
She knew how he would spend it. On buildings. On roads, if he listened to what everyone said and was wise. On war, if he didn’t and wasn’t. If the loan hadn’t come in this fashion, he would have raised it from some other source, with far more potential for harm. This way, they might be able to afford all that Sigismond was going to spend anyway.
Now the planning was done, the equipment here,