The Unicorn Hunt (100 page)

‘Coming,’ said Tobie. The word, or its echoes, sobered the lawyer. He looked at Tobie and John, and saw a warning. Later, the three of them met.

Shutting the door: ‘It’s Gelis, I assume,’ said Gregorio. ‘We know she travelled part of the way south with Adorne, and for a while she was thought to be dead.’

‘She came to Egypt,’ said John le Grant. He cleared his throat. ‘There was trouble in Cairo, and she found her way to Mount Sinai. We don’t know where she went after that. But she’s supposed to be coming to Venice when Nicholas does. You don’t know where she is?’

‘She moves about,’ Gregorio said. ‘She’s been in Genoa. She writes to her family. Every now and then she disappears, or perhaps she just wants some privacy.’

‘And the child?’ Tobie said.

‘I don’t know,’ Gregorio said. ‘No one, not even Margot, knows where it is now, or if it’s alive. And I have no information about it. Margot made a promise to Gelis, and nothing that I know of would make her break it.’

He left presently, being tired from the journey, and Tobie sat for a while in silence with John.

It seemed, although no one had spoken, that something had been said. John said, ‘I think you should do it. You know what Gelis made him go through. Margot would listen.’ After a while he said, ‘She was married once, wasn’t she?’

‘He is dead,’ Tobie said. ‘She never lived with him.’

‘But Margot has been free ever since? Do you know why she hasn’t married Gregorio?’

‘Yes,’ said Tobie. ‘She consulted me.’

John’s freckled face with its white chin was intent. ‘It’s a medical matter?’

‘It’s private to them,’ Tobie said. ‘But it has a bearing. There is deformity in Margot’s family. Some are born normal; some are brutes. Every generation suffers from it, and they all know, as she does, how to nurse the afflicted. That is between you and me.’

John said, ‘Does Nicholas know?’

‘No,’ said Tobie.

After a while Tobie said, ‘I shall go and see her. But if she agrees, we should have to tell Gregorio.’

Then it was February, and they were all there, in Venice. Few of them would recognise all the threads which had brought them there. Most of them were aware, now, of the kind of calendar of which they were part, although they might not have counted the stages. The sixth, which had started in Cairo, had brought the game, lure by lure, to one field.

In the north, soon, another hunt, another season would open. It was time that this one was called home.

Part V

THE PRISE

Chapter 47

N
ICHOLAS DE FLEURY
arrived last in Venice, with no more ceremony than, say, a ducal chancellor performing his annual audits. The boat went to the mainland to collect him, since he had given the precise time of his arrival: communications had never ceased flowing between himself and the Bank. He had with him the small household he had collected to look after his personal needs, and he had asked for no one to meet him but a clerk with a box of the most recent papers.

He read them through sitting under the hood on the misty voyage to the collection of islands that called itself Venice. His small staff, mostly Catalonian, stood huddled in the open air, talking in low voices as the Grand Canal opened before them. He proposed keeping them with him.

By the time he stepped ashore at the Ca’ Niccolò, he had added the news of the last few days to what he already understood of events in the ten months since he was last in Venice, and the five since he had departed from Cyprus.

That much was essential. What was also essential was a sense, impossible to obtain at a distance, of shifts of balance less quantifiable. He gave his mind to it now, accomplishing, swiftly, his practised patron’s arrival into his Bank.

The six he wanted were there: Gregorio and Julius, Tobie and John, Cristoffels and Father Moriz. Margot had come with Gregorio, but was off on some woman’s business. Diniz had been left to manage Bruges, but had given his willing consent to the investment of the gold that should have been his. One supposed that investment was the word.

And Astorre, of course, had been forbidden to leave the Duke’s camp, which was perfectly sensible. He would have sent him back himself, had he come.

He had summoned no one from Scotland but had had notified Antonio Cavalli in the Tyrol who had set out at once, he was told. Naturally. Cavalli was a Venetian: the Palazzo Cavalli was not all that far from the Banco di Niccolò. Or he might lodge at the Fondaco dei Tedeschi. That was close to where the Scots usually stayed.

Nicholas knew, from those who were watching Adorne, that the Baron was travelling north with his son and his niece. Why the girl was coming he could not imagine, unless van de Walle and Reyphin, both continuing home, had been considered inadequate chaperones.

Adorne could not, of course, hurry home without getting mixed up in politics. And Duke Charles would not now be much interested in his reports, although the merchants of Bruges certainly would. As for King James – the other King James – he would have to whistle, one supposed, for his Book.

Well, men whistled. Nicholas called his six executives together and informed them of his reading of what the Bank would be asked for and what they could provide as part of a strategic plan against the Grand Turk. He heard their comments. He asked Julius to give his interpretation of the Signoria’s thinking; and then added his own estimate of what the Turcoman and Karaman rulers, the Knights of Rhodes, the Mameluke Sultan and the King of Cyprus (
bien plaintive de tous biens
) could offer, and the degrees in which they could be helped. He then set all that against the Bank’s other business and resources and passed round some fresh calculations. He did not talk of the war in the West. Their minds on the East, no one queried it.

Gregorio said, ‘You anticipate difficulty with the Knights of Rhodes. With Genoese interests.’

‘Anselm Adorne is on his way,’ Nicholas said. ‘The Knights went so far as to exclude him from their discussions on Rhodes, but I suspect he guesses they are coming to Venice: even that this time he might catch Uzum’s envoys. I fancy he also realises that if we help Uzum Hasan overrun these particular Ottoman lands, Venice will end up with all the former Genoese alum and perhaps even the mastic. As well as all the usual trade in silk and jewels and scents and rhubarb roots and beautiful women.’

‘You mean that we shall,’ said Julius.

‘If we choose to favour Persia, yes,’ Nicholas said.

‘And the Genoese?’ Gregorio persisted.

‘They have a base on the Black Sea called Caffa,’ Nicholas said. ‘Ludovico da Bologna has just gone there. He may get back in time
to explain, with diagrams, how Caffa deserves to be protected. It won’t help Adorne or the Vatachino, but it will placate the Genoese among the Knights and even in Genoa. So when are the Persian envoys due to arrive?’

‘We think in eight days,’ Julius said. ‘The Knights sent them in a squadron of galleys from Rhodes. The word is that they should come by next Thursday, take a day or so to recover, receive some attention, and then meet ourselves and the Senate on the Monday before Lent begins. So we have to know what we’re doing before then.’

‘It shouldn’t be impossible,’ Nicholas said. ‘I grant you we have a lot of ground to cover. And as we cover it, it might be as well to start some quiet talks with some of the Senators. Julius, Cefo? You know which ones, and when I should see them. It would be nice to meet the Knights and the Persians with something already understood. Gregorio?’

‘It would be sensible,’ Gregorio said.

‘I thought you were sleeping,’ said Nicholas. ‘Perhaps it has gone on rather long. There’s a lot to do. The same time tomorrow?’

‘And that’s what happens when you climb to the top of Mount Sinai,’ Julius said. ‘You come down with a lot of commandments.’

‘I know. He didn’t notice the balloons,’ Tobie said.

Julius made a grimace of good-humoured acknowledgement and flung himself down. ‘Well, it
is
Carnival-time.’

Tobie said, ‘Oh, come on. There are two weeks of it left. I’m sure you’ll manage some of your banquets and balls.’ He stooped and picked up Julius’s hand, with all the rings on it. Having examined it, he let it drop back.

‘Mind you, I don’t understand the Serenissima’s serenity. By all accounts they were cutting their throats after Negroponte – bringing the Captain-General home in chains hardly helped. All their credit and glory departed; nothing left in the East but Crete and a few bits of islands, and the Duke of Milan about to march over here, and deprive them of Crema and Brescia. What are they having a Carnival for?’

‘Because Moses de Reedy is going to take care of it all,’ Julius said. ‘Or he will, if all goes well at the conference. What do you mean, what are they having a Carnival for? It’s Carnival-time.’

‘Then I’d better go and put my funny face on,’ observed Tobie with acidity; and went to find his fellow conspirators.

John was with Gregorio, who appeared sunk in doubt. ‘I don’t
think you should tell Nicholas what we’ve done. He hasn’t asked, anyway.’

‘Don’t you look at his face? He doesn’t need to ask, he divines,’ Tobie said. ‘He knows Gelis isn’t here. She doesn’t have to come until after the meeting. The morning after. That was the pact with the Patriarch.’

‘So she won’t do anything until after the conference is held,’ Gregorio said. ‘So don’t tell him.’

‘I don’t see why not,’ said John le Grant. ‘The way he is now, he’d hardly register a small thing like a family.’

‘The way he is now,’ Tobie said, ‘he’d fly apart like a spring-loaded shield. Wait for ten days. Wait till after we’ve seen Hadji Mehmet and the Knights and the Senate and it’s all resolved, one way or another.’

Five days after that, in a downpour, Anselm Adorne, Baron Cortachy, made a consciously impressive arrival by hired boat from Chioggia and put up with friends at the Ca’ Giustinian on the Grand Canal, since the rooms of the Knights of St John were already spoken for. With him was his promising son Jan, shortly to join the papal household, and his niece Katelijne Sersanders.

Two days after that, on a Wednesday, his niece took a hired maid and a page, and had herself poled across the Canal to the large, square building, fronted with mooring posts, which everyone referred to as the Ca’ Niccolò.

She wore a cloak and gown from Rome and a mask she had bought in Ferrara after she had begun to suspect what Venice was going to be like. She knew already that the buildings would be more refined and highly decorated than in Bruges, and that its network of waterways was infinitely more splendid and dense, and that the Carnival would be more aristocratic than the ones she was used to.

It had occurred to her that her uncle’s patron James, King of Scotland, would probably rather have an account of the Carnival than a blow-by-blow description of the Tomb of Lazarus, but she had been wise enough not to suggest it. She sat with her gaze fixed away from her gondolier, whose lissom body was unclothed from the waist downwards except by coloured hose, and whose eyes, beneath his feathered cap, kept sliding sideways in the manner depicted, for different reasons, in ikons.

Up till now, similarities to Egypt rather than Bruges had kept coming to mind: the pattern of moving light on the underside of bridges and the wind-patterns of sand; the ranges of structures
inlaid and banded with white and gnarled with protuberances like the mountains of Sinai. Water, swollen and flooding, coursed through the canals like an animal; like the water released at the Abundance. Even the pillared magnificence of the Doge’s Palace, glimpsed from afar, had the look of a woven reed village, its cabins on stilts.

But she was in Venice, not Sinai. She stepped ashore with her suite and, treading over a mat of coiled streamers, entered the marble halls of the Banco di Niccolò.

She had to wait. A page brought her a posy of flowers, and another brought her a concoction of fruit juice and offered to look after her attendants. A third finally took her up a grand staircase from which she glimpsed rooms filled with tables and clerks. They all looked frayed. M. de Fleury, when she was shown into his room, displayed all the unforced composure of a spinning top which has picked its own speed. He seemed pleased: her visit had coincided, perhaps, with a statutory restorative break. ‘
Salve virgo Kaiherina
’ he said, offering her a seat.

The beard had gone, allowing him the use of one or both dimples. The incandescence of the journey to Cyprus had also gone. They had not met since the evening in the royal Palace at Nicosia:
Je prens d’Amour noriture
, followed by his departure. Whatever he had wanted other than gold, he had not got, or kept it. She said, ‘About Jan,’ since he had, as it were, introduced the subject.

He poured two goblets of wine and kept one. Nicosia had changed that, too, she had noticed. ‘No. First, about you,’ he said. ‘I was sorry not to visit you at the Clares. Was it tedious?’

‘They were very garrulous,’ Kathi said. ‘They talked about other guests they had had, and showed me something of Cyprus. The Monastery of Cats. Kouklia. Famagusta. They are extremely well endowed by the King’s mother. About Jan. He’s fond of his father. He can be silly.’

He sat down, the cup in his hand. ‘Oh dear,’ he said. The remark might have applied to part or to all of her speech. He added, ‘I thought Jan had been offered a post in the Apostolic Threshold.
Seriously
silly?’

‘Not enough to kill anyone,’ Katelijne said. ‘But extremely eager to return any recent blows to the family pride. I suppose, too, that this is a time when the lords of the night watch are off duty.’

‘ “During Carnival, all jokes are acceptable,” ’ he quoted mildly, and drank, thinking. Then he smiled and looked up. ‘Thank you. The warning is noted. So what about the
Relazione
, the Great Book? Is it finished?’

She took a gulp of her wine. It was strong. She said, ‘I’ve seen the last words: Conclusio Peroptima et Salubris, Amen. I think that’s all he’s written, apart from the beginning. But he’s headed it up with his father’s name and all his titles and most of the four orders of chivalry.’