To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [117]
‘Not the first day,’ said the Abbot. ‘Later, perhaps.’
Even before leaving Bruges, Jan Adorne had thought of henbane. By the time he had crossed the Alps and accompanied the Bishop of St Andrews through Pavia, Bologna, and Viterbo, the eldest son of Anselm Adorne was contemplating something more sudden with blood in it. It was not so much that Patrick Graham was short-tempered and greedy, had acquired too many illegal offices and was failing to pay for them. It was because he complained all the time.
Last year, on his long, painful pilgrimage, Jan had fallen out with his father, the autocratic, demanding, exigent Baron Cortachy. But his father had been a model of self-control compared with this man of the Church, obsessed by his own royal blood. His father, grieved though he’d been over Jan’s silly behaviour in Venice, had forgiven him in the end, and had said nothing of it back there at Calais, although he had not allowed him to come with him to Scotland. If Jan had been given a punishment it was this, to come back to Italy, the place where he had made a fool of himself. But he might have made a fool of himself anyway, if he’d stayed with his parents. They had no right to do it. His father and mother had no right to shame him, at their age, with their lust. To make a new child together, and to send him away.
Repressively, he made the best of it. A qualified lawyer, with years of training at Paris and Pavia, he must set to and start his career. Every offer in Bruges had fallen through. In any case, there was only one path to the heights, and that was through office in Rome, and the kind of situation the last Pope had offered. That Pope was dead, but his nephew was still in Rome, still a Cardinal. And Cardinal’s secretaries had been known to become Popes themselves, in the fullness of time.
Not that Jan’s ambitions stretched quite so far, or were quite so weighty. He knew he lacked concentration, and would have to curb a taste for student frivolities; but provided he were in the right company, it should be easy. He hoped to meet no one who had seen him in Venice, and had been thankful, in passing through Pavia, to find de Fleury’s physician no longer there. Dr Tobias had gone to the Count of Urbino, either to cure his marsh-fever or to attend his wife through her ninth pregnancy. She had already given day to eight daughters, but such was the mystical reputation of the Banco di Niccolò that a son was no doubt considered assured. Jan hoped with all his might it would be a ninth daughter. He hated Nicholas de Fleury and his whole heartless, mercenary crew. Henbane would be too good for him, too.
It was raining in Rome. Once, he had found the city exciting. Slowly, after the return of the Popes from Avignon, the new houses and mansions, inns and villas, fountains and stalls had begun to cluster again round the bridges, and the two principal roads to Ostia and the north. Some of the converted palaces stayed the same, but churches were acquiring new faces, and costly and elegant buildings were rising now for the Roman nobles, the Cardinals, the Conservators and the municipal authorities, with fine gardens and salons and halls where precious things could be displayed. Only a few months ago, Jan and his father had been shown the Pope’s own collection in the Palazzo San Marco: the gems and medals and bronzes and cameos; the twenty-five charming altars with their mosaics; the jewelled vestments and ivories; the hundred gold coins, the thousand silver; the modern arras from Flanders; and the golden vases commissioned from Florence. It was said that he had offered to build a new bridge for Toulouse in exchange for a cameo.
All that had been the Pope’s. When, only this January, Jan had received the news, kneeling, that a post would be his with the Cardinal of San Marco, his future had seemed brilliantly assured. He would live in the Palazzo. The ceremonies of the Vatican, glittering and ornate, confirmed the promise of a career that – provided he now kept his head – might astonish and humble his father. The whole city seemed ready