Scales of Gold (82 page)

In the desert, what mattered was friendship, not consanguinity. Friendship; and truth, where it could be spoken without causing harm. Nicholas said, ‘If there ever was such a claim, I do not mean to renew it. Regard me as the natural son of Sophie de Fleury. If I require a family, or a cousin, I shall choose one.’ And he sent a smile, full of reassurance, to Diniz.

He made the rest of the encounter as brief as he could, but, on leaving, could not prevent Diniz walking with him towards the gate in the garden, or giving voice to his tumbling apologies. Eventually Nicholas stopped and turned. ‘I didn’t bind you to silence over my mother. Many people know who she was. I hope Tilde does, and that if she doesn’t, you’ll tell her. What I believe or believed about my father can be forgotten about.’

‘Not by me,’ Diniz said. ‘I saw your son in Madeira.’

They were in a small orchard. There was no one else there. Nicholas said, ‘That is not something you should ever say.’

‘I know,’ Diniz said. ‘You don’t need to speak. I guessed. Gregorio doesn’t know. I won’t tell anyone else. I realised in Famagusta. Simon himself doesn’t know, does he? He brought the boy to Madeira to watch you die at his hand. Nicholas!’

‘I’m sorry,’ Nicholas said. ‘I’m not going to admit to any of that. Henry is Simon’s son.’

‘I know. He has to be,’ Diniz said. ‘I suppose you’ve given him up. I suppose there’s nothing you can do about it; I see that. But Nicholas – he is the image of Simon.’

‘Then he must be Simon’s son,’ Nicholas said. ‘Goodbye, Diniz.’

Nicholas left without looking back, but conscious that the boy was standing still, staring after him. Now it was over, he experienced a great relief, of the kind he had felt in the presence of Umar. He had already decided to rid himself of this burden, and now it was done.

He remembered, then, that Gelis was coming, and thought that, for once, self-abnegation was about to receive its reward.

She came in the evening, as he hoped she would. The time between, he occupied with his own business: with Gregorio and his staff in the Banco di Niccolò, studying the ledgers and reading the reports sent back by Julius. He saw, through Margot’s eyes, the change in Gregorio: the assurance of Venice added to the personal labour, the heart-felt pioneering of Madeira, coupled with a burning sense of injustice. Gregorio would not readily allow the Lomellini, the Vatachino or Simon de St Pol to escape their deserts.

After that, Nicholas had gone to the Charetty, and talked to Cristoffels and let Tilde and Catherine show him what they had done. Tilde, large-eyed and blushing, had held him back at the end, his hand in both of hers. ‘You like him, too?’

And he had put back her hair and held her face with his hands: the face that would never be as bright as Marian’s, but which had Marian’s eyes, and her brother’s terrible nose, and all his own childhood locked somewhere inside it, and said, ‘I like him. And
Felix and your mother would have loved him. All you need to do is love him as well.’

When Gelis came, he was away at the dyeworks, sitting on a bench among the familiar vats, trying to hold a serious conversation about orchella while being side-tracked by all the jokes and gossip and laughter that you got from men you had known since you were ten. He had given up, in the end, and ordered a barrel of ale and they were all drinking it when the servant came running. He was required at Spangnaerts Street to welcome a guest.

It was Gelis van Borselen, of course, who could diagnose a man in liquor whether she was lying unclothed by a pool among Negroes or dressed from breast to hem in meticulous velvet, with a fine, bulbous hat on her head. Her hair, which he had cause to know was well brushed, was out of sight, wrapped round her head. She said, ‘Fermented liquor again?’

‘They keep slipping it into my cup,’ Nicholas said, ‘in the hope that I’ll ravish them.’

‘I’m sure,’ she said, ‘that Henninc has been trying hard for a very long time. I want to see Godscalc.’

‘He’s here,’ Nicholas said. ‘You’ll have to help me up the stairs.’

He was a little drunk and thankful for it, for, once in Godscalc’s room, whatever they planned, Timbuktu enclosed them. Godscalc and Gelis knew it almost as he did; and hungered to talk. The common irritations: the sand, the wind, the heat, the insects. The exotica they had described to others so often: the apes, the parrots, the river-horses, the lions, the elephants.

The people they had not described. Once, in Venice, Julius had mentioned a blackamoor he had acquired for his boat and Nicholas, frozen, had asked what tribe he belonged to, and had seen the uncomprehending expression in the other man’s face. All that, he and Godscalc and Gelis shared as, for a shorter time, had Diniz and Bel.

They asked him about Umar, and he told them a little, and a little more of the journey to Taghaza. He fell into dispute with Gelis over the fortifications he had left; and again, over where the canal should be. He criticised the type of wool she had proposed for the weaving-shops. Godscalc said, ‘If you are going to quarrel, could you do it somewhere else? I have a headache.’

She was instantly full of remorse. The remorse was as spurious as the headache. Nicholas said, ‘May I see you home?’

‘I don’t know,’ said Gelis van Borselen. ‘Can you walk?’

He could walk. He walked her to where she was sleeping, which was not the Gruuthuse palace, he discovered, but the van Borselen house, where Wolfaert stayed when in Bruges. It was empty, but for two servants.

At the door he said, ‘What do you want of me?’

‘A night,’ she said.

There was a door at the back. He let himself in, and left by the same way in the morning; and it was like Tendeba, but all enacted in a dream, with one strong, pliant girl. One girl, with the myriad allurements of Tendeba. He tried to tell her, but she laid her palm over his lips, and her body on his, and under it, and between. The morning light showed her spent, and still smiling. He said, ‘Gelis. We shall make a child if we go on like this. What do you want?’

‘What I am taking from you,’ she said. ‘I can protect myself. I shall bleed through and after Easter, which will give us both a respite. Is that too womanly for you?’

‘And after Easter?’ he said.

‘We shall have three weeks before I go back to Scotland.’

He said, ‘You are going back?’

‘Oh, yes,’ she said. ‘Unless I cannot do without you.’

‘Or I cannot do without you?’ Nicholas said. And laughed suddenly, for he knew what she was going to say.

‘What has that to do with it?’ Gelis said.

Nicholas supposed, if Godscalc suspected before, that he must be sure now of what was happening. He himself had never needed much sleep, but the nightly toll left him sometimes light-headed. He stood in his office and leafed through the reports from Julius in Venice; from le Grant in Alexandria; from Valencia; the orders for dyestuffs for the Wedding; and thought mostly of the previous night, and the next one.

She was ingenious in arranging where to meet. The van Borselen house only twice. The next time, at Veere, where he required to go, as was right, to talk to those Scottish merchants who had objected so strongly to the increased market tolls that they had broken off trading in Bruges. He took with him some letters from Bonkle.

She had a boat at Veere, and proved to him, as she had promised, that she could sail. There was room for two of them, and a small sail which took them to a beach which remained deserted all afternoon. Later, he came to his senses and apologised, aware that he had allowed her no respite. Yet she had shown nothing but a powerful compliance. She said, ‘If I don’t want you, I’ll tell you. Gregorio says he saw Katelina’s son and disliked him. Does that pain you?’

‘Yes,’ he said. He felt her naked weight shift on his arm, and looked reflectively upwards. The sky was pale, and the sand lay where it was, without rising. All around them was water.

‘You might win him back,’ she said. ‘Now he has brothers.’

Nicholas looked at her.

Gelis said, ‘Didn’t you know? A fertile kitchen-maid and now,
they say, a well-born maiden whom Simon may have to marry. They say that possessing one child often leads to the siring of others. Simon will have a family.’

‘I don’t grudge him it,’ Nicholas said.

‘You envy Umar,’ she said in a soft voice.

‘I am happy for him,’ he said. ‘I am also patient.’

She moved a little. Then, rising, she came to stand over him, bare feet apart, damp hair streaking her breasts in the sunlight. ‘How patient?’ she said, and let herself slowly down. ‘This much? Or this? Or will you let me do this, and do nothing?’

‘No,’ he said; and closed her laughing mouth, and took up his licence to union once again.

At Easter, they parted, she to take her woman’s retreat, as she had warned him, and he to take his share in the ceremonies. She had mocked him over his first reaction to her news. ‘You were disappointed! You were hoping to discover me pregnant and helpless?’

He said, ‘I should like you, yes, to be able to make your decision. I shouldn’t want to oppress you with an unwanted marriage or children. It’s as well.’ In less than four weeks, if she kept to her plan, she would be gone. He wouldn’t allow himself to say more than he had. He wouldn’t allow himself to say, ‘Am I to be only your lover for life? Don’t we fit, mind to mind as we do body to body? Or do you still hate and want me at once, because of Katelina?’

The rest of the time, of course, they were in fierce opposition. Even while they were sleeping apart, she would find her way into the Charetty counting-house and browse with Diniz and Tilde through the ledgers, and then burst in on him or on Gregorio later with some violent stricture. ‘Do you know what you are lending the town, for their costumes? Why are you not fighting to keep importing the alum you want? What are these terrible fountains? They don’t work!’

None of Nicholas’s friends knew what to make of it. Gregorio, talking quietly to Godscalc, would say, ‘They are exhausting one another. He came back with a strength she hasn’t been able, yet, to disturb. But she will destroy herself, if she doesn’t make up her mind soon.’

‘Margot’s assessment?’ Godscalc had said. ‘I think you are both right, but I also think there is nothing you can do. Gelis is torn between loyalty to her sister and something else. It may be mere fleshly pleasure. In which case, it will fade.’

‘Leaving Nicholas where?’ Gregorio said.

And Godscalc had said, ‘I shall speak to her, Goro. But not yet.’

As if to justify his decision to wait, the weeks after Easter seemed to show Nicholas less beset, and something less inflammatory about his resumed connection with Gelis. However discreet they might be, the occasions were always created: the hunting excursion, the expedition to sail or to shoot which always left them alone, out of Bruges. She had returned to the house of Louis de Gruuthuse, and there, too, one could guess, she had company in her chamber. But between, Nicholas behaved as would any wealthy head of an empire: he conducted his business and visited his fellow merchants, including Tommaso Portinari, manager of the Bruges branch of the Medici of Florence. On that occasion, he took Diniz with him.

Once, an ambitious, struggling deputy, Tommaso Portinari had despised the apprentice Claes and the circle of young men in which he had found himself trapped. Handsome, poor, dependent on the patronage of his family and, over them, of the Medici, he had struggled to be where he now was: not a twelve-year-old junior, but the undisputed controller of the Bruges business; a trusted counsellor of the new Duke; a monopoly supplier of silk; a near-monopoly supplier of alum; a diplomat whose secret letters were welcomed in France, Milan, England. A wealthy, unmarried man of forty-three, whose home was the Hof Bladelin in Naalden Straate, the great turreted house where the treasurer of the Golden Fleece used to hold his receptions at carnival-time.

Tommaso had seen Katelina van Borselen there, the year she had married St Pol. The year the Charetty dyeworks had gone on fire. It pleased him to welcome Claes – Nicholas – now, and the young Vasquez nephew. Tommaso walked across the tiles of his parlour and held out both adorned hands, saying, ‘My dear Nicholas, how I have longed to have time for a talk with you. And Diniz, who has become as close to me as his uncle. What will you find tolerable, do you think? A piece of fine sugar candy? My kitchen knows I have a sweet tooth.’

‘I shouldn’t mind a piece of fat mutton,’ Nicholas said, ‘rolled up with ground maize and an eyeball. Toma, it’s me. Bought any ostriches lately?’

‘I – It’s been so long,’ said Portinari. At first sight, because he wore no jewels, Nicholas looked the same, except that his face was somehow more hollow, and his eyes amazingly direct. Then you recognised the quality of the hat, and the sleeveless tunic, and the gown over it. Tommaso said quickly, ‘We are all so thankful that you came safely back.’

‘Are you?’ said Nicholas, following his gaze. ‘I got the silk off ibn Said in Timbuktu – which reminds me, I’ve got to settle his
debt to you. You may not much like having me back. You’re being a damned fool over the alum.’

‘I beg your pardon?’ Tommaso said. A servant had come into the room. He sent him off, snapping an order.

‘Freely granted,’ said Nicholas. ‘The Pope’s got a lot of good alum, and you want to sell it for him, with no competition and at a fine, high old price.’

‘The money goes to the Church,’ Tommaso said. ‘The Duke has agreed to ban all other alum. Why did you go to Ethiopia if you don’t support the Christian Church? Or, forgive me, try to go. You failed to get there, I hear.’

‘I ran out of candy,’ Nicholas said. ‘The Duke can agree till he’s Ethiopian black in the face, but the merchants will go on taking Turkish alum as well. Myself included.’

It had been a shock. Nevertheless, Tommaso Portinari had met self-made fellows before, with no notion of how to conduct meetings. Wine arrived, and a tray of well-sugared pastries. Portinari said, ‘I do sympathise, of course, with your mixed allegiances. To deal in Timbuktu at all, you had to conform to Muslim beliefs. You must have many Muslim friends now.’

‘Well, the ibn Said brothers,’ Nicholas said. ‘Do you still use Benedetto Dei as well? Or is he a Christian?’