To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [114]
Lazzarino of the Casa Niccolò had been selected as factor in Rome because of his skill in this respect. The most inoffensive and obliging of men, he took his listening ears to all occasions of note and said nothing; his reports told what he had learned. His wife, more naturally opinionative, had the sense to appear gentle also. Their aptitudes fitted in well enough with the more flamboyant personality of Julius, who was happy to leave the dull work to the agent and buff up the Bank’s social relationships in his own style.
By the time Gregorio left, the English embassy was already over: a constipated group under Gold well, dispatched to bring the obedience from a King newly back on his throne, who desired the fact to be noticed. Florence followed: not on the prodigious scale of Milan, but rich enough to make the eyes water. It was led by Lorenzo de’ Medici, and included a column of wains requiring thirty-five horses to pull them, and loaded with, among other things, four hundred pounds’ weight of table silver.
For lodging they had the hospitality of Lorenzo de’ Medici’s two uncles who ran the Rome Bank and, more grandly, the extravagant palace of Cardinal Orsini, whose eighteen-year-old niece was the wife of Lorenzo. With the party rode five other envoys, the orator Donato Acciajuoli and a Martelli among them, and an assortment of Levantine exiles including a girlish young half-Greek called Nerio. There came also a crippled kinsman of Acciajuoli’s whose presence would have turned Nicholas cold, had his thoughts not been directed elsewhere.
Julius had no qualms when this particular gentleman stalked into his house, the wooden leg perfectly managed underneath the long skirts of plum velvet. Gazing at the smooth bearded face and dark eyes, Julius noted the silvery hairs, the sharper bones, but conceded that the man had worn well since the day that Claes had snapped his leg off by accident. By what passed for an accident, in those light-hearted years when men perceived only Claes, and not Nicholas. Acciajuoli hadn’t borne him a grudge; had indeed passed him a few business tips well worth having, even if there had been a sting, now and then, in the tail. Nicholas seemed to find the fellow lowering, which was natural. Acciajuoli was a man who had seen Nicholas, his back buttered, in jail. Nicholas hadn’t been anyone’s padrone then.
Julius thought the Florentine sly – his Greek blood – but would hardly call him malignant. They said he had approached Gelis in Florence two years ago. No one knew whether he had offered her anything, or asked her to do something, or had been merely obeying a whim. He was an inquisitive man. At this very moment, goblet in hand, he was enquiring about the arrival of Anna. It was a dull, clammy day, and they were sitting in the loggia in the garden, not far from where Ludovico da Bologna had once placed himself.
‘The Gräfin?’ Julius said. ‘Many of our clients, as you might expect, are coming to Rome. I believe she is one of them.’
‘Of course,’ said the Florentine soothingly. ‘I forgot. She is a shareholder in the Bank’s newest ship. I am told your splendid merchantman is sadly delayed? Some dispute in the boat-yard at Danzig?’
‘One expects it,’ said Julius. ‘There are others.’
‘Skiffs and doggers and balingers, in little boat-yards in Scotland, so rumour says. Not very palatable news for your Hanse friends in Cologne. Unless, that is, you mean to recover your fleet from the Doge? The old Ciaretti, the pirated Ghost, the battered San Niccolò? Venice would have a right to complain. But who could blame Nicholas, retired to his love nest in Scotland, if he lost interest in fighting the Turk on the Euxine, or in Persia, or the Khanates?’ He smiled, and laid down