The Unicorn Hunt (65 page)

She had once seen the other man do it: the man who had died. She knew it was possible. In the Tyrol, their maps were too poor.
The other man had been poring over a drawing of Florence. He wanted to see, he had said, in what street his mistress was sleeping that night. She remembered how worn he had looked. Now, she hesitated.

De Fleury must have heard her, and turned. His face against the light was not at first distinct, and she smiled, stepping towards him.

She said, ‘Weel, Nicol! What sinistrous trick have we here? You’ve become crafty now at your trade?’

His hand moved, half palming the stone. She waited for him to stand. When he did, he had uncovered the bob and laid it on the map. His back was still to the light. He said, ‘Duchess.’

She looked at him, and then made up her mind and walked forward to study the map. It was large, but not professionally done. She thought, from the ink on his fingers, that he had probably drawn it himself. It showed the streets of a large town and some of their houses. On another sheet, laid aside, she saw the plans of three dwellings. She recognised two. One, unmistakable because of its church, was the Hôtel Jerusalem, Bruges. The other was her own late sister’s house, that of Wolfaert van Borselen in Veere. She realised that the town on the map must be Bruges.

She said, her voice kindly, ‘I interrupted. Ye were seeking your wife. Did you find her?’

He spoke, his voice slower than usual. ‘No, your grace. I didn’t expect to find her. She stays outside Bruges.’

‘Then who? My family, would it be?’ She let him hear the reserve.

‘No! No, your grace,’ he said immediately. ‘Another lady. I found her. I had been … concerned for her safety.’

‘And is she safe?’ the Duchess asked. She moved, inducing him to turn round. She saw it was as she suspected. She said, ‘Am I allowed to know her name?’

‘Of course,’ said de Fleury. ‘Her name is Margot. She is the close friend of Gregorio, my manager. She went missing.’

‘But now she is back?’ the Duchess said. ‘You can tell that?’

‘It seems so,’ he said. ‘They are both there, in the house that we use.’

‘Then they are at ease, and you too. But don’t fall sick for their sake,’ said the Duchess. ‘Spare your gift. Or you’ll find me ill pleased that I taught you.’

‘Never that,’ de Fleury said. ‘You showed me a way. If it does me harm, then most likely I deserve it.’

Their eyes joined. ‘Aye,’ she said. ‘I jaloused that already.’ When
she turned at the door, he had already crushed the maps from his desk and discarded them.

It was their last meeting in private. Soon he was gone, with his entourage and companions. They would cross the ridge and descend the sunny slopes of the mountains where the apple blossom sparkled in ice and the southern warmth beckoned.

She did not envy Nicholas de Fleury, although she would not forget him. Indeed, in her way, she incorporated him in her planning much as he, in his turn, had used her. She did not know that she had been the fourth stage of a plan which – because of a death – had undergone a masterly reconstitution.

Nicholas de Fleury had been debarred from the chase of his choice. No one had said he couldn’t fire from the coverts. Or return, once this diversion was over, to see what he had killed.

Chapter 31

A
LEXANDRIA, THE JEWEL
on the northernmost sea-strand of Egypt, was one of the romantic places of the world to which Nicholas, on his wedding day, had promised himself to bring Gelis, his wife. It suited him to enter it, without her, three months after leaving the Tyrol. He had John le Grant at his side and a few writings attributable to a parrot.

He did not leave his main arena without thought. He had listened to Moriz. He made sure, before going too far, that Anselm Adorne was genuinely committed to the same journey. (Priests were not immune to slips of the tongue.) But the warning proved to be true. The Baron Cortachy was not only armed with safe conducts and ducal letters of credence, he had made a will preparatory to leaving. It confirmed, as nothing else could, his rising importance in Scotland and Flanders.

The Baron had bequeathed his best sapphire to the Bishop of St Andrews, for love of Maarten his son. A stained glass window with the Adorne coat of arms was promised to the Charterhouse monks outside Perth. To mark his funeral, that of a prince among merchants, ells of linen in grey, black and white were stipulated for the church and his lying-in-state; and a file of twenty-four men, robed in black, from the weigh-houses. The bells of three spires were to toll, and a thousand poor men to receive alms. Bruges would remember its eminent citizen, Anselm Adorne.

Shriven, ducally sponsored, Adorne had planned to set out in February, and hoped to celebrate Easter in Rome. Seven companions had been invited to ride with him: a chamberlain in holy orders, two merchant kinsfolk, a niece, a monk, a ducal chaplain and an eminent burgess of Bruges. A son was to join at Pavia.

So Nicholas de Fleury was told. He did not know, because the
message did not reach him till later, that when Anselm Adorne finally left, the number of his company had increased by two.

Proceeding in turn, Nicholas de Fleury travelled south from the Tyrol with his metallurgical padre and John. They called, on the way, at some of the mines. They stopped at Bozen, which had a market favoured by Venetian traders. They arrived in Venice in March. Julius sent the Bank’s grand oared boat to Mestre to meet them, and Nicholas saw Father Moriz assessing the silken canopy and the gilding and the carving and the preposterous liveries. Nicholas spoke to the oarsmen, who looked frightened, and then took his place and was silent.

He felt odd. It should have been terrible, this first return to the city he had left two years ago, rich and comforted and full of childish desires. But as the islands beyond Mestre slipped past – Murano, San Michele – and the familiar skyline appeared, with its golden domes and towers and palaces; as the boat skimmed through the winding canal and into the great thoroughfare of water that led to the Rialto and the Bank, he was touched by something like the warmth of the old days, returning to Bruges.

Bruges was no longer home. He had lost Bruges, with everything else. On the other hand, this was a place he had made. He understood, for a moment, the disappointment that lay behind Cristoffels’s stiffness and Gregorio’s past disapproval: disappointment that, having created this astonishing bank which he was entering now, this great mansion full of activity of which he should be the head, he had left it to others to run.

It was being well enough done. Funded as it was, it could hardly help but succeed. It was hardly his fault that he had spent, in his life, less than the makings of one year in Venice. He hadn’t chosen to go to Cyprus. He had had to leave for Africa, or the Bank would have failed. He had never ceased to communicate, except when circumstances made it impossible. The fact was, however, that he had guided it in the main from a distance, and of the people coming to shake his hand now – Padrone! Padrone! – he knew only half.

He understood, but that didn’t mean that he would change the course he had laid down because of it. It was his life he was living, not theirs.

Nevertheless, he arrived, and made himself known, and proceeded to launch a dense programme of work that was to last through the rest of March and the most of the following month. He sat with the clerks, and spent nights with the letter-books and ledgers, Moriz at his shoulder with Cristoffels and Julius. Summoned,
the agents came in from their branches: Florence, Genoa, Milan, Naples, Rome; and he took the patron’s chair behind the big table, his officials beside him, and heard their reports, and asked his questions, and gave his orders.

He was arming the company, as he must, against Adorne. And there was time. Adorne was still on his way. The agents were home, primed and briefed, long before the Baron Cortachy and his train reached their cities. And as Adorne began to pass through, the reports arrived of what he was doing.

He was meeting merchants, that was clear. Many, of course, were related to him. It was also, however, something of a triumphal progress. Anselm Adorne was being greeted, entertained, even fawned upon by the rulers of each republic or duchy he passed through, and was being royally treated.

An early report, hurriedly scribbled, said that he was being represented in some regions as an envoy of the monarch of Scotland. A second message contradicted the first. He carried Burgundian credentials of ambassadorial weight. The chaplain in his party was de Francqueville, one of the Duke of Burgundy’s personal confessors. The report from Milan, sent in the third week in March in a rainstorm, mentioned that the Duke and the Baron had hunted together with leopards. The lady Gelis van Borselen, dame de Fleury, had accompanied the party.

That packet came as Nicholas was leaving for a meeting appointed by the Great Council. He read the letter as the
barchetta
swerved and splashed on its way to St Mark’s and the mallets of the smiths and the shipwrights and the caulkers thundered far off in the sheds of the Arsenal. He wondered, with part of his mind, how well off they might be for timber. John le Grant said, ‘What is it?’

Nicholas folded the paper away. ‘My wife is with Anselm Adorne.’

John le Grant opened his eyes. With the milder weather, the cold sores had gone, and the redness from around the white eyelashes. Oddly, the vigour of the engineer’s manner had also diminished. It was as if he had determined to distance himself from something he feared or distrusted. Now he said only, ‘Your wife is coming here?’

‘Time will tell. At the moment, they’re all on their way to pick up Jan at Pavia.’

Adorne’s oldest son had just completed a jurist’s course at Pavia. From Pavia to Venice was three days by fast boat. It had always been possible that Gelis would circumvent the postponement and
try to join him on terms of her own. She would be angry, too, about Florence. There was, of course, no word of a child.

John said, ‘If she comes, will you take her with us?’

‘I should think she’d find that very unpleasant,’ Nicholas said. ‘Not to mention dangerous. No. She could wait with Julius, if she likes, until we get back.’

It had a feasible ring. Talk of danger was well founded at any rate: the noise from the Arsenal was as significant as it had been six years before, when he had sailed from Venice to Africa, leaving a city going to war.

That time, it had been summer. This time, Easter was late so that the place was filling with pilgrims as well as mercenaries: rich and needy from every nation preparing to go to the Holy Land; finding and hiring a dragoman; buying their mats and jars and chamberpots and feather beds and mattresses and basins; their wax lights and tinder, their salt meat and hen-coops, their locking boxes for money; their trinkets of rings and crosses to take and have blessed. And, in between, visiting shrines and relics; investigating the islands; being conducted through the Arsenal; viewing the Doge; and admiring the elephant trained to dance behind bars.

Soon the poles with their red crosses on white would go up in front of St Mark’s, and they would rush to book their places on the great galleys going to Jaffa: twenty ducats on leaving and twenty ducats on arrival for the privilege of lying a month toe to toe with diseased and vomiting strangers in a hold dimly lit by four hatchways, and crossing a sea menaced with war.

The meeting he was going to had to do with that war: with Sultan Mehmet’s threat to end the Venetian Empire with eighty thousand men and a war fleet of eighteen years’ building. The Doge and Council had stopped asking Nicholas de Fleury to join them in person. He had paid them much of the gold they had asked for, and had lent them the
San Niccolò
and the
Ghost
to join the ships going to Crete: it was up to the Signoria to crew them. He had sent leave, through Julius, for any of their own men who wished to join the Captain-General. The Captain-General was not of the highest competence but Paul Erizzo was, the Venetian commander on the spot.

The Doge had accepted his gold and his ships. Subsequently, he had not only freed Nicholas de Fleury from war service, but allotted him additional privileges by virtue of his forthcoming mission to Egypt. The Doge, too, had been harangued by Ludovico da Bologna.

That, then, was disposed of. And God knew Nicholas didn’t
have to hunt for reasons for not taking Gelis. It irritated him, none the less, to have to prepare for a confrontation. He hadn’t planned to leave until Easter was over, and all the ceremonies that launched the sailing season just after: the Corpus Christi processions, pairing pilgrims with senators; the Marriage of the Sea on Ascension Day, when five thousand ships accompanied the Bucentaur of the Doge to the neck of the Lido, where the Doge cast a ring in the sea and then invoked the Lord’s blessing in the church of St Nicholas, saint beloved of mariners; saint whose power, they claimed, could endow the childless with sons.

He had counted on having weeks more in hand before he joined the
Ciaretti
.

He spent a few short-tempered days. The news, when it came, was brought by a courier from Genoa. Adorne was there with his son and the others. They were proceeding to Rome, and the lady Gelis van Borselen was still with them. The doctor had stopped at Pavia.

‘The doctor? What doctor?’ had said Julius impatiently. This dispatch had been brought to the padrone in his chamber, and after reading it through, Nicholas had called the others to hear.

‘Guess,’ said Nicholas. ‘Who is the expectant nephew of Giammatteo Ferrari, the wealthiest professor of medicine in Pavia? Who has managed to achieve a free trip to see his frail uncle, and perhaps even view his frail uncle’s printing presses?’

‘Tobias Beventini?’ said John le Grant. He eyed Nicholas.

‘Tobie?’ said Julius. ‘I thought he disliked his uncle.’

‘He doesn’t dislike his uncle’s library,’ Nicholas said. ‘And the old man’s own children are dead.’ He glanced at Father Moriz. ‘You met our Tobie. He nursed Father Godscalc’