Caprice and Rondo (39 page)

That afternoon, as the business had reached its conclusion, Kathi had made her own pilgrimage through the town, along the clamorous wharves and below the creaking wheels of the Crane, up the broad market street past the Artushof; over the ground trembling with the force of the
Ordensmuehle
. Past the church of St Nicholas, from which a cheerful Scots voice issued to hail her, and into the cathedral with its great astronomical clock, telling the phases between wars.

She called on the houses she knew, and sat in the shade of their orchards, where once she had trodden in snow, and related all the gossip of Thorn. All of them wished to know about Colà. All were surprised at the news, although none could match the intensity of her own relief, when she first heard it. ‘He is going to Persia! And escorting a young married woman for part of the way! Would her husband not object?’

She explained about the Patriarch, whose household Anna would join. She explained about Julius, now slowly recovering, but was vague about the source of his hurt. It should not have surprised her, calling on Elzbiete, to find that Elzbiete already knew.

Paúel Benecke’s daughter had lost none of her bulk, nor her forthrightness. Hugging Kathi in welcome; exclaiming in rapture at the news of her forthcoming child, Elzbiete was uncompromising in her opinion of Nicholas. ‘Of course, he shot the fool to have the wife for himself. She is the woman who bought half his ship, but hasn’t yet paid for it? My father would have done just the same. But you are not displeased? The story I told you has helped? We agreed that Colà should leave, and even that a woman might coax him. Maybe you chose the woman yourself?’

‘He knew her already,’ Kathi said. ‘And it isn’t quite as you think. She’ll take care of him.’

‘Like Gerta,’ said Elzbiete.

‘Yes. No,’ Kathi said. She laughed. ‘Just accept it’s a good thing. What about your father?’

‘What about him? He is on the high seas, stealing something, no doubt. He was angry with Colà; then he set to planning what they will do when he comes back. Will he come back, Katarzynka?’ Elzbiete said.

‘He might come back to Poland, but I don’t think he will sail with your father. I think that is over,’ said Kathi. ‘Your father will find someone less wild.’

‘He liked Colà,’ said Elzbiete. ‘They would have killed each other, but he liked him. Now he will die of drinking instead.’

T
HAT
NIGHT
, lying still in his arms, Kathi touched Robin’s cheek. ‘I don’t want to leave Poland.’

‘You must.’

‘Of course. I know’ They had talked for a long time of the coming child. Thinking of her own childhood and Robin’s, of her uncle’s pride and love of his family; thinking of what Nicholas had undergone, and of what Elzbiete had told her of her father — abandoned, brought up at sea, condemned to search all his life for a companion — she had realised that she must bear her child at home; that she had been wrong to think of anything else. Then she thought of her answer to Elzbiete’s question. Nicholas would not rejoin Paúel Benecke, she had said.

She thought that was true. The winter of desperation was over, and something must now take its place. Fate was carrying Nicholas where the Patriarch always intended to have him, and Christendom might get some good of it by mistake. She knew, as well as the Patriarch, that he had chosen to go for no spiritual reason. The Patriarch would assign the credit to Anna, but it was Elzbiete who had supplied the real lure: the secret that Kathi herself had sent Nicholas. The whispers about some lost gold, and a Spaniard, and a trail that led to the pirate haunts of the Black Sea around Caffa.

He might find his gold. He might create a merchant empire in Caffa, Circassia, Trebizond. He might settle in Poland. He might never find wealth, but still discover a purpose. And at least the journey itself would separate him from the dangerous life he was living. Although time had taken care of some of that. Benecke had gone, and Julius would lead no one astray for a while.

Robin was stroking her arm, his cheek on her shoulder. He treated her breathlessly now, as if she would bruise under his touch. She ran her
fingers lovingly over his skin, to give him leave. She said, ‘Julius. We’ll have to tell Gelis. Shan’t we?’

His head moved. Then he said, ‘You don’t really think he meant to kill Julius?’

She said, ‘He sometimes loses control when he’s goaded. He blames himself afterwards.’

‘I know he blames himself,’ Robin said. ‘It was his fault, and he was trying to say so. But he wasn’t upset when it happened. They were
laughing
.’

‘So we tell Gelis it was an accident?’

His hand had moved lower. He said with sudden half-genuine annoyance, ‘How did Gelis get into bed with us anyway?’

After that, because she had invited him, everything became rather pleasant and serious. But before her thoughts turned away, her mind heard again the drugged cry that contradicted all Robin’s fine theory.

‘I am sorry,’ Nicholas had been driven to plead, although not to her. ‘I am sorry. I am sorry.’

Not to her; for he had not used her tongue. He had spoken in the language of Homer, and of the great poet-librarian of Alexandria whose follower he had known, it seemed, for so long. He had reverted to the speech of the ruined empire to which he was returning, and of the man, also lost, in the end, who had belonged there. It was their forgiveness he had asked for, not hers.

Part II
CIRCASSIAN CIRCLE

Chapter 13

A
RRIVING
IN
V
ENICE
that summer, Caterino Zeno paid an enjoyable visit to his wife Violante, a lucrative one to the Doge and Senate whose servant he was, and lastly, with the mixture of opportunism and malice for which he was noted, directed his barge to the Bank called Ca’ Niccolò where, landing, he enquired for the lady Egidia van Borselen of Beltrees. He was amused, lingering in the ornate marble hall, to hear from somewhere behind and outside the competing voices of very young children.

The message, conveyed to the counting-house, was received by Gregorio, the Bank’s long-time director. He did not immediately take it to his new partner. Instead, withdrawing to assume his lawyer’s silk robe and black cap, he took a moment to think, while sending to have the man taken aside, and offered a dish of fruit and some wine.

He needed to think, if Zeno had brought news of Nicholas de Fleury. For eight months now, by silent consensus, he and the others struggling to uphold the integrity of the Bank had taught themselves to envisage Nicholas as not only departed but dead, his ostracism regretted only by his army captain and Julius, neither of whom had any particular grasp of business morality, and by his son, who was too young to understand.

The arrival in Venice of Nicholas’s wife and son Jodi had taken place in December, just as letters of warning about Nicholas were arriving from Trèves. Gregorio had greeted the beautiful Gelis with extreme caution verging on panic, and had been confused but relieved to see his own wife receive her with sympathy. Margot knew Gelis better than he did, and he trusted her judgement. And then, to reassure him a fraction more, it turned out that Gelis had come with the company doctor. Tobias Beventini might have turned his back for good upon Nicholas, but he had reached other conclusions about Gelis. ‘She was obsessed. She forced him to compete against her in business, and she feels responsible for the way he elected to win. She wants to help put it right.’

Gregorio thought of his letters. He said, ‘I understood she was selling his plans to his rivals.’

‘She secretly joined them,’ Tobie had said. ‘She told Nicholas that to his face on that bloody day of reckoning between them at Trèves. She did it to win their God-awful contest and found, when they’d finished tearing one another to bits, that she’d failed because he was more ruthless than she was. At any rate, she’s not likely to try it again. After what he did, she left Nicholas, and she couldn’t return to the Vatachino if she wanted to. As it is, she’s done the opposite. She’s written down all their trading secrets for you, and she’s willing to invest her own money to replace something of what Nicholas squandered. If you want, she’ll stay and help with the business. She’s had some experience.’

‘I know she has,’ Gregorio had said. ‘But might she not want to use it to finish the Bank, as she has finished with Nicholas?’

And Tobie had listened, his cap dragged off and his balding scalp gleaming, and had said simply, ‘She is offering a large sum of money. Take it. Make no promises. And see what she does.’

And what she had done was prove herself, bit by bit, to be almost as able as Nicholas. She could deal with the minutiae of running a company — she had shown as much in the short spells she had already spent in their branches: with Julius in Cologne, Diniz in Bruges, Jooris at Antwerp and here in Venice with himself. She had displayed it, there was no doubt, with Father Moriz and Govaerts during the term of the Bank’s stay in Scotland. And what she had done for the Vatachino was evidence of another kind.

It was apparent also that she was a strategist: that rare person who could absorb and analyse current events, and construct from these a policy for the future. She did not have Nicholas’s instant comprehension of numbers. She did not have his imagination: the intuition that took the facts and drew from them some project so unlikely that only Nicholas could have thought of it. But she was, she proved over and over, prodigiously gifted, hard-working, and beyond every doubt trustworthy in all that she did. And all those hours when she was not in the bureau, or representing the Bank in the Republic, she was to be found with her son and his nurse.

Venice had learned to admire her. Gregorio himself had eventually accepted her, with the others’ approval, as a working partner of his Bank. And from Margot his wife he knew that the joint household was running in harmony and that, one day, even the nurseries might blend. His own son was nearly three, but Jodi was three years older than that, and had found himself separated from a father to whom, Gregorio had been astonished to discover, he seemed to have been deeply attached. The best remedy for that was the constant attention of his mother, which for the
first time, perhaps, he now had. Soon the memory of his father would fade and then (said his excellent nurse) he would welcome a small friend such as Jaçon.

The Bank was slowly climbing the path to recovery. Nicholas’s wife and his son had found a haven. The ugly wound left by his perfidy had been forcibly stanched and bundled out of sight, and the small group of folk he had deceived, now scattered, were methodically remaking their lives. And now Caterino Zeno had come to disturb them.

Well, thought Gregorio, let him come. Six months ago, it might have been different. But now, surely, they were secure. He settled his gown and was calling a servant when Gelis herself appeared at the door of his chamber. She said, ‘They tell me Caterino Zeno has called.’

She looked composed. She had always been slender, and for a few weeks in the winter had appeared sufficiently etiolated to cause Margot anxiety. Then she had regained her strength, and was now much as he remembered her when she and Nicholas had become lost in the ecstatic affair which had led to their marriage. Gregorio had never quite known how Nicholas achieved his legendary successes with women. But it was clear to him how this pale golden girl had become his wife: the surface coolness did not always conceal what lay beneath.

But now, she heard him in silence and then said, ‘He will have news of Nicholas, and wants to see how we receive it. Shall I see him alone, or will you come and support my performance?’ Her eyes were sea-blue, and smiling.

Gregorio said, ‘It may be bad news.’

And Gelis looked at him and said, ‘But we have already had all the bad news, have we not?’

H
OWEVER
SPLENDID
HIS
DRESS
, or skilled his barber, or devoted his masseur, a man who has spent nearly three years in the Levant will bear the mark of it for many weeks after, never mind one single day. Caterino Zeno, springing to his feet as his quarry entered the room, had the weatherbeaten skin and nervous energy of a traveller who, even yet, has not shaken off the need to be wary; but his eyes, scanning Gregorio and his fair companion, were bright. It was Caterino Zeno’s cleverness, his curiosity and some would say his cheerful heartlessness that made him such an excellent ambassador for his city.

He thought again, kissing her hand, what a lovely woman Gelis van Borselen was, and that she would not long remain single, even in this uxorious household under the good Gregorio of Asti and his suspicious regard. Her marriage with de Fleury had failed, one supposed, because of the undoubted misconduct on either side. It occurred to Zeno, sitting, to
wonder whether she suspected that de Fleury had been the lover of his own exquisite wife Violante. He himself was reasonably sure, but had not pushed Violante into admitting it. She had given him his legitimate heir, his handsome young Pietro, and he had his own compensations — a pretty daughter, for example, born in Georgia three years ago. Violante had said nothing of that, any more than he did of Nerio. They lived in a civilised world.

Now, he gave himself the pleasure of delaying his news, asking first after the lady’s child, and Gregorio’s family, and the fortunes of the Bank, now it had divided under its managers. Responding freely to questions, he described with attractive modesty his years in Persia at the warlike Court of the Turcoman prince, and the successes he had achieved in the name of the Lion of St Mark, for this dear Republic, so generous to all those who helped her. And finally, he related how he had returned —with such travail! through such danger! — by way of the Kingdom of Poland. His news from Poland, indeed, was the occasion for his trespassing thus on their hospitality. But someone had to be told. A double tragedy. And who would have guessed?

Surprisingly, it was the lawyer, Gregorio, who paled. The girl — the woman, she was in her late twenties — had weighed him up sooner, and, dropping her eyes to her lap, had shown no immediate sign of alarm. Only at the end, looking up, she spoke before her companion could do so.