To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [128]
In the Casa Niccolò in the Canongate it was the same. Govaerts, as ever, controlled the business, but admitted to himself it was less stressful when Nicholas was abroad than when he was physically present but almost wholly engaged in other concerns.
Nor was it better when John le Grant and Father Moriz arrived, angered at the interruption in their difficult programme. All that was left in full swing was the boatbuilding, which de Fleury wasn’t crazed enough so far to compromise. John however had to abandon his guns and replace them with quite different mechanisms and finicky castings: hours of concentrated fine work for the benefit of a Christmas playlet. Being John, he presently took fire and would have refused to do anything else. Moriz, suspended between the true God and one made of hide-covered clay, took longer to become reconciled, being disturbed by both his own conscience and suspicions of Nicholas. Meanwhile the business did without both of them. Only the goldsmith, who always worked directly to Nicholas, appeared wholly happy.
Archibald, Abbot of Holyrood, was happy because he was an able, energetic man who didn’t mind his entire yard being dug up and remade to hold a long rectangular platform with a stand of seats on two sides, and an end which was fixed to the porch of the Abbey. Beneath the yard was positioned a network of rooms, pits and tunnels, some of them filled with machinery. Above it were workshops. Sometimes Abbot Crawford would make his way there after matins just to smell and look at the pigments: sinople and cinders of azure, verjus and brown of Auxerre. There were two pounds of vermilion, at seven shillings the pound. And all the scenery was painted on vellum, not paper; so that nothing could buckle or flake. His highly numerate intelligence kept track of some of the costs.
He was content that the money was being spent in his yard (with the promise of permanent compensatory improvements). The more money the King lavished on this, the less there would be for any nonsense such as leading armies to France. Duke Charles had just made a pact against France with his new allies England and Aragon. It was not a bad thing that de Fleury was here, and Adorne, the other Burgundian. God forbid that Charles of Burgundy should surround himself with clever men.
When the actors were chosen and the rehearsals began, advertised by the clang of the bell, the Abbot lingered to watch the men hurrying to and fro, their rolls under their arms. The rolls so carefully copied in his own cloisters, each man’s part on a strip. Sometimes de Fleury came himself, brandishing the traditional baton of the Protocolle, the man who carries the book of the play and directs it. The Abbot armed himself nowadays for his exchanges with the Burgundian. De Fleury, said Bishop Tulloch – and he agreed – was both a fathomless danger and an ally worth having. It made for stimulating encounters. The virtues of bourgeois cortesía.
The musicians practised where they had begun, in the collegiate church of the Trinity, learning the music as it was written. The singers had been joined by a child of fragile beauty called John, the son of one of the actors who, like his father, appeared on the recommendation of the Abbot of Holyrood. Roger, who suspected everyone’s musical taste but his own, heard the child once, and that night changed three pieces to accommodate him. His sister, equally angelic, was too young to sing but was given a role as a cherub. As for Will Roger himself, his condition varied through all this time between a state of violent happiness and violent anxiety. He forgot to eat, until the nuns noticed and began sending down baskets.
In the High Street of Edinburgh, one of the few mansions unaffected by theatrical madness was that of Anselm Adorne. There, in his office, Adorne quietly conducted his business with the men who slipped in, sometimes after dark, to talk to him or bring him dispatches.