‘What concessions should we extract from this new Tudun Karaï Mirza? If he ate off skins, Anna must have found him amusing.’
Then: ‘Who is this imam Ibrahiim you made Anna listen to: some black friend of Umar’s? What happened to Brother Lorenzo? How much gold exactly do you think there will be?’
And, as it finally occurred to him one day: ‘How do you propose to get into Caffa, considering that the Genoese threw you out?’
He could give Julius the answer to that one at least. If Contarini could get in, then he could. There was still a Venetian consul who would hide them until he could construct a new identity.
At some such point, tiring of the inquisition, Nicholas would ride off to the two Persian envoys, with whom he was attempting to make friends. They were both scared, and therefore defensive. One of them, on his way to Moscow with Rosso, he would never see again. Or so he prayed. The other was going to the Duke of Burgundy, and would meet at least someone Nicholas knew.
He had been waiting for Julius to mention Gelis and he did, the day before they were due to arrive on the shores of the Black Sea at last. It was four weeks to the day since they had left Barbaro and Uzum Hasan, and had plunged into a world of isolated monasteries and unfriendly alien towns. In Fasso, there would be shipping, and news.
There would also be Genoese. Coming south, Contarini’s small party had escaped notice by merging with the twilight Latin community: Venetians who had turned Muslim and Genoese who had made local marriages. He and Rosso proposed to perform the last stage of the journey with their companions by boat, and make for Contarini’s last lodging, at the house of a Circassian called Marta. The Patriarch, Julius and Nicholas, unobtrusive in western dress, set off to the same destination with their guides and servants by horse. It was hotter, but offered some escape, it was said, from the gnats. Sheltering under a lone tree at noon, chewing crusts and spooning down millet paste in a vortex of feathery insects, the travellers were inclined to doubt this. Julius, whose growing cheerfulness nothing could shake, tended a choking smudge fire, and rallied Nicholas when they were alone. ‘Don’t complain. At least you’re not in the boat getting swamp fever. I don’t want you sick yet. Not until you’re made us all rich at Caffa.’
For a day he had talked of nothing but Caffa, questioning Nicholas again and again about details. He asked how Anna looked when Nicholas had seen her last: how she wore her hair, what gowns she had had made. It was as if the scene in Tabriz had never taken place, obliterated by the present prospect of joy. Caffa was there, within reach, a short journey over the sea, and all Julius’s hopes and desires leaped towards it. He smiled, and said, ‘You sneer at my singing, but now you know what Anna can do. She said she’d made some music for Jodi.’
Nicholas had already stopped trying to eat. He said, ‘It was charming. I remember.’ He started to rise.
Julius put a hand on his arm. ‘No. I want to say this. You know Gelis visited Bonne, and talked about Jodi and marriage? If she is happy, and you still agree, it would make the best of all we are doing. The Patriarch thinks so as well. And as for old Thibault, it doesn’t matter.’
‘Thibault?’ Nicholas said. He ceased to move.
‘Gelis went to see him in Montello, didn’t she? After Anna and Kathi suggested it. Anna wrote that you were upset, and I’m sorry. But I thought you wouldn’t mind knowing the truth.’
‘Do I know the truth?’ Nicholas said.
Another man would have looked embarrassed: Julius displayed impatience. ‘Well, you don’t seem to be legitimate; not unless the tale of twins can be proved. And the old man held out no hope of that, from what I hear. Who would have thought he was shamming, the devil?’
The gnats sang and buzzed round his head, high as reeds: like an organ, like bagpipes inflating, or deflating. (De cop de cotel/Fu sa muse perchie.)
‘I don’t think he was. Pretending,’ Nicholas said.
‘He let all that happen to you?’
‘He was ill, then. When he could, he tried to do something. He didn’t wish harm to me, or Adelina. I pity him. Fate was more cruel to him than to us.’
‘Fate was better to you than Adelina,’ Julius said. ‘Wherever she is, she suffered three years of hell.’
‘One,’ Nicholas said. ‘She went to a convent.’ The gnats wailed. He looked up.
‘You were told she went to a convent,’ Julius said. ‘I found out later. She went to a house Jaak had outside Geneva. He used to spend the night there.’
‘Until she was eight,’ Nicholas said very slowly. His grandfather’s letter had said so. He added, ‘I didn’t know’ That emerged slowly, too. The black oil of Baku: turgid; choking; inflammable.
‘Why should you?’ Julius said. ‘You were a boy. You knew nothing of that.’
He was waiting. Nicholas knew it; knew why; knew what he ought to say, but could not. He drew together all his forces, and spoke. ‘I don’t look back. All those people are dead, and those who are alive don’t deserve blame, or are not worth troubling over. You have a happy life now. So have I, near enough.’
‘I wonder if Adelina has,’ Julius said. ‘Gelis is trying to find her.’ He rose, and stretched, and stood smiling. ‘But what’s that to us? Are you going to sit there all day? We are going to Caffa!’
Cibalala du riaus du riaus
Cibalala durie.
IN FASSO, there was shipping, and news. The hibernation, the isolation, the incubation was over; the odyssey which had started in March was ending now, in the last days of July, its adventurers alive, unharmed, ready to take their place again in the busy highways washed by the sea.
Their guide discovered the Circassian’s house, but no one within it to greet them. Inside, they found familiar baggage. Contarini and Rosso had arrived, so it seemed, and gone out. Julius, too eager to wait, strode off to find them. The Patriarch, who was expected elsewhere, decided to linger. Brother Orazio and the servants went off, leaving Nicholas and Father Ludovico together. The Patriarch said, ‘Are you not eager, also, for news?’
‘No,’ said Nicholas.
‘Because you fear for your friends? The lord Uzum Hasan, if the Turkish fleet has passed down the coast and its armies are invading his country? Or Brother Lorenzo and his fellows on Crete, where the monks of Mount Sinai have a monastery? Or does everything seem uninteresting to you but the pleasures of returning to Caffa?’
‘You do not want to hear my troubles,’ Nicholas said.
‘I don’t ask to hear your troubles, you fool,’ the Patriarch said. ‘I ask about your hopes.’
‘They are the same thing,’ Nicholas said.
Soon after that, they heard the sound of running footsteps, and calling. The Venetian ambassador would never run, although they heard his shrill voice in the clamour; Rosso’s grating tones also. But it was Julius who burst in through the door and stood gasping against it, his high-boned face smeared with tears, and mucus, and sweat. And it was Julius who uttered the news.
‘We can’t join Anna in Caffa. There is no Caffa. There hasn’t been for seven weeks. The Turkish fleet wasn’t going to Crete; it was coming to the Crimea. It landed its guns, and its armies, and mastered it all. The Peninsula is a graveyard; every foreigner killed or enslaved; every town, every fortress demolished. And none of us was there.’
The Patriarch’s hand closed on his crucifix. He said, ‘Do you think we could have stopped it? Is there any news of your wife?’
Nicholas shut his eyes.
Julius said, ‘How could there be? At best, she’ll be in some — some Turkish hothouse.’ He choked.
‘Perhaps not,’ Nicholas said. He did not entirely believe what he was saying. Women generally received the fate Julius feared. He understood all Julius felt about Anna mainly because he felt it himself, about some stubborn Russians who would not heed advice, and a great Cairene teacher who, whatever threatened, would not abandon his flock. He said, ‘You might find her.’
Julius had become very still. He said, ‘Then I
am going to Caffa.’
‘You can’t,’ said Rosso. It was contemptuous.
‘I can. I will,’ Julius said. He had quietened; looking at no one; preoccupied with his thoughts.
There was a space. The Patriarch looked at Nicholas, saying nothing.
Nicholas said, ‘Then I go with you. For if Anna has escaped, I know where to find her.’
Chapter 30
PLUNGED INTO ITS OWN summer wars, the West did not hear of the shocking events in the Levant until the end of the season. When Venice relayed the warning that something nasty was brewing in retaliation for the Turkish defeat in Moldavia, Caffa had already fallen. No one knew it. The Black Sea, now a Turkish lake, let nothing leak out in summer but anchovies. And even if it had, nothing would have been done about it. Among the Christian nations that summer there were few issues as important — how could there be? — as the King of England’s invasion of France. The better-known pirates, in particular, were flocking to Gascony.
Gelis, now a military veteran, found a macabre enjoyment in sharing with John le Grant the army’s screaming exasperation with Charles of Burgundy: his addiction to Neuss and his escalating conflicts with the Swiss which continued even when the Emperor marched into Cologne in March, and young Duke René of Lorraine decided to change sides in May. That said, it all increased the Bank’s profit and kept Gelis occupied. Unlike others she could name, she and Diniz in Bruges kept strict control of the Bank’s response to its increasing opportunities. It was firmly in Burgundian favour, but not over-extended. The damage done by Nicholas was almost repaired.
She tried not to think of him, or of the letter he had promised to send about an enterprise of which she had heard nothing more. As far as she knew, Nicholas was still in Caffa with Anna and now, presumably, Julius. From Julius and Anna, returning, the Bank could no doubt expect some news; but not before the end of the summer. Then, of course, there would arise this proposed betrothal between Jodi and Bonne.
She still could not understand it. Nor, she knew, could John. He talked of Nicholas now and then, usually when reminded by some unfortunate event on the battlefield. She had not realised, until then, how much fighting the two men had seen together, dovetailing their skills: setting traps for the Turks at Trebizond; mining, tunnelling, designing, casting cannon. Guns required numeracy; so did navigation, and hydraulics, and toys. She heard about their mechanical elephant, and the carnival at Florence where they met. Nicholas had come hunting for the engineer who had almost saved Constantinople, and John had been with him, more or less, ever since.
‘And come to regret it,’ Gelis said; and he had nodded.
‘He’s a wrecker. I told you. And an innocent at the same time, what’s worse.’
‘An innocent!’ Gelis had said; and he had looked at her, russet brows raised.
‘You didn’t see him at Trebizond. Not just in retrieving that silly wee bitch from Doria, but plunging into hopeless dilemmas. Which to rescue; which to kill; which to betray. Good and bad, right and wrong; duty; loyalty. In the Tyrol as well. And in Cyprus.’ He broke off and said, ‘I bubbled, myself, at Famagusta. You don’t know a man until you know what makes him greet. An innocent. No grasp of reality.’
‘He saved your life,’ she said. Astorre had said that.
‘Oh, aye. As Julius saved his. We made a good team.’
It was only later that she discovered that the silly wee bitch was Catherine de Charetty, the younger sister in Bruges who was going to marry her own second cousin. It was very much later that she found out what le Grant had meant about Famagusta. It had nothing to do with her sister, who had died there, but she was charitable enough to suppose that Nicholas had been affected by that as well.
She had not seen Nicholas in Trebizond, but she had watched him in Africa, where a simple voyage for profit had also turned into a trial of character and a testing-place for beliefs. She understood, for the first time, what John le Grant might mean by innocent; and, not for the first time, how alike he and Nicholas were. She had begun to realise, ever since Edinburgh, that these men and women were Nicholas’s family, as much as she or Jodi or Marian de Charetty could ever be or have been. And she realised that the act by which he had divorced himself from them was wholly hapless.
Nicholas had ruined his own life for nothing; because of a simple refusal to school his own talents, and a level of undiluted physical energy that made him excessively hard to control. Only Kathi, sometimes, had been able to manage that. And of course she herself had a key, but had vowed not to apply it. Passion was not enough, as her sister would have discovered. The question was … The question increasingly was, whether it was better than nothing.
As April approached, it seemed to Gelis that she had been separated from her son for long enough. She wrote to Scotland, asking with affection after the infant Margaret of Berecrofts, and enquiring what her parents’ plans might be for the summer. She also wrote to Clémence de Coulanges, in the friendly, easier terms that befitted her altered relationship with the future wife of Dr Tobie, and asked for her news, and her advice.
At that time, it seemed to Gelis that Jodi was safer in Scotland than within reach of the cannons of France. She had a journey to make, and a letter to wait for. Then she would go to Scotland.
IN ROME, packed with the Easter pilgrims of a jubilee year, the name of Nicholas de Fleury had begun to irritate Anselm Adorne’s eldest son, a lawyer in clerical orders in the household of Cardinal Hugonet. Jan Adorne, who was thirty, had known de Fleury from boyhood and already despised him as a jumped-up apprentice, even before the present ceaseless reports of de Fleury’s doings in Poland, linked as they were to the dismissal of Jan’s own father. First, prominent at every Roman reception, there appeared a Persian mission led by Caterino Zeno the Venetian diplomat, who had advanced de Fleury money, it seemed, to help take his own father’s place. Then came further tales of de Fleury’s friendship with the Queen of Poland and the traitor Buonaccorsi, related by his father’s friend Cardinal Barbo, the papal legate to Poland.
The saga even continued in Naples, where Jan Adorne found himself on both papal and Burgundian affairs, since his master was brother to Hugonet, the Duke of Burgundy’s Chancellor. The Duke wanted soldiers, and had sent the Grand Bastard his brother to pick up a mercenary army under the nose of the Pope. It would be awkward, of course, since the army was intended to fight the Holy Roman Emperor, not the Turk. The Duke trusted his brother to explain that Burgundy was already opposing the Turk by sending to the court of Uzum Hasan the worthy Patriarch Ludovico da Bologna, and the excellent Nicholas de Fleury the banker, whose former partners in Bruges and at Neuss were so ably assisting the Duke. The Duke trusted that if, as a consequence, Uzum Hasan were to march on the Turk, due honour would be paid to these two intrepid men.
Jan’s noble Genoese blood boiled. Someone said (at the reception that followed), ‘Any such honour was deserved, of course, by your father. The Mission should have been his. I cannot understand why Lord Cortachy was recalled.’
‘Venetian jealousy,’ Jan Adorne said. He could only have said it to someone else of Genoese extraction. This was Prosper Schiaffino de Camulio de’ Medici, once the peppery Milanese envoy to France, whose Camogli ancestors had exercised their fishing skills close to Tana, and who knew all about Venetian jealousy. Jan turned fully, and gave the man a smile. Beside Camulio, he now saw, was a courtier of quite another kind: a man whose beauty of feature and hair quite overcame his lack of height, and whose lustrous eyes, dwelling on Jan, caused Jan’s smile to widen quite naturally.
‘Ah, Venice!’ the stranger said, casting a glance, half affectionate, half comical at his companion Camulio. ‘At least in Scotland you will be free of her.’
Jan Adorne, changing his smile, turned his gaze back to the Genoese. ‘I should have congratulated you! They have extended your remit! Papal notary, collector for the Apostolic Camera and nuncio of the Pope in England, Ireland and Scotland! My father will be ravished!’ He kept his
smile in place. His father, no admirer of Pope Sixtus, was not likely to be entranced by the appearance in Scotland of Camulio, a middle-aged protégé of the Pope’s nephew.
‘And so will the Pope’s dear Giuliano,’ observed the beautiful stranger gravely from behind. ‘But not enough, I fear, to send Prosper so far from his side. Fortunately for me, it seems that I may act for him as his business adviser. I hope to be in Scotland by June. I may even be fortunate enough to meet your dear father pursuing his duties. Or your cousins, Sersanders and Katelijne. Or even the wife and son of poor Nicholas de Fleury who, I hear, is pursuing some dreary task in the Levant.’
Jan gazed at him, reddening. ‘I am sorry …?’
‘My dear Jan, why should you remember your visit to Cairo, exalted as you now are in the heart of the Christian world? My name is David de Salmeton, formerly of the Vatachino. David de Salmeton, adviser to the Collector for the Apostolic Camera in Scotland, our mutual friend Prosper. Is it not delightful? Would Nicholas not be enchanted, if he knew?’
That night, Jan Adorne wrote to his father.
I’m sure you remember de Salmeton. I can tell you at least he is rich: I have seen the palazzo he lives in, and he spends, they say, like a prince. Do I remember that Kathi didn’t like him? She’d better change her mind now that she’s married a Berecrofts. A man with the ear of the Curia can make or break a merchant firm like her husband’s.
That letter went off in April and reached Anselm Adorne in June, at the height of the solemn Masses, the rich processions, the extravagant banquets staged at Neuss by the Duke and the Emperor (without Nicholas de Fleury), to celebrate the end of the war and the siege. Adorne attended them without joy. Time, lives, and a hundred thousand florins of Burgundian money had been squandered on fruitless campaigns which had lapsed only because France had entered the field once again, and England was demanding attention.