The Unicorn Hunt - Dorothy Dunnett [356]
The Baron Cortachy, Envoy of the most noble, the most high and most powerful prince, the lord Charles, Duke of Burgundy (and counsellor of James, King of Scotland), conducted himself at table with all the address of one accustomed to the ceremonial of Brussels.
To Tobias Lomellini he said, ‘I, too, am dismayed, although as a merchant I shall benefit. M. de Fleury has forfeited the right to act as exclusive purchasing agent for arms. I am told the Patriarch of Antioch has been in Caffa, consolidating Genoese privileges in order to placate the Order in Rhodes. It could have been worse.’
It could have been worse. The words, Adorne’s own, stayed engraved in his mind as his name was engraved on a block of stone; on a wall. Was that to be the epitaph of this pilgrimage, this journey which circumstance had forced on him and his son, and which, at another time in his life, could have been glorious?
He should have come for his soul’s sake alone. The sufferings and the rewards: the solitudes and silence of Sinai, the exaltation of the spirit he had experienced over and over in the Holy Land should have been sufficient. The jars and phials, the trinkets and the indulgences brought so far with such pains should have been acquired for those dear to his heart, and less for those from whom he or his Duke desired favours. And some of his party were dead.
Yet he served two princes, and was loyal to them, and had worked in their interest. And for his family, too, he had worked – this immense, growing family with which Margriet had blessed him; and which meant that he could not ignore the opportunities or the dangers which the future might offer his investments and his trade.
And likewise, he could not ignore his competitors. He wished de Fleury had not come, and that the child Kathi had not encumbered him, dear though she was. He wished he did not know, as now he did, that Jan was not of the stuff of which great statesmen are made. But the lad’s future was safe, with a Pope who favoured Genoa, and the Adornes.
Jan had shown himself a good son, and in this interim should be permitted some frivolity, although his father could wish he were absent less often, and were seeing less of Simon de St Pol whose life he, Adorne, had saved in the salt-houses in Scotland. Splendid jouster though St Pol was, he had the name of a profligate. It was a tragedy, too, to see developed in Nicholas de Fleury what had seemed, long ago, merely the irresponsibility and lightness of youth. Now added to that was the sin of impiety. And what St Pol lacked: a chilling mastery of manipulation in business which others, too, had begun to identify as a threat.
With a fortitude supplied him by God, Anselm Adorne confronted an eventual return to his home and an untangling of the ludicrous situation precipitated by these poor, warring monarchs of England. Unrecognised for months by the Duke, the Yorkist King of England had been skulking in Holland as a house-guest of Louis de Gruuthuse. At the same time, thanks to Nicholas de Fleury, the Scots traitor Boyd, Earl of Arran, was raising a family in the Baron’s own household.
Adorne owed allegiance to the Scots King who had condemned Boyd to death. His own daughter served the English King’s mother. He could extract himself from the predicament with some honour, but it was de Fleury he blamed, and de Fleury on whom his thoughts constantly dwelled. It seemed the man was not going East, but had just confirmed his stake in the West: in Flanders, Burgundy, perhaps even in Scotland. But there, of course, the Baron Cortachy had already forestalled him. And now there were others. In future, Nicholas Fleury would find his opposition of a different calibre. He would face a coalition.
The pendulum gave him nothing. He sat finally by the light of one guttering candle, gazing at the lines on map after map; concentrating his being on Gelis, on Margot.
Nothing worked. Unless he had lost his mind, they were not in Florence, nor in