The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [224]
He was arming the company, as he must, against Adorne. And there was time. Adorne was still on his way. The agents were home, primed and briefed, long before the Baron Cortachy and his train reached their cities. And as Adorne began to pass through, the reports arrived of what he was doing.
He was meeting merchants, that was clear. Many, of course, were related to him. It was also, however, something of a triumphal progress. Anselm Adorne was being greeted, entertained, even fawned upon by the rulers of each republic or duchy he passed through, and was being royally treated.
An early report, hurriedly scribbled, said that he was being represented in some regions as an envoy of the monarch of Scotland. A second message contradicted the first. He carried Burgundian credentials of ambassadorial weight. The chaplain in his party was de Francqueville, one of the Duke of Burgundy’s personal confessors. The report from Milan, sent in the third week in March in a rainstorm, mentioned that the Duke and the Baron had hunted together with leopards. The lady Gelis van Borselen, dame de Fleury, had accompanied the party.
That packet came as Nicholas was leaving for a meeting appointed by the Great Council. He read the letter as the barchetta swerved and splashed on its way to St Mark’s and the mallets of the smiths and the shipwrights and the caulkers thundered far off in the sheds of the Arsenal. He wondered, with part of his mind, how well off they might be for timber. John le Grant said, ‘What is it?’
Nicholas folded the paper away. ‘My wife is with Anselm Adorne.’
John le Grant opened his eyes. With the milder weather, the cold sores had gone, and the redness from around the white eyelashes. Oddly, the vigour of the engineer’s manner had also diminished. It was as if he had determined to distance himself from something he feared or distrusted. Now he said only, ‘Your wife is coming here?’
‘Time will tell. At the moment, they’re all on their way to pick up Jan at Pavia.’
Adorne’s oldest son had just completed a jurist’s course at Pavia. From Pavia to Venice was three days by fast boat. It had always been possible that Gelis would circumvent the postponement and try to join him on terms of her own. She would be angry, too, about Florence. There was, of course, no word of a child.
John said, ‘If she comes, will you take her with us?’
‘I should think she’d find that very unpleasant,’ Nicholas said. ‘Not to mention dangerous. No. She could wait with Julius, if she likes, until we get back.’
It had a feasible ring. Talk of danger was well founded at any rate: the noise from the Arsenal was as significant as it had been six years before, when he had sailed from Venice to Africa, leaving a city going to war.
That time, it had been summer. This time, Easter was late so that the place was filling with pilgrims as well as mercenaries: rich and needy from every nation preparing to go to the Holy Land; finding and hiring a dragoman; buying their mats and jars and chamberpots and feather beds and mattresses and basins; their wax lights and tinder, their salt meat and hen-coops, their locking boxes for money; their trinkets of rings and crosses to take and have blessed. And, in between, visiting shrines and relics; investigating the islands; being conducted through the Arsenal; viewing the Doge; and admiring the elephant trained to dance behind bars.
Soon the poles with their red crosses on white would go up in front of St Mark’s, and they would rush to book their places on the great galleys going to Jaffa: twenty ducats on leaving and twenty ducats on arrival for the privilege of lying a month toe to toe with diseased and vomiting strangers in a hold dimly lit by four hatchways, and crossing a sea menaced with war.
The meeting he was going to had to do with that war: with Sultan Mehmet’s threat to end the Venetian Empire with eighty thousand men and a war fleet of eighteen years’ building. The Doge and Council had stopped asking Nicholas