To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [60]
He and Gregorio arrived in Rome to find it full as a beehive and buzzing. As they had already been told twenty times, the new Pope was now chosen: a blameless della Rovere from the coast west of Genoa who was going to call himself Sixtus. Milan and Bologna were happy. Venice, which would have preferred its good friend Bessarion of Trebizond, was reserving its judgement. There were sixteen Cardinals and their trains in the city, and all but three of the Electors. The crowning would take place in three days, and Julius was glad he wasn’t arranging it.
They stayed with Lazzarino their agent in a rather large house which had just been renamed the Casa Niccolò. It had a garden, a fountain, a chapel and a Franciscan priest awaiting them under a fig tree. He was eating. ‘Ha!’ said Father Ludovico da Bologna, Patriarch of Antioch. ‘The funds improve when the patron disappears for four months. So where is that son of Babylon, Nicholas?’
The solid frame and black tangled hair were the same, and the stained gown of nondescript colour under his robe, but the Patriarch’s tonsure was practically visible and he had recently shaved. The Curia clearly had him in hand.
Julius, who had a long memory, looked at him with disfavour. It was forty years since this unpleasant man, when merely an Observatine monk, had first heard the call to unite the Christian churches of the East and the West, and persuade them to raise money and arms against the Ottoman Turk. To that worthy end, Ludovico da Bologna had since travelled across half the known world, collecting his instructions and expenses from four Popes. Now he was here to urge another Crusade, and the death of the Pope had detained him.
Ten years ago, the Patriarch had embarrassed Julius in Florence by exposing his youthful errors when clerk to the Cardinal Bessarion. Time and again, Nicholas, too, had been forced to wrest the course of his life from those black-pelted fists, most recently early this year, when he had declined to commit his army and funds to the East. Hence, now, the man’s evil enquiry.
Julius was happy to offer enlightenment. ‘Nicholas? On the high seas for Scotland, if not actually there, with his wife and his son. I thought you knew. That was the plan he propounded in Venice.’
‘I wasn’t in Venice,’ said Ludovico da Bologna. ‘I saw him in Cyprus, walking quadrilles in the street like the sodomitical partridge and vowing to venture his stock in Heaven for a concerted attack on the Turk. Then he denied it. But thus in all countries is the artisan class. And to this he has now added, I gather, the diabolical practice of necromancy.’ He presented his teeth to a chicken leg.
Julius, wincing, drew breath to retort, but Gregorio, in his calm lawyer’s way, forestalled him. ‘Nicholas is the custodian of a Bank which must have regard to great events affecting its coffers. Moreover, his commitment was made, as I remember, on certain conditions. You offered him a meeting with his son. This he achieved by himself.’
‘Through the aforesaid skills, forbidden by Mother Church. The offspring will be damned, or the parents be driven to responses of abominable violence. I saw your Dr Tobias in Urbino.’
‘You stayed in Urbino?’ said Julius. The Count, a well-known leader of mercenaries, kept a lavish table.
‘With my Persian delegate, yes. There was a Flemish painter at work on a masterpiece, and nothing would do but Hadji Mehmet should have his portrait included. It flatters him. Your Dr Tobias thinks, as I do, that Burgundy will cost the Bank more than it offers, and that Scotland should be left to Adorne. Is Adorne’s niece in a nunnery yet?’ A jelly was set on the table, with a spoon. Julius averted his eyes.
‘Katelijne Sersanders?’ said Gregorio. ‘She lives in one, when in Scotland. That is, she serves the young Scottish Princess in a priory. But she is not, so far as I know, taking the veil.’
‘I shall remind her,’ said the Patriarch. ‘Her barbs would rust, sunk in a husband.’
He swallowed. Julius was surprised. Then he recalled that the Patriarch and Katelijne Sersanders