To Lie with Lions - Dorothy Dunnett [66]
It was one of the reasons why Crackbene was tolerant of this infestation of wife and nurses and child. He had had experience of the van Borselen woman in Africa, and knew she was of good, active stock, capable of making a life of her own. As for children, he spoiled his own but was uninterested in others, unless they were training for sea. He had brought one such lad back with him from Africa, and had got him a good post. He meant to tell de Fleury, some time, about Filipe. He would be pleased.
You could say that de Fleury and he were the same, for all that he was a seaman and de Fleury a banker, or supposed to be. They were both attracted by the kind of crazy, high-paying jobs that no man of sense would risk his skin for. Northern waters were Crackbene’s native habitat, but he had also sailed to the Euxine and Cyprus and Africa, and had lost a few ships, and a few crews, and more than one owner. De Fleury had near-killed him once, and so had the Turks and the Gambia. But you would come back from the dead for this game.
Even John le Grant hadn’t been told the whole story at first. Some of it had been discussed in February with the lawyers at Venice. Some of it had been planned before even that. De Fleury had known he was coming back to Scotland one day. He had left orders. And then, surfacing in Dijon this summer, he had extended them.
The present voyage had been arranged at that time: Crackbene was to charter King James’s Rose of Bremen and pick up the padrone and party from Calais in July. When, as it turned out, the Rose had been reduced to chips in an battle with pirates, a smaller caravel had been leased. The Bank, of course, had no ships of its own in the north: its roundship and caravel were both in Venetian service, and its elderly galley confined to calm waters.
Wading through the English bureacracy at Calais, Crackbene had found de Fleury’s party installed in a house of the Staple with the priest and le Grant. The domestic tangle had evidently been regulated at last: the child was there, indisputably a de Fleury, and so was the wife, with her arm in a sling. Among the grooms and the archers, the story had been the same one that he’d already picked up elsewhere: the girl had slept with St Pol, that stupid philanderer, and de Fleury had sent for her and taught her a lesson. It matched what Crackbene already guessed, including de Fleury’s attempted fight to the death with her lover. It continuously surprised him that St Pol had survived it.
Greeting Crackbene at Calais, the padrone and the lady now looked and sounded reserved, as was understandable. In a month, the scandal would all be forgotten. The girl made a lot of the child. Crackbene deduced, without too much trouble, that the wellbeing of the child was why de Fleury had troubled to continue his marriage. Also, she was a handsome young woman, worth taming. Crackbene was satisfied, with his mind on his business, to dismiss the private problems of Nicholas de Fleury.
And the business, discussed in a private room with a view of the Ruisbank Tower, had been all that Crackbene had anticipated. Face to face, freed from the importunities of his women, de Fleury had unfolded at last the detail of the Bank’s particular venture in Scotland and John le Grant, the only other participant, had listened in silence, his white-lashed eyes round as sea-anemones; his fading carrot hair twisted in spikes. From time to time he ejaculated.
‘Danzig! Ye have a caravel building in Danzig!’
‘Bristol! It was you that captured that wine-ship!’
‘Jordan de Ribérac! How in the name did ye sell off his cargoes!’ His accent, set adrift with excitement, travelled to Aberdeen from the Ruhr in three sentences.
Finally he sat back, alight but indignant. ‘All you mentioned in Artois was putting a man of your own into Denmark, and getting a new specialist