Caprice and Rondo
‘It sailed under a Burgundian flag,’ Adorne said. He recited it, as if she were a jury. ‘It had been Italian-built, with its consort, to go on Pope Pius’s Crusade, and when Pius died, the Medici leased the two ships from the Duke, who had not paid for them yet. This voyage was one of their regular trips between Pisa and Flanders. Both ships had a Florentine crew: one was captained by a Strozzi, and one by a Tedaldi. They left Flanders freighted for Florence, but also intending to stop at Southampton to pick up English wool, and to sell a consignment of alum from Tolfa worth forty thousand gold florins. Because the Hanse towns were at war with England —’
‘In reprisal for their unlicensed fishing in Iceland,’ Kathi said.
‘— in reprisal for Iceland, I agree. Because there was a war, Paúel Benecke and his Saint Pierre de Rochelle —’
‘His Peter von Danzig,’ Kathi said. ‘Or Das Grosse Kraweel, if you prefer. It’s outside the window.’
‘I have seen it. It carries over three hundred men. It intercepted the Burgundian ships and boarded the San Matteo, killing thirteen Florentines and wounding a hundred before making off with its whole cargo, including all that intended for Italy. The cargo has now been divided up and sold, despite Tommaso’s appeals at Hamburg and Utrecht, despite the promises made to the Duke that none of the Hanse cities would handle it. They all have.’
‘And the Peter’s owners and crew all got shares of the booty,’ Kathi said. ‘Their daughters are expecting fine dowries. Paúel Benecke made himself a fortune, but the ship wasn’t his.’
‘Of course not. He did the killing. He’s disappeared. The men who did own the ship were a syndicate from the Confrérie of St George. Valandt and Niederhof and Sidinghusen. Three of the very gentlemen who are attending the Town Hall and entertaining us so very pleasantly at the Artushof. Who are proposing, if I am not mistaken, to continue to delay us without profit, even though I have letters to present to the King, and every day the year is advancing … They make no bones about admitting what happened. It was justified: it was an act of legitimate war; the San Matteo was in English waters; if anyone is to blame, it is the English. They even admit to the two altar-pieces.’
‘Tommaso’s is at Oliva abbey,’ Kathi said. ‘You wouldn’t get in, but they might let me see it, if you wanted.’
‘Is it? How do you know?’ Her uncle stopped pacing.
Kathi said, ‘I thought I had a lot to tell you, but you seem to know it all. I’ve been with Paúel Benecke’s daughter all afternoon.’
‘Kathi?’ Robin said. She had felt his eyes on her, anxiously, throughout the recital.
Adorne said, ‘You’ve …? My dear, I am sorry. I have been thoughtless. Sit down. Tell us what has happened.’ He took her to a chair, and sat down beside her. ‘Now.’
She began with the conclusion, which was all that mattered. ‘Elzbiete, Benecke’s daughter, thought she knew where he was, and we looked for him. Nicholas has been with him all winter, and she thought I should find them together. But as you already know, Benecke has gone, and Nicholas with him.’
‘Where?’ Robin said.
She shook her head.
‘Why?’ her uncle said. ‘I should have thought Nicholas would brazen it out. Unless he thought that I, like himself, would break my promise. There are two Scots ships in the Mottlau, and plenty of traders in Danzig.’
She did not answer. She knew that. One of the chief events of the deadening, deafening misery of the afternoon had been Elzbiete’s insistence on visiting the Dominican church of St Nicholas, its ancient red brick visible from the shuddering ground where eighteen millstones thundered beneath the half-open book that was the roof of the Knights’ mighty legacy. The Knights might have been banished, their castles razed, their trade usurped, but what remained, as with Rome, as with all the great military societies, was the skeleton, still intact, of their efficiency, evidenced in the voices and eyes of the councillors who had dealt smilingly with Anselm Adorne that afternoon. Three generations ago, a Walter van Niederhof had been one of the best overseas agents of the Teutonic Knights; as a Henry von Allen had factored for them in France. The Knights had gone, but the trade of Danzig was still in practised hands.
Paúel Benecke had not been in the Order’s great mill, although they had searched all seven storeys for him. Nicholas, of course, might frequent the church of his name — except that she discovered, too late, that this was the church of the Blackfriars commonly used by the Scots, who possessed here their own special altar. She had said, ‘Elzbiete, I’m sorry. M. de Fleury would not have come here.’
At which a priest, turning round, had said, ‘You speak of Colà? Why, Fräulein, we know him well: he spoke often to our Scottish friends here, these latter days. Our wicked friend, this lady’s father, first brought him. Is he well?’
The priest did not know where Colà was. They went to the market, pushing between vendors and buyers, storytellers and small gambling circles, stalls of second-hand clothes and worn furs and chipped clay pitchers. They crossed the sweet-water river, which the Knights had made into a canal, and rounded the shore to the smoking fires of the first of the boat-yards. Over there, amid the din of saw and hammer and voice was where the Saint Pierre, now the Peter, had first been brought, and her fine Breton caravel planking faithfully copied. This was the home yard of the Fleury, now loading salt and wine, so Elzbiete said, in Bourgneuf. ‘But it does not belong to Colà now, but to some woman called Anna?’
They returned to the wharves where the immense Peter von Danzig was now moored. Once the wonder of the whole western world, the caravel was itself dwarfed by the sky-piercing bulk of the Crane. The hook was crawling down on its cable: above Kathi’s head, through the din, she heard the creak of two wheels and, peering up through the gloom, saw the great wooden roundels turning, and the plodding feet of the men who empowered them, their outstretched arms gripping the rims. Seeing them, the four men had looked down and bellowed salacious pleasantries. ‘Animals,’ Elzbiete had said.
They had intruded, against custom, into the Artushof, and found a drunken feast in one room, and a group of men gambling in another. In the Town Hall there was a trial, with people shouting. Last of all, they had gone to the elaborate house of a merchant. It was there that they learned that Colà had been there, but that the good captain had come and removed him. Where? No one knew.
Kathi, lady of Berecrofts, said to her uncle, ‘I think they may have gone because Benecke thought we should entice Nicholas home. And I think Nicholas may have gone to please Benecke. The Peter von Danzig is a privateer. And they expect Colà to join them this summer.’
She did not say, even to Robin, what else she thought. She did not repeat Elzbiete’s stories of how Nicholas had spent the winter, or her unbelievable, her sickening quotations from Nicholas, followed by the questions they inspired.
Old women prize youths: they are indefatigable. (‘So, Katarzynka, what crone’s bed did he take?’)
Never trust blacks: they are vermin. (‘Did some servant steal from him, then?’)
‘And why, Katarzynka, do you say his wife is not stupid and prudish, when Colà has described her to Paúel as both, and her son as a bastard?’
That had been just before Elzbiete and she parted company at the end of the long, fruitless search. Elzbiete had begun to express her regrets. But Kathi, her perceptions rubbed raw by distress, suddenly exclaimed in a low voice, ‘You knew! You knew from the beginning that Nicholas — that Colà had gone.’
And Elzbiete, pausing only a moment, had said in her most reasonable voice, ‘Well, Katarzynka, yes. But my father would be sorry if Colà left Poland.’
There was such a difference of height that Kathi had to strain to look up, as if she were trying to convince God of her innocence. She said, ‘But we don’t want him back. He couldn’t go back. I want to persuade him to stay here in Poland. Elzbiete, tell me. Tell me, where is he?’
Elzbiete gazed at her, frowning. ‘He can’t go back? Why?’
> ‘Because of something he did. I can’t tell you what, but your father would approve, I am sure. A great coup. The biggest act of piracy you could imagine.’
‘So he is rich? He has been ransoming prisoners?’
‘No. You don’t sell vengeance, you buy it,’ Kathi had said bitterly; and recovered. ‘So will you tell me? Please, where is he, Elzbiete?’
And Elzbiete had looked at her in silence and then had said, ‘With my father. My father will write. He writes a good hand, and can decline and conjugate too. Then, if he allows, I shall tell you.’
‘Without telling Nicholas?’
‘If you like. You still want to surprise him?’
‘That is one way of putting it,’ said Kathi.
But she revealed none of that to her uncle. To Robin, later, she said, ‘Benecke thought we’d take Nicholas home. I think I’ve convinced his daughter we shan’t. If we’re lucky, her father will send for us. Not my uncle, but us.’
‘Why should he?’ he said. They were in their bedchamber, and he was standing, fully clothed, at the window.
‘Because he wants me,’ Kathi said. ‘And he has discounted you. He thinks you aren’t really my husband.’
Robin turned. She could rely on him, always, to understand her. Youth and crones. She thought of what else went into that delicate equation. She thought of Marian de Charetty, who had fallen in love with her apprentice, who, from love and from pity, had married her. She studied, with furious affection, the young man before her who was the age now that Nicholas must have been then. Robin of Berecrofts had long guessed, before she had told him, that she was not a sensual being; that bodily pleasures meant little or nothing; that all her joy came from the mind. He had entered open-eyed into this marriage, feeling his way, never intruding, always controlling, as well as man could, the surging impulses of the blood. And she, fallen silent that first night at the sheer comeliness of him, unclothed, had made an equal pact with herself and with him, to give him all that she could, and nearly all that he could want. Only, always, she made the first moves.
As now, when she said, ‘And of course, he must be right. Or why else are you standing there clothed?’
Once he was with her, he could not always be gentle, nor did she want him to be, but studied how to bring him to deeper fulfilment; to realise the great urge that overwhelmed him. She learned too, how swiftly young hunger returned, and how to welcome and satisfy it. Working with him, she took a craftsman’s delight in his quickening breath, his moist skin, his clenched eyes wet, sometimes with tears. Then he was her child. The rest of the time, they were equals.
A WEEK LATER, when no word had come, and Anselm Adorne was still held fast in Danzig, Katelijne Sersanders left her husband and, accompanied by a group of Teutonic ladies, rode out from the west gate of Danzig to visit the abbey of Oliva.
The church was tall, echoing and unusually narrow. The cloisters were like all other cloisters. The Abbot, although warned beforehand, seemed about to repudiate the arrangement. ‘The Confrérie have made me its custodian. I am not supposed to display it. Especially to …’ And he had glanced distractedly at Kathi.
‘My lord, she knows it’s here. Her uncle knows. Everyone knows. Does your lordship suppose we are about to help her carry it out of the country? Now, when the grain is about to come in, and you need all the advice you can get about taxes?’ The lady of Filip Bischoff could threaten.
The Abbot said, ‘Of course. I see your point. If Cracow knows, all the world knows, I suppose.’
‘Cracow? The King? The King has been told that the painting is here?’ asked Frau Bischoff.
‘Presumably so,’ the Abbot replied. ‘When his sons’ tutor was sent here, and saw it. And the other young man.’
‘His sons’ tutor? Signor Buonaccorsi, the scholar, was here?’
‘Callimaco,’ said Kathi to the air. ‘He attempted to murder Pope Paul, my uncle says. He used to live in Murano. Zacco helped him in Cyprus. He went to Constantinople, and tried to hand Chios to the Turks.’ She looked at the Abbot, who was old enough to think thirty-three young. She said, ‘Signor Buonaccorsi was here, my lord, to look at the painting?’
And the Abbot said, ‘No. I have already said. He wished to meet the foreign merchant with whom he had been corresponding. Colà. Nikolás. The surname escapes me.’
With whom he had been corresponding. ‘De Fleury,’ Kathi suggested. She heard the tremor in her own voice. ‘The King sent this gentleman to meet M. de Fleury?’
‘Colà,’ said one of the ladies. ‘We knew as much. Did we not mention it? Colà received an invitation from the Court, but refused it. We found it most gratifying. There is nothing at Court for a merchant. Danzig is the place for a merchant.’
‘Or a pirate,’ Kathi said. A conversation came into her mind. Tedaldi. One of the patrons of Callimaco was the Medici agent Tedaldi, chief of the Florentine merchants in Poland. The San Matteo, with its Florentine crew and its Florentine cargo, freighted by the Florentine Tommaso Portinari, had been commanded by a Tedaldi. Before, that is, it was captured by Paúel Benecke, with the loss of thirteen dead and one hundred wounded and the dispersal of all its cargo, including the great altar-piece by Hans Memling, which she was now about to be shown.
The King was interested in Nicholas, but Nicholas for some reason had rejected him. The meeting had been arranged in Oliva, where the painting was placed. The King might be under considerable pressure from his Italian colony to defy the Danzigers and hand back the Italian cargo. All these things her uncle needed to know. At the same time, of course, she would not have been allowed here unless everyone wanted her uncle to know them.
Kathi said, ‘So, my lord, might one see this magnificent work?’
It was a magnificent work. She had seen it before, or most of it. Angelo Tani and his wife on the back of the flaps, and then the triptych itself. The rainbow. The Elect, with Duke Charles curly-headed among them. And the Saved. And the Damned.
She couldn’t see Nicholas among either. He was probably somewhere in limbo. She did see someone else whom she knew. Tommaso. Tommaso’s neat coiffeured head on top of someone else’s limp body, kneeling piously in the pan of some scales.
It beat Sixtus. It beat Pope Paul’s successor, who provided his wealthier guests with ex-cathedra gold pots in the close stool. Despite everything, she found herself pink with foolish amusement.
Elzbiete saw it. She said, ‘Were you looking for someone?’
‘Yes,’ said Kathi. ‘I’ve found him. I can die happy, now.’
Chapter 4
DURING THE DAY, he was sober: he had to be. During the night, he was more often sober than not, according to his own choice. When the day came that Paúel Benecke ruled the habits of Nicholas de Fleury, then would life become ludicrous.
On the face of it, this was merely a race. The plains of Poland yielded their crops in the autumn, when the great highway of the Vistula might be low, and the shipping roads of the Baltic were closing. The grain came to the river, and waited. In spring, the world’s fleets came to Danzig. Last summer, fifty had sailed out in April, bound for Flanders and Holland and Germany. Through the summer, there might be a thousand ships more. They came for grain, and for copper and timber. The great estates sent their corn to the riverside granaries, and men like Paúel Benecke floated it north on rafts a hundred feet long and nearly thirty feet wide which were worth more in themselves than the corn, for the rafts were made of the mainmasts of caravels. Other craft, small and big, came as well, often manned by their owners: tenant-farmers and smallholders. And whoever reached Danzig first received most for his wheat, oats and rye, and his timber.
He had wanted to do this, even before Paúel had wrenched him away from the Mission and Danzig. It reminded Nicholas of Iceland, of which he often spoke entertainingly. It amused the flotilla: his remorseless mimicry, his scathing tongue, until he turned it on their masters, their institutions, themselves. And even then, they brought themselves to put up with it for
, like the Icelanders, they had been locked in their houses by winter and would seize on any diversion.
But that was by night, when the concourses travelling the river would arrive at their next loading-port and, mooring the rafts to the quays, would leave their dogs or their guards by the silos and surge bellowing into the taverns. Or sometimes, as dusk overtook them, they would come to rest on some hospitable shore where the country people would flock down to serve them, bringing black bread and sausage and cheeses, and frothless ale by the cask, and this season’s new batch of whores. Then the gambling and fiddling, the high-jumping dancing and singing would continue long into the darkness, until the most energetic lapsed into sleep.
Some rivermen, desperate for an advantage, tried to run the river with lanterns by night, but not many, and none could keep it up for long, however many polemen they carried.
That was why Nicholas never drank during the day. He had a reluctant respect for the power of the Vistula, this shining, swift-running highway which swirled through the fabric of Poland for six hundred miles to the sea. He had a respect for its dark, savage currents, and for the shifting white sand of its shoals. The men who manned the great rafts, poles in hand, provided the power and the strength, and dragged up the single unwieldy sail when wind and river might briefly co-operate. But it was the river pilots who were kings on the water; whose orders were law; and who rode their rafts with their steering-oars and their bodies, like men bounding downhill through snow, heeling out of one stream and slipping into the flow of the next, pitching safely aside from the watery glare of a shoal, even though the rafts lurched and juddered and bucked, and the timber groaned in the rush of the water. Sometimes even skill wasn’t enough, and a raft would strike and, bursting asunder, would send whirling downriver a pack of half-submerged logs: random, lethal. The rafter name for these, wilki, meant ‘wolves.’