The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [340]
‘You didn’t say you’d met Ludovico da Bologna,’ Tobie remarked. ‘Where? Nicholas, where have you been?’
He would find out. When Tobie wanted to, he always found out.
‘Famagusta,’ Nicholas said. ‘She left a little of the gold there, and the box led me to it. Made of the same gold, I suppose. I thought it was going to be the child, but it wasn’t. I gave some to the Franciscans, and brought some for Diniz.’
He paused and added, ‘The Patriarch thinks that Ochoa’s probably sailing the seas under strict supervision as a master in the Hospitallers’ galleys. Licensed piracy. But he did try to tell us, through the parrot.’
He saw, this time, that it was Tobie who had been stricken dumb. He found he wanted to continue. ‘The Patriarch was using us both. Gelis and myself. He knew that gold alone wouldn’t take me to Cyprus, but that I might follow a clue to Mount Sinai; especially if I found Anselm Adorne was competing. And he persuaded Gelis to go there and wait for me. I don’t suppose she needed much persuasion. She wished me to go to Cyprus as well, and left the box – you were right – just as he left some gold to prove it existed.’
He paused. He said, ‘I was bound to try and find her, you see, after what happened in Cairo. And she was bound to try and force me to Famagusta. From the Patriarch’s point of view, he had time to put off before Uzum’s Envoys were due to reach Cyprus. He may have hoped the Mount of the Lord would achieve miracles, in which case he was wrong. At any rate, he says he has stopped intervening. He expects Gelis and myself either to halt of our own accord or kill one another.’
He waited again. Tobie’s extraordinary, incoherent distress brought him a positive resurgence of calm. Nicholas said, ‘So do bring everyone to Venice. It’s going to be something worth watching.’
In a few days he had departed, with the Persian delegation, for Rhodes. Tobie sailed from the same port for Alexandria; and found the Florentine agent, Mariotto Squarcialupi, travelling with him.
The Patriarch of Antioch, a practical man, paid a pastoral call on the convent of the Poor Clares, Nicosia, and held a friendly conversation with Katelijne Sersanders, whom he had previously encountered in bed, when seeking the fellow de Fleury.
De Fleury had not had time to call on her, it appeared, before departing from Cyprus. Dr Tobias had told her some of the news. She was perfectly content at the Clares’, and had been taken to St Catherine’s tomb, the Lusignan chapel, and the place where St Catherine’s father King Costa had lived before unwisely accepting the appointment as viceroy of Egypt in Alexandria.
The Patriarch formed an unusually good opinion of Katelijne Sersanders and put it to her, before he left, that she ought seriously to consider her namesake’s example and become a bride of the Church. She said she would give it some thought. The Patriarch returned, well pleased, to the Dominicans and composed a letter to Gelis van Borselen who was then, he had cause to believe, on her way to a discreet lodging in Genoa.
Tobias Beventini arrived in Alexandria and held a fraught conversation with John le Grant in the midst of the spice market, as a result of which a number of letter packets marked cito, cito, cito left for various ports. Two berths were booked on a fast galley going to Venice.
Anselm Adorne, Baron Cortachy passed through Beersheba and Hebron and entered Jerusalem on the eleventh day of September. Having visited the Mount of Olives, Bethlehem, Jericho, Nazareth, Galilee and seven other places, he arrived in Damascus on the sixteenth of October, where he was met by the Vatachino agent called Martin, and accepted a courtesy invitation from the sub-agent of the House of Niccolò, carrying out instructions from his colleagues further west. John de Kinloch, impatient to reach Rhodes (where he was to remain) had been brusque, but nothing upsetting occurred.
Lambert van de Walle acquired a rash, and Pieter Reyphin contrived to buy a barrel of wine. Jan Adorne continued his diary. Towards the