To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [298]
The members of the Comptroller’s and Treasurer’s staffs were well-disposed men, unfamiliar with Italian book-keeping, whose task was to apply an inflexible system to an uncertain and corruptible income, often plundered at will by the Crown. The clerks did their best, and delivered their accounts once a year to the Exchequer audit. Once a year only; in summer; in June.
Meanwhile, the flaws in the structure were painfully obvious. Any man who could offer help in their predicament was bound to be listened to. And the solution was simple. Instead of changing the system, you altered the money.
Below, where Wilhelm of Hall ruled, the crucibles poured out their billon and copper, casting the bars which his printers and strikers would beat and cut into groats and pennies, farthings and placks stamped with crowns and mullets and thistles and the King’s head, all of them debased and black money.
Later, when the coining irons were removed and the lockfast boxes taken away for the night, the furnace was ventilated again. This time, Wilhelm himself set to work with one striker he trusted; pouring out molten gold and stamping it with a pair of puncheons which no one would come to remove, because no one knew they existed: the coining irons for a louis of France.
Far from yielding a profit, this part of the business was ruinous. But of course, it was worth it.
He talked with Wilhelm for a while, and then went to bed in his office, since it was too late to return to the High Street. Before he retired, he unpacked the chessmen and laid them out one by one at his pillow.
Yule and Twelfth Night came and went, their social obligations fitted into the spinning bands of his projects. Most of his agents reached him through Gregorio or Diniz or Julius, who had gone back to Cologne. Some correspondents preferred to send word direct from as far off as Danzig. Jordan de Fleury reached the mature age of four.
Duke Charles used the winter to appropriate the Duchy of Guelders. The Pope and Sigismond of the Tyrol used it to prepare a plan to encourage Duke Charles to fight the Swiss.
In Scotland, her grace the Queen, eight months pregnant, found out at last about Simon of Kilmirren and had to have something slipped into her ptisan to quieten her. Her demands for the filthy whoremaster’s head were side-stepped by the King, with the help of his doctors and ministers. After years of neglect, Kilmirren was at last being properly managed, with thriving flocks and good crops and a healthy trade through the haven of Ayr. The estate was paying its dues to the Crown. Provided St Pol stayed where he was, the King was pleased to regard this as a form of restitution.
The Queen, increasing sullenly, let the argument founder. It would lose nothing by waiting. And she was mollified by her latest acquisition: a packet of jewels, two of which had a name.
Andro Wodman departed. Messages to Nicholas from Burgundian Artois, heavily coded, suggested that unless England promised help soon, the Duke would cancel his attack on the French in the spring. Meanwhile, every nation was complaining of piracy, even France, whose own notorious freebooters were seldom chastised by their monarch. Whether in this connection or not, the vicomte de Ribérac had been sent for by Louis.
And lastly, an event took place behind closed doors in Cologne which Julius did not report, although it concerned the Bank, as it happened, as much as his own personal well-being. The Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck, whose unofficial man of affairs he had become, invited Julius to spend time at her side in the grand hunting-lodge of one of her kinsmen, in which