The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [343]
When he did stop in Florence, going north, he felt nothing more than traces of emotion to do with Godscalc, and perhaps the child he had befriended, who had died. He called on old Alessandra to give her news of her son, and found her frail and short-tempered, as if she could see the last page of her account, and did not like what she read. At the end, she said, ‘You did not take my advice.’
They had been talking about spectacles and about silk. He cast his mind back.
‘Oh, business!’ she said. ‘You have grown like all the rest: you think business consists of nothing but percentages, contracts, delivery dates. I thought at one time you had some understanding of people. Charity.’
Then he took her meaning, although he was still surprised. He said, ‘I was grateful for your letters. One’s wife is less easy to command, perhaps, than one’s sons.’
‘I should not blame you,’ she said, ‘if you had fallen out of charity with that one. I should get rid of her. As for my sons, since you make the comparison, I did no more than order their lives until they were capable of doing so for themselves. If you have all you came for, I am tired.’
Anselm Adorne arrived in Rome on the eleventh of January. The Cardinals of Rouen and St Mark were amiable, as was that popular churchman, the Chancellor of Burgundy’s brother. The Pontiff agreed, hardly solicited, to give a second audience to the counsellor of his dearest son, the redoubtable Charles, Duke of Burgundy.
In point of fact, the Pope had some cause to be interested in those countries the Baron had visited, as had Cardinal Bessarion. The Cardinal’s sympathies were Venetian, and the Pontiff’s – surprisingly, fortunately – were not. In the end, the Baron came away with the prize that he had hoped for, or one of them. A post in the Pontiff’s own household for Jan Adorne, graduate of Paris and Pavia, his son.
To Jan, of course, it set the stamp, at last, on his future, and made the whole slogging business worth while. Their lodgings rang with his jubilation. His cousin Kathi said, ‘When?’
‘When I’ve seen you all safely back in Bruges. I’m to come back immediately. If we hurry, we could be home by February. I could be back here by May. I shan’t have time, of course, to write out the Book.’
‘You wouldn’t,’ said Kathi, ‘take a small wager?’
‘Why?’ he said.
The girl said, ‘Well, do you think you can go back to Bruges yet? With the Princess of Scotland giving birth in your house beside the traitor Boyds, father and son, and Edward of York rampaging about incognito in Oostcamp as guest of one of the Duke of Burgundy’s governors?’
She looked earnest rather than smug; but Jan was still vexed. She had been like this, virtually pickled in vinegar, since they picked her up from Cyprus in November. He wondered if Nicholas de Fleury could possibly have arranged it all. Claes. He had been in Rome when the big conference was being held. He’d gone north quite recently. They said he was making for Florence and Venice.
In a way it was no surprise therefore when his father came to mention that, unfortunately, they would not be able to go straight home to Bruges. Instead, he thought Jan would find it amusing, as a treat, to spend a little more time in Italy. Florence. Bologna. Ferrara. Even Venice. Venice in the days before Lent was surely something they might allow themselves, after all their privations.
But Jan knew it wasn’t the allurement of Martedi Grasso that was drawing his father. It was the diabolical plotting of Claes.
A galley of the Knights Hospitaller of St John, putting off from Rhodes just after Twelfth Night, began a rough journey west, bearing with it a contingent of Knights and the same experienced, much-exercised Turcoman delegation from the prince Uzum Hasan which had already visited both Cyprus