Caprice and Rondo

  This appeared a doubtful blessing. Gelis waited, with hard-tried patience, for Kathi to bring her next letter. When two weeks passed and she did not, Gelis collected Jodi and walked round to see what had happened. Robin answered the door and asked her in, displaying a mixture of embarrassment and high spirits, which were soon explained. She went to see Kathi, but didn’t stay long. On the way home Jodi, who had learned a lot in a year, looked up at his mother severely. ‘Why are you smiling?’

  ‘Because I’ve just had some news. News about Aunty Kathi.’

  ‘She’s going to have another baby next year. I know. Why are you smiling?’ said Jodi. Then, before she could answer, he said, ‘Wee Aunty Bel doesn’t have babies. She can load a hackbut and shoot it.’

  ‘So can I,’ said Gelis unwisely.

  Jodi said, ‘But you could have babies if you wanted to.’

  It was a busy street. People smiled. Gelis said, ‘Well, I don’t want to. I have you. I don’t need any more.’

  ‘You can’t have any more. Papa has gone away and you can’t make them without him. I hope he doesn’t come back,’ Jodi said. He wasn’t crying, but his face was quite red. ‘I don’t want to see him.’

  ‘Well, I’m sure he wants to see you,’ Gelis said. ‘Don’t you think he misses your poems? He hasn’t even seen your new horse. Let’s go to the stables and see him. You might ride with Ser Tommaso’s children tomorrow.’

  That evening, after Jodi was sleeping, Gelis asked Tobie to sit with her in her chamber. The cushioned seats, the light hangings, the tables, all of which had been her choice, looked mellow in the long summer twilight. Outside the open windows, swallows shrilled, and by leaning out, one could look down on Spangnaerts Street, quiet now, the dust of its cobbles printed with the marks of the day’s bootprints and hoof-marks and wheels, either climbing upwards on the way to the Square, or bumping down to the working canal. The canal itself was out of sight: the bridge, the stacked kegs and moored barges concealed by the turns of the narrow street, dark as a canyon between its double row of tall houses. At night, you might hear the ducks quacking. At the top of the street, modest in shadow, the White Bear of Brugge presided from its high niche, listening perhaps to the faint laughter and music which floated from the Society’s windows around it.

  Gelis gave Tobie wine, and he pulled off his cap, so that the weak pink light glowed on his scalp and his short, kittenish mouth and curled nostrils. He did not look like the army surgeon of the Duke of Urbino, accustomed to wielding his saw and mallet and knife in the great bloody tents that followed the cannon. He said, prosaically, ‘So what is wrong? Jodi? If it is about Jodi, you would be better with Clémence.’

  But he listened, and at the end said, ‘No. You were right. This is not about Jodi, it is about Nicholas.’

  ‘It is about them both,’ Gelis said. ‘As he grows, Jodi will deserve some explanation. I don’t wish him to turn against Nicholas. But Nicholas doesn’t write, except about business.’ It was true. Part of the core of me. It was untrue.

  ‘Because he has decided on a clean break from all except business. I happen to think he is right. Are you asking whether you should take Jodi and go to him?’

  ‘Without being invited?’ Gelis said.

  Tobie looked at her. ‘Are you thinking of yourself, or of him? If you have convinced yourself that he wants you or needs you, then go. I suppose you can afford an armed troop to protect you. But don’t take Jodi with you. After all that has happened, that child needs to step into a home, not a trial marriage.’

  She said, ‘I couldn’t leave Jodi.’

  ‘Anna wanted you to go,’ Tobie said. ‘Anna was desperate for you to go, after we had been to Montello.’

  ‘It was Anna who sent us to Montello,’ Gelis said.

  ‘She wanted to help Nicholas, and us. We might have proved his legitimacy. She didn’t know the outcome would oppress him.’

  ‘She gave him Jodi’s poem,’ Gelis said. ‘She’s good for him, but she isn’t as perceptive as Kathi. If he can’t come back, and if it’s not certain whether I could, or would, or should join him, it would be kinder to let him forget. She should allow him time to make his own choice, and send to tell me himself. She is simply causing hurt, otherwise.’

  There was a silence. Her heart beat. Tobie said, ‘I want to say something. Since Julius left, you must have exchanged messages with his company. Friczo Straube in Thorn. The agents in Augsburg and Cologne. When you were with him, they did well. What is the state of his business now?’

  She was silent.

  Tobie said, ‘You don’t want to say it, because Julius proved himself a good manager both here and in Venice. But we know Anna brought him no money. Perhaps she burdened him with considerable debts. And the company obviously hasn’t recovered, although he has been too proud or too vain to tell us. Anna must have had great hopes of the African gold when Kathi told her about it. And Julius thought it important enough to abandon his office to juniors and join her in Caffa. It was a rash thing to do, unless he was fairly sure that Nicholas would use the gold to help him.’

  Gelis drew a deep breath. She kept her voice steady, because it was so important and she was so glad it was in the open.

  ‘Everyone thought it was coming to Caffa last autumn,’ she said. ‘But it didn’t. Nicholas knew, as late as last November, that it was still buried in Cyprus. By January it had gone, but it couldn’t have reached the Crimea through the winter. If Ochoa dug it up, everyone would have to wait until the spring.’

  ‘Ochoa didn’t dig it up,’ Tobie said. ‘A Hanse ship is just in, with some Genoese merchants. They all rushed to their quarter as if reporting the plague, but I heard some waterfront gossip. Everyone knows Ochoa de Marchena. They said the Genoese captured him during the winter, and he was killed trying to escape. There was no mention of gold. And that was in February.’

  ‘Poor, silly Ochoa,’ Gelis said. ‘So David de Salmeton has it, unless Ochoa left it to others to bring for him.’

  ‘But then, Nicholas would have told you,’ Tobie said. ‘There’s something else I want to say. Do you remember the nun you wrote me about? The one we heard of from Thibault de Fleury? His late-born little daughter was fond of her.’

  She remembered. The nun was called Ysabeau, and was sister to Josine, the vicomte’s first wife. She had sent to the address Brother Huon had given her, and then to two other convents. The last one had been a Cistercian foundation in Scotland. She said, ‘We decided not to investigate further.’

  ‘Then you don’t want to hear what I found?’ Tobie said. ‘I was going to keep quiet. But now I’m not sure if I should.’

  ‘You mean I might not have to annul my marriage, because it was never legal in the first place?’ said Gelis with irony. She clasped her hands hard together.

  ‘No,’ said Tobie. ‘No. It has nothing to do with Nicholas’s birth. I hoped this Ysabeau might know something about that, but she only remembered the scandal. Eccles is a very small priory, and the Sister suffers from deafness, but she did tell me something. She remembered Thibault’s daughter Adelina. Blue eyes and red hair: wilful, pretty, intelligent. Walked out on her family with just enough to pay her way into a convent, but was transferred from one to another because of the trouble she gave. Finally parted company with religious life at nineteen, when she disappeared for a month and turned up with a baby, a daughter.’

  ‘A daughter?’ Gelis said.

  It had become dark while they were speaking. The swallows flashed past the window, silhouetted in the moonlight; their shadows flickered inside the room, slashing across the white bed, the unlit brazier, the grim, ghostly features of Tobie. She rose to lift a candle and light it. A daughter. A daughter. Her fingers shook.

  ‘Fourteen years ago,’ Tobie said. ‘So it wasn’t Bonne. And Anna is black-haired, and German. She introduced herself to Julius in Cologne, and Julius adored her on sight. You were there. Then she committed the Graf’s business to Julius, and that brought her in to
uch with the Bank. Nicholas liked her as well. We all did. Kathi thinks she is the sister that Nicholas needs. And that is what matters, even if she is not the person she says she is: even if Moriz can find no trace even to prove she is German. Shall we go on talking?’

  She turned and sat down. ‘There is more?’ According to Kathi, Nicholas had been devastated, afterwards, by what he had caused to happen to Julius. She had been sure, she was still sure, that whomsoever he took to his bed, it would not be Anna.

  Tobie got up, walked to the window, and sneezed. He took out his kerchief and sneezed several times more, blew his nose and then, without asking permission, took the spill and lit all the remaining candles. Then he shuttered the windows, refilled their glasses, and sat and looked at her.

  He said, ‘It’s something about Adelina, Thibault’s daughter. Clémence knows this, but no one else; not even Nicholas. I learned it years ago in Geneva, from Tasse, the little woman who lived near Montello.’

  He stopped. Gelis said, ‘Drink. Don’t tell me, if you don’t want to.’

  ‘No. I must.’ But he drank. Then he resumed. ‘Little Tasse. She was a serving-maid in the house of Jaak de Fleury, the brother of Thibault. She worked there all her life. She remembered Nicholas; you could see that she loved him. She was fond of Julius. She knew Adelina. Even after Adelina had gone, she heard the rumours and she spoke to people who had met her as she moved from one place to another.’ He paused. ‘Tasse didn’t speak of a baby. What she heard was quite different, and she believed it. She said that because of her childhood, Adelina could never have children.’

  ‘Her childhood?’ Gelis said.

  ‘I think,’ Tobie said, ‘that that is all you need to know. But if that rumour is true, then the theory that Adelina had an illegitimate baby is wrong. Whereas Anna did have a child: the Graf’s daughter Bonne.’

  It was hot now. Her eyes stung in the candlelight. Tobie had emptied his glass and was refilling it. Once, she had heard, his drinking had nearly wrecked him, but his discovery of Nicholas had changed that. He had discharged himself from that patient, but was still, out of duty, prescribing for the last of his ailments. It was not likely to drive him to drink: Clémence would see to that. He was making free with it now, because he wanted Gelis to tell him something.

  Gelis said, ‘I don’t know what it all means. I don’t want to know, unless it is going to harm Nicholas. Is it?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tobie said. ‘I don’t even know whether to try to tell him. That’s why I wondered whether you seriously intended to join him.’

  ‘No,’ she said. She had already begun to reach that conclusion. This time, it was firm.

  ‘Then will you write? Or shall I?’

  ‘It might fall into the wrong hands,’ Gelis said. ‘I suppose I could put it in code.’ Her thoughts turned. She said, ‘Would Nicholas have known the nun you met? Ysabeau, Josine’s sister?’

  ‘Josine died before he was born,’ Tobie said. ‘The nun told me that. He never knew his grandmother, or had anything to do with her sister, although Adelina did. He never knew, apparently, that his mother Sophie was a twin. She had a sister.’

  ‘But that is — Nicholas has an aunt?’ Gelis exclaimed. ‘Where? Can we find her?’ And reading his face, she answered herself, ‘No.’

  ‘No,’ Tobie said. ‘The twin was born dead. No witness for the antecedents of Nicholas. If you want to write to Nicholas, I’ve told you all I know’

  Again, the invitation. Again, she refused it. She had begun by worrying over Jodi: about his fatherless future; about the dangers from de Salmeton and Wodman. Now she had another perspective.

  She could not explain, but she could affirm, at least. ‘I love him, you see,’ she said to Tobie. ‘You ought to know that.’

  ‘Do you think I don’t?’ the doctor said.

  The words remained, long after he had gone; after she had lost the chance of asking him what they meant.

  And soon, it hardly mattered.

  IT WAS ROBIN OF BERECROFTS who came to the Bank the next day and, avoiding the bureau, had himself shown to her quarters. She saw his face, and sent Jodi away. ‘Kathi?’ she said.

  His face relaxed, and then tightened. ‘No! Bless you, but no. Gelis —you know of yesterday’s ship, that brought some Genoese merchants from Poland? Tobie told you?’

  ‘They brought news,’ she said. She pushed aside the notes on her desk. They were already encoded.

  ‘Bad news,’ he said. ‘Bad for Genoa; worse for us; worst for you.’

  ‘Then it’s Nicholas,’ Gelis said. Quite slowly, everything came to a halt.

  ‘It isn’t certain,’ he said. ‘Gelis, it may be all right. But Caffa has fallen. The Turkish army landed at the beginning of June and overran Caffa and Soldaia and Gothia: took the whole Crimean Peninsula, and captured or killed every foreigner whom they could reach. No one knows who escaped, but some did. Nicholas would have Julius with him. Anna is clever. If Ludovico da Bologna is also still there, they would have a better chance of survival than most. We don’t know yet, that’s all.’ He was kneeling beside her, his warm hands around hers.

  Gelis gazed at him. The beginning of June. Three months ago. No wonder she had had no further messages. No wonder Nicholas had not sensed de Salmeton’s attempt to seize Jodi; had not apparently followed the move from Scotland to Bruges, or anything that had happened since. He was dead.

  Then she thought: I would know.

  She said, ‘Can I go and find out?’

  Robin’s face was full of pity and pain. He said, ‘The Crimea is full of Ottoman soldiers. No one can get in. The news came through Moldavia. Of course, there will be formal representations: Genoa and the Pope will send diplomats, especially if the Patriarch is still there.’ He stopped and said, ‘I wanted to go, but they made me see that it would be useless. It’s over. We killed him. We killed him by turning him out.’

  She could not see his face now. He had come to comfort her, but instead, she felt his tears fall on her hands. She said, ‘He’s alive. Robin, I know.’

  He looked up then, with a guarded hope that she, too, had briefly felt. They talked, and when in the end she sent him away, he was half convinced that Nicholas might indeed be alive. She was, sure of it. It had given her comfort, too, until she remembered who might be with him.

  She must tell Tobie and the rest. She sat for a long time, without weeping, before she rose and picked up the notes from her desk to tear them into small pieces. There was no point, now, in completing them. Now, no warnings could pass, either way.

  Chapter 32

  THAT AUGUST, Nicholas de Fleury was alive simply because he had not yet got himself back into Caffa.

  A boat had to be found to take him, with Julius. And once found, it had to be bought, since no one would lease or charter a vessel which would certainly never return. It was, astonishingly, Ludovico da Bologna who bade Orazio open the rat-trap of his purse and help buy it, and his acquaintances from the Greek Christian community who found local fishermen who would crew it, provided that they sailed it one way, and thereafter kept the boat itself as their fee. They would land two crazy Franks on the coast, but they weren’t going to wait for them.

  Rosso, the Muscovite envoy, paid no attention, being deep in his own dogged plans to leave the Black Sea and find another safe route north to Moscow. Contarini, having begged to go with him, gasped with horror when told his itinerary and took to his bed, overcome by what he feared was the plague, but which might have been simply a bad attack of the flux.

  Ludovico da Bologna, having hitherto kept the party safely together by his bullying, now made a number of simple, efficient plans, and departed from Fasso before anybody. To the Venetian envoy’s accusing shrieks, he had merely stated that it was time for each of them to care for his own safety. With him, he carried Uzum Hasan’s envoy, loaded with presents for Charles of Burgundy, in recognition of the Duke’s unremitting attention to the struggle against the Turk in the Levant.


  The Patriarch was travelling home by way of Moscow, as was Rosso. Only, unlike Rosso, Ludovico da Bologna was taking a route twice as dangerous, for which there were no guides, and which would have been impossible for anyone without prior knowledge. The Patriarch was travelling by boat and by horse up the eastern coast of the Black Sea, where the cliffs grudgingly gave way now and then to the shore, and the small mixed communities harboured Christians from the Patriarch’s strange, far-flung parish. It would bring him, in the end, to the river which would launch him towards Moscow. It would also bring him to the Straits of Kerch, the doorway to the Sea of Azov, and the one safe crossing which fleeing refugees from the Crimea might use. That summer, the eastern shore of the Black Sea was where penniless bands of Genoese and Venetians would be in need of succour.

  ‘He might find Anna!’ Julius had said; but Nicholas thought it unlikely. The Genoese who were Anna’s patrons would have been the first to be captured or killed. She was not a part of the working community of Caffa, which, given a chance, would know where to go. In any case, from what he heard, not many had been given a chance. The same was true, of course, of the Russians; and of the imam Ibrahiim who, to some Turks, represented the Sultan Qayt Bey more than he represented Allah.

  The voyage, when it came, was one of the worst Nicholas ever remembered. The Black Sea, over five hundred miles from east to west, made its own storms, even in August, and was known as a graveyard of vessels. They worked the ship, stripped to their dark Turkish breeches, and the rest of the time slept exhausted in corners; he and Julius hardly spoke. On the first day, when the enormity of what had happened smote them in Fasso, Julius had looked up at Nicholas eventually and said, ‘The gold. I suppose this is the end of the gold. If it came, the Turks have it. And the furs.’

  And Nicholas had said, ‘You have lost the furs, certainly. As for the gold, it may have turned back, if the carrier saw what had happened in time.’ And then, as Julius’s sceptical gaze darkened, Nicholas had said, ‘No. I suppose it has gone.’