He let himself be taken off and sent home, still hiccoughing weakly. So he did not hear the major domo make his announcement, in Latin followed by Greek. My lords, ladies and gentlemen, pray honour the Despoina Zoe Palaeologina, niece of Constantine, lately Imperator Constantinopolitanus; honour the prince Andrew Palaeologus, Despot of the Morea; and honour the prince Manuel Palaeologus, his brother.
‘Jan thought she was your lover. Do you have a lover?’ said Nerio to Julius.
‘None of your business,’ said Julius, choking. There were tears in his eyes. The lady had begun, in a stately way, to make a circuit of the far end of the room. He said, ‘She’s just been painted for Muscovy. Do you think the panel was big enough?’
‘All princesses are beautiful,’ murmured Michael Alighieri, joining them. ‘All paintings proclaim it. All envoys call them so, for fear some turn of the political wheel may make it necessary to believe it. All speak of Catherine Corner as an angel of pulchritude: you have probably seen her. And before you call it hypocrisy, Patriarch, recall how you fumed long ago over that stinking Greek turncoat, Zoe’s father. But now she is a valuable pawn, is she not, in your game?’
‘Poor Ivan. Poor Zacco,’ said Julius. He began to laugh again, very quietly.
‘Holy Church,’ said Father Ludovico, ‘does not have recourse to pawns. Here is the Cardinal. He will tell you. The lady is the Pope’s beloved daughter in Christ. On the day she marries Duke Ivan of Muscovy, she will draw the worth of her dowry and more from the returns of the Tolfa alum mines. So the papal alum will pay for the downfall of the infidel. And should the Golden –’
‘Enough,’ said Cardinal Bessarion. ‘This lady lives under my roof, and will be respected. Master Julius, you have leave.’
Julius flushed. He said, ‘Monsignore. I have to apologise for Adorne. He is young.’
‘He is not helped,’ the Cardinal said, ‘by his friends. I should like you to retire. This reception in any case is nearly over except for my private guests. I shall send for you presently, when I have a communication about banking matters. Patriarch, a word.’
The two men paced off. Julius, still scarlet, smoothed his doublet and began to move to the door. Nerio walked with him. ‘But it was worth it!’ said Nerio. ‘Poor boy, it was worth it! I suppose there is nothing for him but the Bishop of St Andrews? He looked very glum.’
‘There never was anything for him but the Bishop of St Andrews,’ Julius said. ‘He’ll have to make the best of it, like everyone else. That’s my cloak. It’s still raining.’
‘So it is. Which way do you go?’ Nerio said.
‘Not in your direction,’ said Julius.
There were fifteen taverns in the centre of Rome. Jan began with the Sun, which was just off the Campo de’ Fiori, and worked his way through the rest until he began to distrust his legs. Then he returned to the hospice and, taking a razor, bloodily hacked off his beard.
Julius walked in the rain until he was sure Nerio was quite out of sight; then he held his sword down and ran to the Casa Niccolò. He took the shortest way, which meant the most crowded, looking all the time from side to side without seeing anyone he knew. He passed within sight of the Palazzo San Marco and a number of taverns, but Jan Adorne had long since gone from his mind. His cloak was soaked and his boots and fine hose were stinking with mud. As he came near the Canale, the rain stopped, and a watery sun touched the overlapping red roofs and the white loggias of the international money market of Rome: the foreign banks with their strange food and odd tongues and busy, busy counting-houses.
Outside the pale portico with its vines, he saw a magpie flash of the Niccolò colours: Lazzarino had set someone to look for him. Julius increased his pace. By the time he arrived, Lazzarino himself had come out. He looked composed, but called across with a little more emphasis than was customary. ‘Our client has arrived. She did not wish to trouble the Cardinal, and preferred to wait for you. I have placed her in the garden chamber to rest.’
Julius nodded. Shedding his cloak, he saw a manservant he knew in the room with his porter, and smiled at him as he passed. There was no sign of anyone else. Julius walked through the house.
The garden chamber was small, and during winter was closed off from the loggia, although the garden could still be admired through glass. The light from the sun, weak and low, touched the windows to gold, and rimmed the hair of the woman who rose at once as he entered. Her face was lost in the dimness, but he smelled her scent, and heard, in the stillness, the sound of her faint, exact breathing.
Then he whispered, ‘Anna!’ and crossed; and threw himself at her feet.
Chapter 17
NEWS FROM ROME travelled badly in winter: it would be two months before Nicholas, in Scotland, learned all that Julius and Lazzarino in their separate ways would send to tell him of these events, and at least as long before he would hear from Gregorio. The Bank had to put up with these delays, as had its competitors. Dispatches, although out of date, arrived in Edinburgh that autumn in the usual steady stream: in repressive mood from Achille in Alexandria; from an agitated agent in Damascus; from Paris and Orléans and Lyons; from Lisbon and Valencia and, nearer at hand and much more recent, from Diniz in Bruges and certain unspecified persons in Antwerp, London and Newcastle, as well as from Tom Yare in Berwick and from Eric Mowat, moved discreetly from Copenhagen to Bergen.
Nicholas read them at night, when his work on the Nativity Play had temporarily ceased, for the business of the Bank had to go on. When the wax-wrapped duplicate ledgers arrived in their regular satchel, he rarely let a day dawn by without opening and studying them – and for their style, as well as their contents. Things changed quickly. Men changed quickly. A new wife, a new mistress, a bereavement, a quarrel; men were human, and nature enforced its priorities. And hence the reports upon which his business depended – the situation, problems, intentions of powerful men – might be incomplete, or unintentionally biased. Or intentionally so. There was that to beware of, as well.
In between the dispatches came other communications: sometimes testy personal scrawls; sometimes carefully penned lines with many abbreviations, displaying the grand seals of abbeys and duchies. These were borne as a rule by persons who had come to Scotland by licence to work until Yule: difficult men and cantankerous persons for the most part; artistic, flamboyant persons such as Nicholas had loved ever since he was Claes, and whom Gelis detested.
Laying his careless, extravagant plans for a careless and extravagant Mystery, Nicholas had always envisaged bringing artists from overseas, although equally he intended to sequester all the talent – or even the non-talent – he could discover in Scotland, and spend time on giving it classes.
Now he had been proffered a challenge. A small affirmation of the immortal status of man had taken place: a work of music created which represented the supreme endeavours of one gifted idiot and his friends. Nicholas was morally bound to do no less for them. A Pasche Play was out of the question – he would not be here for Easter. Therefore the royal Nativity Play must be his test piece, his offering.
Instead of ten months to prepare it, less than four, including the work he had already half done. Instead of a week-long performance with half-trained actors, and amateur craftsmen, a performance of one afternoon, to which would be brought painters, sculptors, carpenters from Bruges and Lille and Brussels and Tournai; scribes who could copy sixty pages a day; tailors who were accustomed to dressing an Entry at speed; men who trained men to walk like young women; men who made wigs for God. That did not take account of the materials which had already come and which continued to come in the holds of hired ships.
Only he did not need an engineer or a Master of Secrets, for he had John and himself. And he did not need a master craftsman, for Cochrane was that. And he did not need musicians, for he had the core of the new Chapel Royal with Whistle Willie at its heart and its head.
For all the people around Nicholas – those who feared him, or loved him, or were anxious for
him – that autumn in Edinburgh was a strange one. In the Castle the King, having commissioned the Play, watched his own dearest plans take second place to a spectacle. Silent, obedient, barren, the Queen saw it as well. Without M. de Fleury’s financial reserves and sympathetic encouragement, James was not likely to leave her this spring to become a second Alexander. His brother Mar sulked, and jeered at the painter who came to take a likeness of the King for a placard. The King, annoyed at the jeering, had dismissed the artist after a sitting of no more than ten minutes but, being ingenious, the fellow found another rough sketch at the moneyers’.
In the Casa Niccolò in the Canongate it was the same. Govaerts, as ever, controlled the business, but admitted to himself it was less stressful when Nicholas was abroad than when he was physically present but almost wholly engaged in other concerns.
Nor was it better when John le Grant and Father Moriz arrived, angered at the interruption in their difficult programme. All that was left in full swing was the boatbuilding, which de Fleury wasn’t crazed enough so far to compromise. John however had to abandon his guns and replace them with quite different mechanisms and finicky castings: hours of concentrated fine work for the benefit of a Christmas playlet. Being John, he presently took fire and would have refused to do anything else. Moriz, suspended between the true God and one made of hide-covered clay, took longer to become reconciled, being disturbed by both his own conscience and suspicions of Nicholas. Meanwhile the business did without both of them. Only the goldsmith, who always worked directly to Nicholas, appeared wholly happy.
Archibald, Abbot of Holyrood, was happy because he was an able, energetic man who didn’t mind his entire yard being dug up and remade to hold a long rectangular platform with a stand of seats on two sides, and an end which was fixed to the porch of the Abbey. Beneath the yard was positioned a network of rooms, pits and tunnels, some of them filled with machinery. Above it were workshops. Sometimes Abbot Crawford would make his way there after matins just to smell and look at the pigments: sinople and cinders of azure, verjus and brown of Auxerre. There were two pounds of vermilion, at seven shillings the pound. And all the scenery was painted on vellum, not paper; so that nothing could buckle or flake. His highly numerate intelligence kept track of some of the costs.
He was content that the money was being spent in his yard (with the promise of permanent compensatory improvements). The more money the King lavished on this, the less there would be for any nonsense such as leading armies to France. Duke Charles had just made a pact against France with his new allies England and Aragon. It was not a bad thing that de Fleury was here, and Adorne, the other Burgundian. God forbid that Charles of Burgundy should surround himself with clever men.
When the actors were chosen and the rehearsals began, advertised by the clang of the bell, the Abbot lingered to watch the men hurrying to and fro, their rolls under their arms. The rolls so carefully copied in his own cloisters, each man’s part on a strip. Sometimes de Fleury came himself, brandishing the traditional baton of the Protocolle, the man who carries the book of the play and directs it. The Abbot armed himself nowadays for his exchanges with the Burgundian. De Fleury, said Bishop Tulloch – and he agreed – was both a fathomless danger and an ally worth having. It made for stimulating encounters. The virtues of bourgeois cortesía.
The musicians practised where they had begun, in the collegiate church of the Trinity, learning the music as it was written. The singers had been joined by a child of fragile beauty called John, the son of one of the actors who, like his father, appeared on the recommendation of the Abbot of Holyrood. Roger, who suspected everyone’s musical taste but his own, heard the child once, and that night changed three pieces to accommodate him. His sister, equally angelic, was too young to sing but was given a role as a cherub. As for Will Roger himself, his condition varied through all this time between a state of violent happiness and violent anxiety. He forgot to eat, until the nuns noticed and began sending down baskets.
In the High Street of Edinburgh, one of the few mansions unaffected by theatrical madness was that of Anselm Adorne. There, in his office, Adorne quietly conducted his business with the men who slipped in, sometimes after dark, to talk to him or bring him dispatches. Martin of the Vatachino saw him there, or, with discretion, in Martin’s own house in the Cowgate. However occupied he might seem to be, Anselm Adorne did not now underestimate Nicholas de Fleury of the Banco di Niccolò. And neither did his nephew, Sersanders.
His niece Katelijne he preferred not to involve. She was busy enough in all conscience, running to the Prioress’s house and her duties over the street, or to de Fleury’s house to interfere with the Play, or here to sit with Margriet, with or without the two Sinclair cousins, Betha and Phemie. He himself did not impose his presence on that part of the house which was women’s business. All Margriet’s women friends came to see her; the Queen sent small gifts; and the lady Mary, Countess of Arran, sometimes seemed to live in Adorne’s house as much as her own.
There was a more settled look now to the Countess – something of resignation, perhaps; and she had made her peace to some degree with her brother. After the first weeks as guest of de Fleury, she had been allowed to move to the monastery of the Greyfriars, not far away. The children visited one another, and she seemed to prize the company of both Nicholas and his wife. She had also recovered her affection for Margriet. If she had blamed the Adorne family once, she did so no longer.
To her husband, Margriet seemed better. Adorne spent time with her, when the others had gone, and sat hand in hand, and read to her, which she always liked. She had never been interested in music, so he set his own lute aside, and devoted himself to what would please her best. He had brought Dr Andreas to live in the house, just to be sure. She did not speak of Nicholas any more, which was as well.
The house of Nicholas, across the street, was – by his own decree – the centre of the whole enterprise of the Nativity. To it, in the early days, came the groups of powerful merchants, the craft-masters, magistrates, lawyers: the men of title and office whose support, guidance, licences, local knowledge, and participation he was going to need. Later, it was the technicians who came to confer, when the rooms the lady Mary had now vacated became a drawing-office, and the stone-lined chamber whose purpose had never become clear suddenly turned into a storehouse of volatile powders and precious metals beaten into strange shapes.
Gelis had been consulted. It made sense, she supposed, that the Ca’ Niccolò in the Canongate should be left undisturbed, to continue trading in privacy. She herself was an excellent organiser. In a project like this, which was something like planning a war, she could become its quartermaster, handling the accommodation and feeding of the multi-national brood which wandered arguing uphill and down between her house and Holyrood, and even assisting the Abbey to provision the performance itself, when engineers and performers, guards and musicians and the spectators themselves required to have access to food.
What she could not yet guess was why Nicholas was doing it in this way. His own capacity for planning was unquestioned, but so was his instinct for good business. It was clearly useful to dazzle the King and to make a killing from all the Bank was procuring. The rest, however, didn’t make sense: the wholesale dedication to this one little project of the Bank’s senior technicians, and – more wasteful by far – the personal undivided attention of Nicholas the padrone himself.
He had never fully explained it, even at the beginning when, seated uninvited in her room with Jodi self-attached to his knee, he had asked whether she would like to help plan it. All she gathered then was that he had offered to furnish a play, and was now expected to produce one for Christmas. He had sounded, if anything, resigned.
She had resisted involvement at first: it was not any plan of hers to assist him. She changed her mind, in the end, for several reasons. For one thing, the prospect of an early departure of the Boyd family had seemed wonderfully appealing. It also appealed, she observed, to Mistress
Clémence.
Later, she heard rumours of a wager to do with Willie Roger, but she doubted if that was the whole story, or his approach to her that day would have been different. She remembered, for what it was worth, that he had been firmer than usual with Jodi. Except when carried, Jordan de Fleury was not encouraged to put his arms around Nicholas. It was a confiding habit he had, of showing open affection to everybody, and Mistress Clémence did not usually check him, unless she thought him too forward. She did not check him that day, nor intervene, of course, when Nicholas did.
In the weeks that led up to Christmas, Gelis was present at most of the gatherings held in her house. During those meetings she sat, largely silent, watching Nicholas manipulating people: so inoffensively sure; so good-natured; so deeply autocratic. Away from the conference table she watched him handling the staff of her house; and the boy Robin and Archie his father, who dropped in most days; and Jodi’s nurses; and Jodi. The weeks went by and Jodi, whistle in pouch and wearing the large knitted hat from which he would not be parted, wandered talking in English and French from house to garden to workshop, breathing heavily as he drew crosses and windows on two inches of paper with Tom Cochrane’s graphite; standing thumb in mouth watching John le Grant fashion two little wheels in order to make a number of others revolve. He stopped holding his arms to be lifted, and spent less time with his parrot, except for four days when Nicholas was away.
They said Nicholas was divining, and indeed reports confirmed that he had been in the west to fulfil some commission connected with minerals. He took Alonse, but not Robin. Everyone, returning, was very secretive, and she caught the end of a peppery clash between Nicholas and the priest, Father Moriz, who was generally stationed at Holyrood. In divining, obviously, Nicholas was open to rebuke by the Church. It did not seem to disturb him: he looked cheerful, as if glad to have the interruption behind him, and turned the unflagging energy once again upon his labouring colleagues. He spent a little time, as was usual, with Jodi, but made no excuses and gave no appearance of making amends for his absence; after a short, sulking interval, the relationship was as it had been before. Nicholas was an expert with people of any age, and planned for the long term.
To Lie With Lions: The Sixth Book of the House of Niccolo Page 29