To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [19]
Residence in the prince-bishopric proceeded much as he had expected. Although exhausted at first by the journey, Gelis soon became self-sufficient: making acquaintances; fulfilling the Bank’s social obligations in style with her fine jewels and rich gowns and royal manners. Indeed, Julius had no cause for complaint.
Nevertheless, after six weeks of serious trading, he began to feel hampered, and even uneasy. Gelis was still there, and no word had come from her husband. She said nothing about it, but his agent’s wife thought she was pining. Ever since the loss of the child, the girl had had the look of a starving dog kept in a pit.
No one, therefore, was happier than Julius when the courier from Diniz in Bruges burst into his office with news. Nicholas and the child were in France. Within five days they were to learn his exact whereabouts.
‘You will go to Bruges?’ Julius said, in the girl’s chamber. She was sitting. She had dropped into a seat as soon as he started to speak.
‘Don’t you recognise a summons when you hear it?’ she said.
The words were scathing, but her eyes were deep as two ice-pools in snow, and her hands were cramped in her lap. He said, ‘He won’t hurt you.’ It was hardly worth the pretence. She was married to Nicholas. She knew what he did. She deserved to suffer, according to Margot.
She left the following day. Julius realised that in some practical ways he would miss her. But for her, the Hanse correspondence would have fallen behind, and she had a natural aptitude for ciphers. It was only away from his desk that he had begun to feel the want of his freedom.
His doublet-maker was due. He set down his beaker of wine and took up and emptied a packet of buttons. He studied them, smiling, and smoothing the silk on his uppermost knee.
The town of Angers was in mourning. The sadness which had dimmed the warm sun of Provence hung like a pall over Anjou and the capital where René, King of Sicily, Duke of Anjou, Count of Provence, mourned the fighting son lately dead in Barcelona, and now the death of Blanche, the little matron, the love-child he had looked to, with his wife, to comfort him in old age.
Nicholas, careful of such things, had advertised his coming in terms of subdued condolence, but would have been surprised to learn that he would be unwelcome at René’s Provençal castle at Tarascon, or could not be entertained by the bereaved monarch at Angers. A merchant banker with Burgundian connections was not likely to be ignored at this juncture in Anjou’s affairs. The greeting he received at Marseilles from René’s godson and namesake confirmed this.
He was expected, therefore, at Angers, even though the royal boat which met his at the junction of the Loire and the Maine was pinned with black taffeta, and Fleur de Pensée, the herald who welcomed him, had discarded his beautiful livery of white and dove-grey and black for one of mourning. So too had Ardent Désir, the second herald who awaited him with a small cavalcade on the quay. High on its rock a hundred feet over their heads loomed the seventeen striped dark towers of the castle in which, ceremoniously, Nicholas de Fleury, banker of Venice and Bruges, was about to be received.
He felt no qualms. He was trained to formality; knew to appear in some dark colour that was not the black of the sorrowing family; knew that everything about him would be documented, including his own feud with Jordan de Ribérac, finance officer to the King of France, René’s nephew and overlord in this duchy. The vicomte de Ribérac’s grandson, Henry, had been in training here as a page. He would be ten now.
The heralds preceded him. Behind the romantic names were two experienced courtiers and trusted friends of the King. Ardent Désir, whose name was Pierre de Hurion, was a writer and poet. So was the King’s maréschal des logis, Jehan du Perrier,