Caprice and Rondo (86 page)

Nicholas was not, now, short of money himself. He had some jewels left, adroitly hidden, but since joining the architect, he had increasingly been offered payments for his work: where the building was concerned, expense was no object. And though Julius was now back and holding the reins of his own business, Nicholas had drawn some personal profit for the deals he had made, and continued to do so. Because living was cheap, and there were so few outlets for money, wealth soon accumulated. Fioravanti had used some of his capital to turn his workshop into a training school. Instead of being paid, many of the young men who came to work on his site or at the drawing boards offered him fees for the schooling he gave them. Half the work he did was experimental. He drew plans. He
used new tools — a compass, a level. A special kiln had been built to make the hard, prime-quality bricks he required: the walls of white Kama sandstone were to be filled with brick and cement instead of gravel and sand, and he had taught the masons new ways to cut stone. This building, on the brow of the hill, was to brush the sky; was to be higher and lighter than anything Muscovy had previously known. The Dormition. The Assumption. The Uspenskii Sobor. The caves at Qirq-yer had possessed a Church of the Assumption as well.

When he and Nicholas talked, it was generally about the cathedral, but it might as easily be about road-making or bridges or dams. Often, he would draw Nicholas to speak of John le Grant and his cannon, and they would discuss, yet again, the problems of countering heavy artillery, and how to break the impasse of costly, time-wasting sieges where neither side had the ability to prevail. After these sessions, the wall-boards would be black with impassioned drawings. Nicholas lived, from day to day, in an agony of uncertainty and apprehension, but his work concealed his feelings and preserved them from crumbling, like Rudolfo’s strictly mortared new walls.

As the weeks went by, there were cracks in the rampart of silence. He knew, before the winter was over, that Mánkup in Gothia had fallen; that the fratricidal prince Aleksandre had been executed and his wife and daughters sent to harems. It moved him more to hear, later, that Abdan Khan the commander had escaped, leading his Circassians east of Kerch to the valley of the Kuban, and safety. They said that his pregnant wife had given birth on the vessel that took them, and that he now had a son, Kesa. The name, picked in pride and defiance, was neither Cairene nor Gothian, but Cherkess.

He knew his own son was alive, but only because of the pendulum. He carried with him Gelis’s letter, brought by Julius and therefore read by him. It added little to what Julius had already told him: that the danger from David de Salmeton was known, and would be dealt with, and that he was not to come back. And so he was not coming back.

He did not, of course, cut himself off from all connection with Julius or Anna: he simply entertained them in his house, and discouraged appeals to his better nature by filling the room with other people. Fioravanti generally had some business to talk over if Julius was present, and Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli never absented himself from a social occasion on any level, whether to shine at it or deride it. Impatience overcame Julius once, to the extent that he upbraided Nicholas in public for neglecting his family and overstaying in Russia, when company business required them both elsewhere.

To that, Nicholas merely answered, ‘Then go back yourself. I’ll come when I can.’ And, when pushed: ‘Then expel me as your partner,
and keep the loan you were given as my forfeit.’ He thought, then, that Julius was within a fraction of going, but Anna restrained him.

The next time they came, Julius was called away suddenly, and left Anna behind, promising to return to escort her home. Fioravanti was absent, but there were three eminent boyars in the room, an Italian goldsmith, and a few of the absent architect’s more promising trainees, who sat as close to Anna as possible, and gazed at her, awed. She smiled and spoke to them all, but spent more time, as was right, with the boyars, interrupting herself on occasion to spar with Acciajuoli, who liked to inject a light irony into the unrisen dough of boyar discourse, increasingly thickened by drink.

Watching the pretty woman and the elderly gentleman, so socially adept, Nicholas saw, yet again, how they took pleasure in their exchange. Both were solemn; only by the tone of their voices could you tell they were bantering. Anna’s face was illumined. Nicholas remembered the times when he, too, had been free to talk to her like that, and the sound of her laughter. He could not risk that now. With Julius here, God knew how it would end.

In fact, of course, Julius was not there. The light waned, the youths reluctantly left, and still he had not returned. The princes one by one fell asleep, and their servants came, as was the custom, to carry them home. One roused on leaving, and broke into song, and then vomited. Acciajuoli said, ‘I shall escort the Gräfin to her home. Her husband has been delayed.’

Anna smiled. She had bought silks in Novgorod, and her slender skirts moved upon one another, layer on layer, as she changed her position. Her sleeves lay at rest on Rudolfo’s priceless tiled floor. She said, ‘Are you afraid to leave Nicholas and myself together? Julius will come. He had enough confidence, you will remember, to confide me to Nicholas in the Crimea.’

‘As her servant,’ Nicholas said. ‘Which, of course, I still am. Monsignore, go home. If no one comes, I shall escort her myself.’

A less skilful man might have thought it polite to insist. Acciajuoli smiled, kissed the lady’s hand, and, escorted by Nicholas, limped to the door, where his servant was waiting. The door closed. Nicholas turned.

Except for Anna, the room was quite empty. The planed timber walls breathed their resin, and the precious objects of Fioravanti’s collection, a little disarranged by the company, defined the declining light in slow-swimming glimmers of silver and marble and bronze. The air sank through the window: the acrid, earth-smells of Moscow, as distinct as the fruit, musk and incense of Trebizond; the fish, clay, and camel manure of Timbuktu. The sweat, flowers and bath-oils of Tabriz; the rotting fish of the Faroes. The hot, peppery, ammoniac stinks of the dyeyards in
Nicosia and Bruges. The scent of love in Bruges; the one he would remember, when all the others had gone.

He knew, as he moved into the room, how that memory had been induced. She had risen from Julius’s bed to come here. Julius’s dutiful bed.

There was a handsome table in front of the window, with his own cup still standing upon it. He collected the wine and sat down gently behind it, on the flattened tapestry on the sill. The air blew on his cheek. She had chosen to remain where she was, in the shadows, framed by the embroidery of Rudolfo’s best chair. When she spoke, it was not easy to hear her, although he did. She said, ‘I can’t go home without you. That is why I have kept Julius in Russia. He wants to go back.’

He didn’t know what to say. Finally, he said, ‘I’m glad you told me, for I think there is a misunderstanding. There is nothing here for you, Anna. You have been my good friend, but that is all.’

‘You would feel bound to lie,’ she said.

‘I’m not lying,’ he said. ‘And I don’t understand, really. It was you who wanted Gelis to come.’

‘Because I was afraid this would happen. I can’t live without you. I’ve tried. Come with me, Nicholas.’

‘Where?’ He tried to sound patient, and kindly, and sensible. He tried to sound as if never, in any conceivable way, could he desire her.

‘Anywhere. You wouldn’t be breaking my marriage to Julius. Whatever you do, I’m leaving him.’

‘But that’s nonsense,’ Nicholas said. ‘You’ve persuaded yourself that something exists, and it doesn’t. Go home. Forget me.’ And as she did not answer, he felt he must go further. He said curtly, ‘I’m afraid I told Julius what happened between us in Caffa. I’m sorry, but I owed it to him.’

‘He told me. He didn’t believe you,’ Anna said.

She was unusually beautiful. Even as her fingers ran down the clasps of her gown, even as he prepared to forestall her, he felt the small lurch of the heart he always experienced when he saw her or heard her cool voice. But he could not let it go on. He said, ‘Stop, Anna.’ She had already pulled the gown down from her shoulder. The dying light, forsaking the statues, the flasks and the ewers, slipped past him to pool on the bare skin of her throat, then her breasts as she stood. He set his hand to the bell on the table and said, ‘I am sorry. I am going to ring. Rudolfo’s steward will come.’

‘He will be too late,’ Anna said. Something gleamed in her hand, against her fair skin. A knife.

Nicholas said, ‘What good will that do?’ He had risen, so that the air flowed unchecked through the window, although the table still stood
between them. Anyone, glancing in as they passed, would be able to see her with her gown pulled down about her, and her chemise wrenched asunder below.

She did not care. She said, ‘Will you come with me now? Take me somewhere and love me. Julius would not try to hold me after that.’ The knife gleamed.

‘No,’ he said. There were people outside. He could hear distant voices.

‘Then I have nothing left to live for,’ said Anna blankly, and lifted her arm. Her eyes, supplicating, enormous, held his. Then she stretched her long, slender throat and looked up at the fruitless sprig, the lethal sliver she held poised above her.

‘You won’t do it,’ said Nicholas. He had not moved. His voice was perfectly even.

She glanced at him, once. Then her eyes closed, and her hand swept down, hard.

He had not believed she would do it. Perhaps because of that, she did. Her breath escaped with the swing of her arm. As the point of the knife entered her body she gave a small, surprised sound, like a residual grunt; but as the blade went on its way, slicing and sucking, she drew a great breath and screamed, loudly enough for the bustle outside the window to falter, and for a murmur of voices to break out somewhere inside the house. After that, she only whimpered, letting the knife fall to the ground and clasping her hands vaguely over the wound. She took one or two uncertain steps and pitched forward, striking the edge of the table at which he still stood as if frozen.

He saw the blood, thick as good tournesol, welling over her skin, soaking into the edges of chemise and gown, flowing down to her lap. He could not see where it came from, but it was very like the first gush from the crossbow wound he had given Julius; her face and throat were untouched and lovely as ever. She sank down before him with her eyes fixed on his, as in prayer; unclasping one of her hands, she stretched out her glistening palm for a moment. Then it fell, and she slid to lie on the tiles, her cheek turned sideways under the loosened dark strands of her hair, her amazing violet eyes at last closed.

Then the commotion outside spilled closer, into the house, with voices somewhere among it that he knew. He still had not moved when the door crashed open and men poured in, one of them limping. The first to enter, the first to see Nicholas at the window was Julius. He said harshly, ‘What have you done? Where is she?’

‘There,’ Nicholas said. A yellow light appeared somewhere and brightened: a lamp in the hand of Fioravanti, with Acciajuoli at his shoulder. The room’s small treasures gleamed once again, and the fair skin of a woman, lying in her half-naked blood on the floor.

Julius knelt. When he rose, he held Anna’s knife in his hand, and his pallor was as extreme as on the day when this had occurred to him also. He said to Nicholas, ‘You tried to rape her, and stabbed her when she resisted you.’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘Look after her, and I will tell you what happened.’

‘Look after her! She is dead,’ Julius said.

‘No. Let someone look at her. It was an accident.’

‘An accident!’ Julius said. ‘You and she are alone in a room, and she is undressed and stabbed with her own knife. That is murder, you diabolical little savage. She was my wife. And now you pay for it.’

His sword came out so fast that Nicholas almost took the blade in his shoulder. He swerved, and when the blade sang again he abandoned the window at last and flung through the room, overturning chairs in his wake as Julius attempted to follow him. Then the brief, furious explosion was over: men had thrown themselves on Julius and relieved him of his sword while Acciajuoli, taking Nicholas by the shoulder, pressed him into a chair and put a cup of wine into his hand. He accepted it in a daze, half rising again as the Gräfin Anna von Hanseyck was tenderly lifted and carried away. He could hear Julius shouting, and see tears of shock in his eyes. Now it was over, he had begun to feel sick himself. He had not thought she would do it. He had challenged her to do it.

The voice of Fioravanti said, ‘You wish to go to your wife, Signor Julius. But before you are freed, notice that, as a matter of law, the man you have just attacked was unarmed, and you cannot be permitted to execute him. In any case, you have not heard what he has to say. And, really, it cannot have occurred as you describe. Your wife’s murderer would surely have one spot of blood on his clothes or his hands, and Niccolò has none. He did not move from the window — I would swear to that, I saw him from outside — and he could not have reached to stab her over the table. It must therefore, as he says, have been an accident.’

‘Then,’ said Julius, ‘I am waiting to hear, with interest, what sort of accident it could have been. Perhaps she disrobed and murdered herself?’

‘Later,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’ll tell you what happened later.’ He felt extraordinarily tired; as if he had endured a long day’s campaigning, and the end was not yet in sight. He began to experience anxiety, in case his attention faltered. His gaze sank to his cup.

Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli said, ‘Are you feeling unwell? Perhaps you would be better in solitude until this whole affair can be examined by the authorities. I fear that our friend Julius will not let it lapse.’

‘Anna?’ asked Nicholas, with brevity. He did feel unwell. The room rocked and the face of Julius, lowering at him, was blurred.

‘She is not dead. She will do. Come,’ said the Greek sympathetically. ‘Leave the explanations to others.’