To Lie with Lions (91 page)

‘You believed him?’ he said. From the beginning, from his boyhood in Bruges, the Florentine had interfered.

‘No. But you do,’ she said. ‘When you cut yourself loose from your beginnings you became easy prey, didn’t you, to all the so-called magicians? Any strolling astrologer can frighten you. Even without me, you were going to fail.’

‘The way I failed in Venice?’ he said. ‘I took Jodi from you. I can do it again. What if you grind me to powder, and are still left with nothing?’

She said, ‘What do you think I have now? And what would you have? A son with no home and no future, like Mary Boyd’s children?’

There was a silence, which Gelis eventually broke. ‘So have we reached a conclusion, despite the condition of one of us? We meet at the end of December: the war ends; one of us will capitulate. Meantime, I am to take Jodi to Venice?’

He roused himself with an effort. ‘You will be safer. Crackbene will escort you. I have my service to Burgundy; you can join me there in the autumn.’

She said, ‘You would leave Jodi for so long?’

Nicholas said, ‘He is older now. He knows us both well. I shall write.’

‘And you will have me watched,’ she remarked.

‘As always,’ he answered. ‘It is you who placed us on a footing of war. You have money. You are free to have me followed, to employ whom you like. Only don’t hurt Gregorio.’

‘I am sorry,’ she said. ‘But Gregorio is the Bank. And the Bank is you.’

‘I thought it was also Jodi,’ he said.

He left very soon after.

In his room was a letter in Greek. It was the third such he had had; Govaerts knew by now to leave it unslit. He broke open the seal.

Come. Come. For love of me, come
.

It was unsigned. It was addressed to the lord Nikko.

Part V

May, 1473
VOLERIES

Chapter 43

A
MAN OF HONOUR
, recently weighing the claims of two friends, Tobias Beventini had soberly set need against need, and had chosen.

Nicholas de Fleury chose at once, with his heart. Then, being Nicholas, he set about making his choice not only desirable, but mandatory.

He was aided, he was not unaware, by fortuitous happenings in Burgundy. He went there to free himself, and found himself already free. He left the Duke, left Astorre, left Diniz and Moriz in Bruges and, travelling fast with only one servant, arrived in Venice in May, only three days behind the cavalcade of his wife, his son and his doctor.

Cristoffels, staggered to see him, had to admit, in his incoherence, that none of the household was here: Master Gregorio and his guests had taken fowling-boats north to the lagoon, where the Bank owned an islet with lodges.

They were still in the boats when the
bissona
swept up in all its glittering splendour and the padrone stepped into the craft containing Margot, Gelis and the two children. Jodi screamed. Gelis whitened. The vessel dipped. The
bissona
, professionally detached, proceeded to the small island jetty and began to unload. Glasses winked, and a damask cloth floated over the sun. Nicholas said,
‘Mon fils
, what were you aiming at?’

‘That,’ said Jodi, letting him go. He had been bending a very small bow at a water hen. At his feet was a bowl of clay balls.

Nicholas said, ‘No, no. The bird would object. It is much more amusing to shoot people. See. Dr Tobias, Master Gregorio in the next boat. You might even reach –’

‘My lord?’ said Mistress Clémence.

‘Or,’ said Nicholas, ‘it might be even better to throw them. You take these balls, and I shall take these. There! A hit!’

The balls were only made of light terracotta, and most of them missed, but Tobie was clipped all round the head until he dragged off his cap and pleaded for mercy. The show of alarm was for Jodi and Jaçon but his voice, when Nicholas disembarked at his side on the islet, was edged. ‘Do you mind not doing that again? Why are you here?’

‘It would have been worse with the bows,’ Nicholas said. ‘You would really have felt it with the bows. I wasn’t needed at Court. The truce is being extended, the English aren’t sending an army, and the Duke is deeply embroiled with making himself the next Duke of Guelders.’

Plates were arriving, and food. Trestles fronted the elegant cabins. Benches were being brought out, and armfuls of cushions. It was like Linlithgow all over again, except that it was happening in sunlight, on the reeded shore of a limitless pool, and everything within sight belonged to him, and him only.

Gregorio said, ‘I thought King James was claiming Guelders because of his mother.’

‘I pleaded his case,’ Nicholas said. ‘But the Duke is a very hard man to convince. He wanted the land to help make up a new kingdom. Now he may do even better than that. The Emperor Frederick is making signals again.’

Gregorio said, ‘Keep your voice down.’

‘What signals?’ said Tobie.

‘He wants his boy Maximilian to marry the Duke’s daughter, Marie. In return – maybe – he’ll make the Duke King of the Romans, halfway house to becoming next Emperor of the Germanies. And further in return – maybe – he’ll abdicate one day and allow the Duke to become Emperor. You should know all that. You ought to be finding and treating a monarch with piles. Find a patient with piles, and no inside information will escape you. Although, of course, you did treat Urbino. What did he have? Marsh-fever, wasn’t it?’

Gregorio said, ‘So what does this mean for the Bank? Nicholas?’

‘It means I don’t sell so many secrets to France,’ Nicholas said. ‘We keep Julius in Cologne, and Crackbene’s friends in Utrecht, and I cultivate all those charming officers of the Emperor whom I met in the Tyrol. Cardinal Bessarion talked to Frederick about us.’

‘So did the Patriarch of Antioch,’ said Gregorio. ‘The Emperor will suspect we are resuming our interest in the East.’

‘So we are, temporarily,’ Nicholas said. It was easy.

Gelis was standing before him. ‘Why are you here?’

‘That’s what I was about to explain. Because I’m going to Cyprus,’ Nicholas said. Jodi tugged at his doublet.

Gregorio said, ‘What for, in God’s name? The spring attack on the Sultan is launched; the fleet has gone; the Venetian arms are on their way to Uzum Hasan and the Turcoman army.’

‘Paid for by our stolen gold,’ Nicholas said. The gold, pirated on its way home from Africa, was being claimed by the Knights of St John.

Gregorio said, ‘Julius is on his way to plead that case now. You sent him yourself.’

‘Then perhaps I should join him,’ Nicholas said. ‘Rhodes is only two days from Cyprus. Yes, Jodi. I have observed that you are there. You shall sit beside me, and Mistress Clémence will tell us what you may eat.’

‘And what you may eat,’ Jodi said.

‘No doubt,’ Nicholas said. ‘No doubt I shall be force-fed with something before the day is much older.’

Two days later he left, taking Alonse; and accompanied Mick Crackbene and a pallid-faced Tobie in a hard, brilliant sail of twenty-six days down the Gulf of Venice, and east to the farthest end of the Middle Sea.

He had been force-fed with many reasons for not going: the only one that had given him pause was Jodi’s face. Gelis had said nothing. He had promised her a resolution this year in the West, and he had reaffirmed the agreement. Only, on the eve of his departure, she had come to him as he stood on the balcony and said, ‘Would you take me with you to Cyprus?’

The light from the water slipped over her skin and her hair and her breast, and made two translucent points of her eyes.

He said, ‘How dare you? How dare you, after Famagusta?’ He stood, breathing quickly, staring after her as she left.

He gave a different answer when Tobie put the same question later that night, in his room. Then, Nicholas lay in his own high-backed chair and contemplated the deep coffered ceiling and said, ignoring the question, ‘Did you put something into my drink? Why am I tired?’

‘Because you’ve seen the boy again, and don’t want to leave him,’ Tobie said. ‘Zacco has called you, I think.’

He supposed it wasn’t a very hard guess. He said, ‘Either Zacco, or David de Salmeton.’

It was quite athletic, the way Tobie sat up. ‘That little whore!’

‘That extremely able agent of the Vatachino, currently occupying a position at Zacco’s right hand, or even possibly at both Zacco’s hands.’

Tobie digested that. He said, ‘But Zacco has a queen now. I mean he’s married to Catherine Corner and she’s pregnant.’ He stopped again and said, ‘Or is all this in reality about David de Salmeton? He half drowned you in Cairo, and you propose to gratify yourself by making him pay for it?’

‘You were closer the first time,’ Nicholas said. ‘I don’t think the message was false. I think it was real. Do you want to come with me?’

‘No,’ said Tobie. ‘But I will.’

At first glance, James de Lusignan, King of Jerusalem, Cyprus and Armenia, seemed unchanged; nine years after their first meeting, the febrile beauty, the loose waving hair and measuring eyes still stopped the heart. He wore light, expensive French dress; he might equally have chosen Arab or Neapolitan or Venetian attire, or have received Nicholas in the old way, casually naked, half killing some horse. They were the same age. Today he was seated on his throne in his palace of Nicosia, and something was wrong.

The surroundings were the same. Gold had been lavished on the royal apartments in recent years. Nicholas had noticed it three years ago on the brief visit which had seemed, then, to confirm his Bank’s share in the Crusade: the promise of an alliance with Zacco and Cairo, Venice and Rhodes which would have placed him at the spearhead of this attack on the Turk.

It had not happened, because of Gelis and his son. He had assumed he had Zacco’s hatred, as he had received the vituperation of Ludovico da Bologna and Rhodes. He had mollified Venice with money and with his ships. It was as well, because Venice was here now in strength. Not the little Queen, seven months pregnant and unwelcome, he guessed, to Zacco’s fastidious eye. But all those Venetian noblemen whom Zacco had also married, his feline eyes open, his claws sheathed, because he had no alternative. He could fall to the Turk or to Venice. He had chosen Venice.

The King said, ‘My lord of Beltrees. I am told this is your title. I am sure you have earned it. To what do I owe this great honour?’

Zacco’s own language was French, or else Greek. He understood the tongue of his overlord of Egypt and Syria. He was speaking now in Venetian patois, the coarsened slur impressively accurate. Someone shifted behind him: the battle-scarred swarthy person of his Sicilian Chancellor, Rizzo di Marino. The Catalans and Sicilians of Zacco’s close inner circle had a better measure of the Venetian temper than had Zacco. For Zacco, there were seldom any half-measures: life was a stallion to be ridden bareback, kill or be killed, for the ecstasy. It was one of the reasons he and Nicholas had always understood one another.

Nicholas said, ‘Sire, last time I called, you were gracious enough to lend me a horse. Since I was passing, I brought another, to replace it. Also a white gyrfalcon from Iceland.’

‘Since you were passing?’

Nicholas said, ‘My notary has some business in Rhodes: a legal quibble which requires our attention. I merely wished to repay my debt, and congratulate your magnificence on your marriage to the lady Catherine Corner.’

‘Catherine Véneta,’ said the King. ‘The Queen has been adopted by the Republic. She is a Daughter of St Mark. The Bishop of Turin, a contemptible fool, has quipped that he never heard that St Mark had been married.’

‘A contemptible and an ignorant fool,’ Nicholas said. ‘Of course he was married. How could a man be a saint, who has fathered a child outside matrimony?’

‘We must discuss it some time,’ said the King. ‘It will please us to inspect this horse and this bird in the morning. We may decide to go hunting.’

‘I should be honoured, roi monseigneur,’ Nicholas said.

Outside the audience chamber, seeking Tobie, he moved from group to group of men he had known: all guarded, all nervously welcoming. There were other men who did not approach him, some of them strangers. Among them was one face he could never forget: oval, cleft-chinned and delicate, with lustrous dark eyes and dark hair. The man had a page at his side, and both smelled of jasmine. Nicholas walked across.

‘I hoped,’ said David de Salmeton, ‘that you would come to me. Zacco is so very much married these days that life has become perfectly tedious. You have left the lovely Gelis behind?’

‘Are you still interested?’ Nicholas said. ‘I must tell her. Perhaps you should change places with Martin. But you would hardly expect her to break off with King James on your account. And Martin might not do so well here. I believe the Vatachino are positively flourishing in Cyprus and Rhodes. And, of course, Anselm Adorne.’

‘It was kind of you to desert the field. I fear,’ de Salmeton said, ‘that it is too late to forge an opening now. They have even given me the Kouklia sugarfields.’

‘And, I trust, some of the vineyards,’ Nicholas said. ‘And a ship to replace the
Unicorn?
All that exquisite claret. I did have some regrets about that.’

‘It sank off La Rochelle,’ de Salmeton said.

‘But they saved me a bottle,’ Nicholas said. ‘I have it for you in my luggage. Too late to forge an opening, you think? Perhaps we should
see.’ He nodded and walked away, followed by the eyes of the boy. He wondered, as he often wondered, what he would do without Crackbene.

It had been obvious from the moment of his arrival that he was not going to be lodged in the Palace, and he had sent Alonse to make arrangements with the Venetian Bailie. It would have been correct – and he wished to be correct – for Messer Pasqualigo to invite him to stay. Instead, he found himself escorted, with Tobie, to the palatial villa next door, with which he was very familiar.

Tobie said, ‘Isn’t this where you went to your meeting three years ago? Isn’t this where the Queen’s Venetian family lives?’