Caprice and Rondo (81 page)

‘Well, I saw his face this time. There was nothing on it,’ said Julius. It annoyed him when she tried to imply that she knew Nicholas better than he did. Then she chuckled, drawing him close.

‘These days, I think you are in a dream, Julius. I wonder why? And tell me, did you give him our other news? About our visit from his elegant, aged, youth-loving friend Nicholai Giorgio de’ Acciajuoli, the Greek whose leg he broke at Damme?’

‘Yes, I told him,’ had said Julius, still a little ruffled. ‘But he knew. His lordship had already threatened to call on him.’

‘Oh,’ said Anna. She sighed. ‘I have to say, I am not fond of Moscow. It is inconvenient to have so little freedom. But if we all go to Novgorod, it will be better.’ Her head turned in the crook of his arm, and she laughed up at him with those inviting, sparkling eyes. He kissed them, as a beginning.

‘I
T
IS
CONSIDERED
PROPER
,’ said the Patriarch of Antioch, ‘to mourn for a grandfather. I am sorry to see you indifferent.’

He spoke in French. Julius and Dymitr had gone, but the Russian monks were still there at the small table, quietly conversing. Nicholas was standing by the narrow, mica-filled window, red in the sunset. He did not reply.

‘On the other hand, you have eaten little,’ the Patriarch said. ‘A mark of refined sensibilities or common belly-ache.’ And as Nicholas still did not answer: ‘Do I seem to you brainless? Or pukingly sentimental? Or an obnoxious maker of tyrannical demands?’

‘All of these,’ Nicholas said. But he turned. The monks had stopped speaking, which was not surprising, as the Patriarch’s voice had increased to a shout.

‘Very well,’ said Ludovico da Bologna. ‘Come here. Drop on your knees. Bend that stiff neck and fold those murderous hands and be quiet and listen. My friends’ — looking to the table and switching to calm, resonant Russian — ‘my brethren in Christ, this young man has lost a revered grandfather, excellent, noble, well loved, and would have us utter prayers for his soul. Will you join me?’

They came forward and knelt, and the ruddy light touched their crowns and their hands, its blessing impartial, while Latin and Greek sent Thibault de Fleury on his way.

Chapter 34

S
INCE
NO
MAN
is a God, the dark days between November and December witnessed a mild diminution of Julius’s ardour, which of course Anna understood and forgave. At the same time, she began to find Moscow tiresome. In the Crimea, her own mistress, planning, intriguing, negotiating her way to success, she had found every day stimulating — or, at least, until Nicholas left. Now, the planning and negotiating were appropriated by Julius, whose growing enthusiasm for founding a Russian-based business had first surprised her, and then caused her to remonstrate. ‘We have to go back. You are making promises we can’t really fulfil.’ And, of course, he agreed. But all the same, as the date approached for their journey to Novgorod, he seemed to be interviewing more merchants, and visiting Nicholas in the Troitsa more often. While she was debarred.

She was not, of course, wholly confined. Her face and head covered, her feet booted, fur-lined cloak folded tightly about her, she stood on the bridges and walked on the ice of Moscow’s two encircling rivers where the markets were held and the wind was less searing. The bright-coloured bustling peasants brought Bruges and Poland to mind, but here, they showed their wares differently. When you bought meat in Bruges, you did not look to find it mustered to await you, as here, on the frozen waterways, where the beasts stood motionless on the snow in their hundreds, skinned and frozen and stiff as humble clay offerings. From hares to chickens, from pyramids of butter to eggs, everything in the market was frozen, and sold by the axe, whose crack and thud resounded back from the walls, followed like cannon shot by glittering fragments. In Moscow, the meat on your table had been killed three months before. Walking about, she made useful acquaintances. Men who had vegetables to sell, or honey in summer. Unemployed men who would do anything.

The market only lasted until just after noon, for daylight began to vanish soon after, and the custom was to repair to the taverns and stay there. It infuriated the western merchants, some of whom she knew from
Thorn and Germany, and whom she entertained with Julius now and then. They were avid for news of their escape and curious, she could tell, to know how it had left Julius and herself financially. The answer was, destitute. The Russians had paid the cost of their journey to Moscow, using money, they said, from a fortunate late sale of furs. It was likelier to have been looted. But they themselves had had nothing until the other day, on one of Julius’s visits to the Troitsa, when Nicholas had slipped a packet into his hands.

He had unwrapped it at home. Inside were six jewels, of such a size and such a quality that they would pay for their house, their food and their journey home or, alternatively, the deposit necessary for any new business venture. Julius had been flushed. ‘He got them from Uzum Hasan, and meant to keep them to live on. But he wanted us to have them. He thinks that, if we stay, we could be rich.’

Examining them, she had caught her breath, despite herself. ‘He is so generous,’ Anna said. ‘He strips himself, for our sake. But Julius, we must go back. I have Bonne.’

He had agreed. But the sale of just one of the gems had paid for a better house, and her furs, and good servants. So, escorted, she was enabled to pay visits to the small merchant quarter, where wives were not common, and to improve her acquaintance with the Italians whom Julius had already met. One of them was a fellow graduate from Bologna, here with his son and a pupil to create a cathedral for the Grand Duchess. Anna called on the architect, at his invitation, in the rectangular house he had been given close to the far from rectangular pile of the Grand Duke’s antiquated timber castle-palace. Her host, a powerful black-haired man in his forties, was there with his son. And with him was another visitor from the West: the elderly Florentine called Acciajuoli, whose intermittent dealings with Nicholas had so often been related to her, with mirth, by her husband.

After the rough ways of the Muscovites, the amused eyes and smooth manners of the old gentleman were undoubtedly pleasing. Tall and slender and bearded, his wooden leg skilfully hidden by impeccable velvets, he spoke with all the gentle authority of a member of a great Italian family, a kinsman by marriage of the Medici, and a nobleman of the Morea, that part of Byzantine Greece once ruled by the Grand Duchess’s family. The fall of Constantinople had ended all that, and nearly ended the life of his brothers, who traded there. Travelling Europe to raise ransom money, he had come from Scotland to Bruges, and to Nicholas.

‘Claes,’ he said, ruminatively, when she reminded him. ‘He used to be an apprentice called Claes. And now he is in prison again. Should I find it surprising?’

She had enjoyed his company, despite the insistent presence of Andrea, the architect’s son, a good-looking young man of modest attributes, who nodded and smiled at Signor Acciajuoli’s every word. After the meal, his father sent him off on an errand, and Anna did not stay long after that. It was not her purpose to further Julius’s awakening interest in the market for engineering supplies. She wanted, as soon as possible, to go home.

Having watched her departure, her host turned back to his other guest with a small shrug. The Florentine Acciajuoli smiled from his chair. ‘You need not have sent Andrea away. I am not about to seduce him, and I am perfectly capable of indicating as much. By the same token, Maestro Fioravanti, you are not about to kiss the shoe of the Gräfin?’

‘What makes you think that?’ said the engineer. Fioravanti was not a name he had used often since graduating in mathematics at the University of Bologna. He had been city engineer there in the mid-fifties, when the lady Anna’s husband had become secretary to Cardinal Bessarion. He remembered receiving a bonus of fifty florins from Bessarion for his skill in shifting a tower from one place to another (shifting towers was his speciality). His trade name these days was Aristotele, but Julius still called him Rudolfo. He had been glad to see Julius married and apparently prosperous: as a wild young lawyer in Bologna, he had spent his first earnings like water, and nearly ended up in jail like this other man. Claes. Nicholas de Fleury. Sharing a cell with the Patriarch, another well-remembered compatriot. Moscow was a Bologna commune.

The sly old Florentine was smiling at him. Fioravanti explained himself. ‘I sound ungracious. I cannot tell you the reason. The lady is beautiful, but Julius was always easily flattered.’

‘He looks happy enough,’ the lame man said. ‘But you wanted to meet my other friend, Nicholas. At least, he wants to meet you. I suspect he wishes to help Julius found an empire.’

‘For him to manage, while Julius goes home? Or the other way round?’ Fioravanti asked. He pulled forward a settle with ease. He had never been tall, but he had always had powerful muscles. He couldn’t do his job otherwise, even though he was no longer juggling obelisks in Rome.

The old gentleman said, ‘Neither, I fancy. What Nicholas de Fleury would like, I rather think, is to consolidate with Julius a permanent Muscovite partnership: a new Banco Niccolò-Giulio based in Great Novgorod. The Gräfin and her husband are taking him there very soon: Julius of course is becoming enthused.’ He paused. ‘No doubt you have views. As you have indicated, you know his nature.’

‘Julius is decorative,’ said Fioravanti, after some thought. ‘He carries
out well what others initiate. He does not have the vision, I would say, to sustain a great business for a long time alone.’

‘On the other hand,’ the old gentleman said, ‘de Fleury has an original mind and has been concerned with many innovative projects, I am told. He would understand your requirements, and anything that benefited your great work would please the Grand Duchess, of course.’ He paused. ‘Father Ludovico is not insensible of the niceties.’

They looked at one another. Fioravanti said, ‘Then I am inclined to hold to my opinion. I should like to talk to de Fleury. Can you arrange it?’

‘Give me a few days.’ Smiling, his visitor rose, collecting his stick, and managing the false leg with adroitness. ‘I shall come with you. And bring Andrea. Nicholas is very good with young men. Quite unlike me. Bracing. Robust. Unless you have pretty maids, you need never be apprehensive about Nicholas.’

T
HE
MEETING
WAS
DELAYED
, because of the Troitsa’s preoccupation with the Feast of the chief saint of Russia. Nicholas became one year older, and was able, from a discreet vantage point, to take his first look at the ducal procession entering the cathedral. Ushered by the Metropolitan Philip and the Archimandrite in a dazzle of ecclesiastical vestments trod the tall, jewelled form, aged thirty-five, grimly sober, of Ivan III Vasilievich, by the grace of God, Grand Duke of Muscovy; the bent figure of his mother Maria; his two brothers Andrew and Boris; the sullen child of his first marriage, Ivan; and — painted, crimped, studded with Byzantine metals and swinging with Byzantine pendicles — the short-necked, globular person of Zoe-Sophia, his Duchess.

Long ago, weeping with laughter, Julius had described the cruel joke involving Anselm Adorne’s son and the youth Nerio in Venice, and later in Rome, when the same Jan had confused the pneumatic Zoe with Anna. At least the exquisite Nerio, by-blow of a princess of Trebizond, had been advised not to come with his Florentine benefactor: Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli limped alone in the Grand Duchess’s procession. Watching, Nicholas saw him glance towards the deep, shadowed porch where he and the Patriarch stood. A moment later, the Grand Duchess glanced over also. In the inflated pink visage, the magnificent eyes with their well-drawn outlines were unexpectedly sharp. On an impulse, Nicholas drew from his memory and performed the obeisance he had last given to David Comnenos of Trebizond, whose race at root was the same as her own. She inclined her head in reply.

The next day, Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli was ushered into the Patriarch’s room at the Troitsa, bringing with him a solid, black, olive-skinned engineer from Bologna with a hoarse voice, and spatulate fingers,
and nostrils smeared like John le Grant’s from the engineer’s habit of pinching his nose when in doubt. It made Nicholas feel better, if not much. The news that Acciajuoli was in Moscow had staggered him. He had never been cowed by this man, but however spaced their rare meetings, he always felt apprehension. Nicholai de’Acciajuoli had never done him any harm, to his knowledge, except as much as an idle, mischievous man might do, who thought himself to have exceptional powers. He had frightened Gelis, as well.

At the moment, however, there seemed nothing ominous in his greeting. He made a mild joke about enclosed orders, and the Patriarch replied with affable coarseness. They had no guard and no audience: a member of the Grand Duchess’s circle could dispense with such things. Then Fioravanti was introduced, and the talk suddenly moved from the general to the particular, simply because Nicholas was intensely interested in the plans to rebuild the Kremlin cathedral, and to know what had caused the walls to fall down in the first place. He was in the middle of an argument about hoists when someone laid a hand on his shoulder, and he realised that the Patriarch and their Florentine visitor had been excluded from the conversation for the last hour, and were now making their presence felt again. They did not appear unduly disturbed, having spent the interval, so it seemed, in tolerably uncontentious conversation of their own. It had never occurred to Nicholas that they would have anything in common.

Soon after, the visitors left, without having done more than affirm a desire, in due course, for other meetings. In his strange, suspended mode of existence, Nicholas was conscious of elation. The world was opening again. He had found someone whom he could work with, and who wanted, he thought, to work with him. And there was plenty of time. Even if everything ceased over Christmas, which was celebrated here on the seventh day of January, weeks of winter still lay ahead in which to collect the information he needed.