Caprice and Rondo (54 page)

‘None of them will give me away,’ Nicholas said. ‘They trust the Patriarch.’ Karaï Mirza’s receipt had brought him unscathed through the portals of Caffa: they had not even turned out his baggage. Wearing the sash, he had been somewhat relieved.

Anna said, ‘And your long-lost sea captain is to meet you in Soldaia, but the monk could not say when. That might be dangerous too. That might be a trap.’

‘I trust Father Lorenzo,’ Nicholas said. ‘And Ochoa is already a fugitive
from the Genoese and the Knights of St John. I don’t think he would send me word simply to harm me.’

‘But then why?’ Anna said. ‘Does he love you so much? Or does he love the gold, and cannot reach it without you?’

‘That is very possible,’ Nicholas said. He paused. ‘I am sorry. I forget I am not alone. If something happens to me, you would be left on your own until Julius could come.’

‘The Patriarch would be here till the spring,’ Anna said. ‘I managed my own life in Germany before I met Julius. Am I not allowed to be afraid for you as a dear friend?’

After a moment he turned his head, breaking their gaze. He had not answered. Anna sprang up and said, ‘The letters. I have kept you from reading your letters. Here they are. Let me go and see to your room while you read them. It is probably a millet store now, or a place where they hang all the cheese.’ He took the letters and looked after her as she walked steadily out: the black hair, the straight, lissom carriage; the Polovtsian drums. He picked up the first letter.

It was one of three from the same source, although you would have had to know the watermark and ink of the outer cover to identify them as coming from Venice. Since his first, anonymous notes to the Casa di Niccolò, a method of acknowledgement had been established, as was usual between a Bank and its informants. All the Bank’s responses so far had been minimal. Sometimes, to his amusement, they had contained small sums of money, on the cautious tariff he himself had once set up with Gregorio. On occasion, there had been a brief added comment. Now, for the first time, there was business news.

In the first letter, it was no more than a word or two, without comment, on a deal in Murano upon which Nicholas had specialised knowledge. In the second, it was a matter of Flemish shipping, as pertained to an intricate project he had launched when in office. The third was different again: it noticed that the mercenary company of the Bank, under contract to Burgundy, was helping the Duke besiege the town of Neuss, outside Cologne.

That was all. He had thrown some scraps, from the East, to the Bank. The Bank had thanked him, but had not asked for more. Instead, someone was saying, quietly,
This is where they need advice, Gregorio, Julius, Diniz. This is how you can help us
. He wondered if she knew that he would recognise her handwriting, and remembered that, of course, she did.

There were only three letters more, and two of them were routine reports. The first said,
They are all well
. The second,
We depart at once from Bruges, with the doctor. There is talk of Ghent, and then Neuss
.

They did not know that he had been out of reach for so long. He would write, but the decisions would already be taken; the crisis at
Neuss, whatever it was, would be over. It might even mean that his army was free. His former army.

The November light was failing now; yellow lamps bloomed outside his window where the town rose on its slopes from the sea. His view was the garden, and the kiosk where Anna had touched him with cherry-stained lips. A passing kiss, like today’s. He turned to the last packet of all.

The writing was unknown. The cover, buckled and soiled, seemed, surprisingly, to have followed a route not unlike that of all the others. Its fastening had broken. The inner wrapper bore the name of a courier at Treviso, and had carried a wax seal, now slit. He set it down.

No.

No, when he was here and alone. No, when Marian was gone, and even Tasse was dead. No, when he was doing what he was doing. No. No. No.

Then he opened it.

It began,
À monsieur mon petit-fils
.

And the signature, when he tumbled the pages, was
Thibault, vicomte de Fleury
.

I
T
WAS
FULLY
DARK
when Anna came in, so that she thought at first that he had gone. Then she saw the chair by the window, and the crouched shadow in it. She hesitated, and then walked steadily forward in the dim light from the doorway. When she rested her hands on his shoulders, a tremor passed through him. She said, ‘I read it. It was open. I was afraid it was urgent.’ Then she said, ‘Did you think the vicomte was dead?’

The question was gentle, reflective, compelling no immediate answer. Her fingers caressed, calming, reassuring, until he lifted his face from his hands. Then she moved, taking a seat a little away, where she could see him, if barely. He spoke.

‘No. I knew where he was. I thought this was news of his death.’

He did not go on. She let time pass, then spoke again. ‘Did you also know what he told you?’

Again, a silence. Again, he answered. ‘It was what I was told. No one believed it. There is no proof.’

She said, ‘But you fought at first to be recognised.’

‘There was no point,’ he said. ‘And less, now. It would invalidate my marriage to Gelis. It would make Jodi a bastard.’

She held out her hand, but he did not take it, and she brought it gently back to her lap. She said, ‘But none of that, surely, should matter? This is your grandfather, who seemed to care nothing for you. You have found each other.’

‘He has found me,’ Nicholas said. ‘The rest does not follow.’

After a while, she said, ‘You will be better alone. When you want it, your room is prepared.’ All the letters lay at his side, as he had dropped them. The missive from Treviso rested uppermost, its pages aligned, its position secure on the pile. He had not torn it, or crushed it, or cast it away. He had not reduced it to ashes. Her face full of pity, Anna rose and left him with his trouble, closing the door.

He heard it close. After a while, he moved from his chair and, lighting the lamp, locked away the money he had brought from Qirq-yer, which was now so irrelevant. Presumably someone had unpacked and seen to his animals. Presumably some story had been told to explain his abnormal arrival: he was fatigued from the journey, or sick. That, at least, was not far from the truth. He did not know who the man was who had whirled like a lunatic in this room only hours ago. The same man whose grandfather had thought to write him a letter.

He read it again on his bed, the door locked this time, and the chamber lit. He knew it mostly by heart.
‘Sois tolérant à l’égard des caprices d’un vieux
…’ It was a long time since someone had
tutoyé
’d him in that brand of French. The handwriting, once elegant, was now cramped with age, or weakness, or pain. The intelligence was not cramped at all. The man he had always thought senile had a mind as clear as his own. Clearer, probably. That had been the shock, not what he had had to say. Or one of the shocks.

Gelis had been there.

It did not matter to him, really, that Gelis had been there, or that Anna, reading this letter (and hence Julius — and hence all the world), should know the excuse, the explanation to which his mother had clung, when a second child had followed a still-birth, during her husband’s long absence.

Such a sweet child!
his grandfather had written of his daughter Sophie.
You would have adored her — I mean as a man: you did adore her, of course, as a child. Simon, a beautiful, lascivious boy, was sufficiently dazzled to get her with child. Her passion for him never died, but a forced marriage cured his at once: he stayed long enough to please his father, then left her. She never recovered, silly girl. The loss of the first child sent her crazy: she did not realise another was coming until it was born prematurely, during the festivities for St Nicholas’ Day. There was no disguising what had happened, and no explaining it either. Well-disposed persons suggested that she had been ravished while out of her mind, and hence could not remember it. Considering my condition, this was deemed not unlikely: clearly, mindlessness ran in the family. Only later, based on hearsay and old women’s tales, did a different theory
emerge. You may know it. I did not feel it my place to mention it to the delightful lady your wife
.

It was, of course, the story his mother had told: the explanation Nicholas had adhered to all these years until, an apprentice of eighteen at Sluys, he had come face to face with the same beautiful, lascivious boy, now an exquisite man. He had hoped for kindness from Simon, and Simon, cornered, had riposted, in the end, with cold steel.

Yet the theory was well-founded enough. When twins are conceived, it sometimes happens that one will miscarry quite soon, while the other will persist and survive. The infant boy who had died had been twin as well as brother to Nicholas. And his own puny birth, far from premature, had taken place at full term or beyond.

It was a good theory, had there been any proof. His grandfather thought so, as well. The vicomte mentioned it as if viewing the case from afar, as indeed he seemed to view his own illness and its consequence; and the actions of his brother; and of Nicholas in taking vengeance on Jaak. He referred to his second daughter, Adelina, only in the context of her half-sister Sophie’s goodness in rearing her, and the kindness of the convent which had embraced her, a furious beauty, at eight. It was the solitary lapse Nicholas noticed, for Adelina had left Jaak de Fleury’s home when she was six. But the vicomte Thibault, then helpless, would hardly register dates.

The oddity was that, in reading about them, Nicholas also found himself questioning how much it mattered, all these pains of the past. Of his own life of agony, Thibault had said remarkably little. He left it to be assumed that, unable to speak, slipping in and out of full consciousness, he had been unable to arrange or endorse or forbid what had happened to Nicholas. He said little of Simon, and nothing of Henry, who was supposed to be Simon’s son, but was not. He mentioned Jordan de Ribérac, Simon’s fat, malevolent father, not at all.

His reasons, Nicholas supposed, were to be found in the only words of advice that the letter contained.

Why feel bitter? Life is unfair. People are often unfair. You and I were born with certain advantages. One does not waste time, then, on resentment. As your wife and your doctor will tell you, I live in peace with a friend, and consider the ambiguities of the world, and make music. You and I did not meet, and I am sorry. But I am content. Should you not be, also?

Then had slipped from the pages the first and last gifts his grandfather had sent him, A sheet of music, minutely ciphered, of a sort he had never heard in his life. And a page of delicate gibberish: a puzzle.
Speechless, paralysed, discounted by his carers as senile, Thibault de Fleury had lain thinking, devising, conjecturing for half his days. And when the demons retreated, he had called up his talents and burnished them, and set them out to garnish his last years.

Nicholas put out the light, and lay looking up into darkness. It was too late, by now, for him to meet Thibault in life, whatever haste he might have made earlier. It was even possible that Thibault had not wanted a meeting. But Nicholas knew that when he came to untangle the puzzle, to track the music, phrase by phrase, with his voice, he would wish that he could imagine his grandfather there, his face critical, pained, full of exasperation for sure, but not without — perhaps not without some trace of approval.

But he could not imagine it, for he had not seen his grandfather’s face. Gelis had.

Chapter 21

T
HESE
DAYS
, when Gelis van Borselen moved, the trading world noticed. By the end of July, it was known that she was leaving Venice for the Bank’s house in Bruges, taking her child and the company physician, and an escort of exceptional strength. She crossed the Alps in fine weather, and made, at a leisurely pace, directly for Bruges, where she arrived at the end of September. It was, of course, a mark of the power of her Bank that safe conducts should be so readily procurable at a time of unease. It was interesting that, having invested heavily and operated successfully with the Venetian branch, the Lady should now, it appeared, be showing a similar interest in the Bruges-Antwerp company.

Meanwhile, of course, her estranged husband was moving through Europe as aide to the Patriarch of Antioch, which might bring in healthy new business, even though de Fleury had officially withdrawn from the Bank. There had been no scandal over his departure, other than the usual marital nonsense. His colleagues had been upset, it was clear, but there had been no hint of malpractice or fraud. He might even come back.

The merchant world approved of Gelis van Borselen.

T
HE
B
ANK
IN
B
RUGES
was not quite so sure. Rooms were set aside for her in the Bank’s great range of buildings in Spangnaerts Street — the apartments that Nicholas had used when he stayed. A party of honour was arranged to ride out and meet her. No one spoke very much. Ever since Nicholas left, having exhausted the Bank to further his private vendetta in Scotland, they had avoided talking of him, except to maintain the fiction which explained his departure, or to curse the death by neglect of some little project he had kept to himself. Then Gelis had pushed into the business, and had silenced them by proving her reliability as well as her management skills.

Which was good, the Venice branch seemed to think. Diniz, now
controlling the Flemish side he had once managed for Nicholas, had been inclined to agree, until his wife and her sister had expressed their opinion. ‘Of course Gelis is working from morning till night, amassing valuable friends, gaining credence. This is what she wanted, isn’t it? Nicholas is out of the way, and she is proving that she is better than he was. Wait. She’ll buy it all back — Venice, Bruges, Cologne, Scotland. Then she’ll laugh at him.’