The Spring of the Ram: The Second Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

  By that time, the presence of a veiled midget (with dog) in Pagano Doria’s house was known to Nicholas, for the simple reason that he had the house watched. The woman didn’t interest him in the least. The plans of Pagano Doria towards the Charetty company were another matter. He was watchful in other ways too. The round ship was already manned, and its cargo was different from his. There was no rivalry there. But when he came to choose his own command and his crew, he tried to ensure that Doria was connected with none of them. And he took the best advisers—the Martelli, the Neroni, the Corbinelli—to help him find the men he wanted, down to the caulkers and carpenters.

  The threat of mischief, however slight, however whimsical, helped him a little by drawing his own group together. It also disguised the real problems. One of them had been, of course, defined already by Julius. Nicholas’s position as leader was so far purely formal. He had the nominal power. He was married to Marian. He had ideas they respected and welcomed. But all he possessed, so far as anyone knew, was a freakish ability for intricate planning, and numbers. It had got him into chilling trouble already, and not even Marian believed him perfectly capable of controlling it. He knew very well that this was why Tobie and Julius were haunting his steps. They were the watchdogs. Whatever he did with his numbers, he was not to use them to kill people he knew. A fair bargain.

  So, he had to show what he could do, both in his measures against Pagano Doria, and in the whole elephantine problem of equipping and launching a maritime trading expedition: a matter about which he knew precisely nothing. The miraculous thing was that, as soon as he started, he became so carried away that he forgot about impressing anybody. And did not know that, of all things, it was his rocketing high spirits that swept the other men with him.

  He bought experts, and stripped them bare with his questions. But he also sought to learn at first hand himself. People enjoyed teaching him. He took advice from everybody. He spent a day in the dry dock at Pisa, talking to carpenters. He inspected the mature wood stocks in the citadel, and watched the new-felled timber floating down on the Arno (the storms were coming at last), and tried his hand at the planes and the saws. He examined canvas.

  He peered into ovens and had long talks with bakers and soapboilers. He had dusty conversations with masons. He spoke to old men with warped hands and learned how to ram cargo. He found the wine-shops that seamen favoured, and sat and drank and ate liver-sausage and talked about weather and currents and landing-places, gaming-houses and brothels. He learned who took bribes in what harbours. He found out about the universal war between oarsmen and mariners, and useful tips about useful accidents, such as how to throw a man overboard in the night.

  He had himself invited to supper with men who had farms in the country, and helped with the wine-making. He did a lot of comradely sampling before he chose the kegs he would carry to sell, and the kegs for his crew, and the special barrels for presents and bribery, and arranged for the pigs and hens and cattle and sheep he’d need for the first few days of the journey. He found a cook at a party after a cockfight, and a trumpeter at a wedding. He talked to Monna Alessandra about silk.

  He began, of course, with other things. He learned that Monna Alessandra had been less than thirty when Matteo Strozzi her husband died in exile, leaving her with her five little children, of whom her two living sons were exiled still. To foster the careers of her sons, she had sold piece by piece all Matteo’s farms and houses and vineyards, leaving her with this pitiful home of fewer than ten little chambers. Her oldest son, a very genius, worked for his father’s cousin in Naples. Lorenzo, poor boy, was unhappy in Bruges. The demoiselle de Charetty, she knew, had been kind to him.

  Nicholas murmured. He remembered poor Lorenzo. He remembered, he said, Caterina her daughter, married to Marco di Giovanni da Parenti the silk merchant.

  Ah, said Monna Alessandra. That was so. Parenti. A Latinist; a so-called philosopher and, of course, rich. His grandfather had made a fortune from armour. But gente nuova, of the medium rank only. With a larger dowry, Caterina could have married a nobleman. But where was the money? To think of the farm, the very palace she had sold to that boor Niccolini. The provender one then took for granted. The oil, the wine, the corn. A little barley, some walnuts, a pound or two of good pork. Sometimes, when he remembered, the boor Otto would send her a pack of such things and she would be expected to value the favour. Otto, who had done nothing to help her sons back from exile. Every day, at Puzzolatico, she would tend the mulberry bushes with her own hands and buy the seed, the silkworm eggs in the spring.

  “Tell me about the mulberry bushes,” Nicholas would say gently. He learned a lot about silk before he did anything about collecting his cargo. And Monna Alessandra, who also knew what she was doing, deduced a number of things about this fellow Nicholas, and made up her mind to learn a few more.

  It was one of the six Martelli brothers who talked to Nicholas about possible sailing-masters. Watch out, they said, for the German Johannes le Grant. Red Johannes. He’s your man, if you’re sailing about Constantinople. He watched out; but if Johannes le Grant was in Florence, he didn’t make himself known. Meantime, on Martelli advice, Nicholas found his navigator and helmsman and, soon after that, they set up their tables before the sea consul’s palace to recruit the seamen they needed. Julius helped.

  By this time, Tobie, Julius and Godscalc were all experiencing the uncertain euphoria of men caught in a whirlwind of fresh fish. They rushed behind Nicholas, arms outstretched to seize the largesse that showered upon them, and spent lamplit nights cramped over vellum, reducing it all to some sort of order. The formal visits, the contracts, the solemn conclaves with bankers, the heavy chests obtained from the Mint, the lists, the registers, the ledgers, multiplied to keep pace with his momentum. Christmas came, and the momentum failed to slacken, since Nicholas had by then found himself allotted a minor but tangible place in the hierarchy of the Medici. He met, in time, most of the family. Cosimo’s sons Giovanni and Piero interviewed him separately, and he became familiar with the house of Cosimo’s nephew Pierfrancesco and his wife Laudomia Acciajuoli. It was Monna Laudomia who found him a Greek tutor when he decided that he wanted to know more than Julius could teach him. Julius agreed to sit in on the lessons in case the man got it wrong. Privately, he was relieved. Five years had passed since his studies in Bologna, and the subsequent spells at Louvain as poor Felix’s tutor had barely freshened his memory. Nicholas, as Felix’s servant, had actually learned more than he had.

  Bologna. All that seemed now to have been forgotten. The unpleasant Fra Ludovico had gone to Rome to proposition the Pope, it was known. His assorted group of Eastern companions would (he asserted) muster an army of 120,000 against the Sultan, provided the Western world raised the equivalent. The Pope quickly suggested that the party should slip over the Alps and put the matter to France and Burgundy, without whom a worthwhile crusade was impossible. The envoys agreed, while holding out for their travelling expenses. When they got those, it turned out that Fra Ludovico would rather like to be Latin Patriarch of Antioch. The Pope appeared willing, but deferred the actual appointment, unlike the travelling expenses, until the friar should come back from his mission. And the best of luck to him, concluded Julius. Antioch needed such men.

  During all this period the work didn’t lessen, but allowed some time for leisure. They had become used to their lodging. The repopulation of Florence had ceased to form part of Monna Alessandra’s conversation. Tobie, who was playing his own small part in that quarter, seldom came to the house in his free time. Monna Alessandra had warned her paying guests about the loose women of Florence who were required to wear gloves, high-heeled slippers and bells, to warn the eye and the ear of the godly.

  Tobie took the lesson to heart. Julius, who slept in the same bed, swore that if a bird struck a bell with its beak, Tobie would be half into its cage with his eyes shut. Julius preferred bruising sports like the calcio and palloni. Quite often, attending, he caught sight
of Pagano Doria. The little rat usually had two or three men at his side; and once the petite veiled woman. The sincere smile appeared everywhere, twinkling under broad, rakish hats with conspicuous jewels in them. Julius noticed that he had regular, unbroken teeth to the back of his jaw on each side. He stopped and spoke to Nicholas now and then, recommending a tailor, a tavern, a merchant who sold decent mattresses or practical tableware or stout travelling boxes. The twinkle, to the jaundiced eye of Julius, was meant to convey that Pagano Doria could consume the Charetty company any day between dinner and supper, but preferred biding his time until he left Florence. Nicholas gave no sign that he minded, but it made Julius uneasy. He spoke to the others about it. For example, January had begun, and with less than five weeks in hand they still had no sailing-master.

  The Feast of Epiphany approached, a celebration dear to the Medici and regularly marked by a play presented by the famous company of the Magi, and an elaborate procession up the Via Larga itself to end at the crib in the friary of San Marco. Friends, clients, supporters, dependants of the Medici, obeyed the President’s summons to ride, pose or even perform on such occasions. When Cosimo de’ Medici was the president no one refused; certainly no one from the Charetty company. Already, their room at Monna Alessandra’s was littered with costumes for their share in the pageant, and above the window a humorist had tacked a pair of crowns and a single frayed wing. Nicholas was sitting alone in the muddle, adding figures, when Godscalc of Cologne opened the door and walked in.

  “No,” said Nicholas.

  “Well now,” said Father Godscalc. “As it happens, I wasn’t going to assault either your virtue or your vices. I had in mind an enquiry.” He spoke with perfect placidity. Chaplain, apothecary and meticulous penman, he had worked as hard as any since Pisa and, drawn into his company’s vortex, had continued to weigh up its members. The complex simplicities of Julius and the absent Astorre he knew well already. Tobie, with his acid doctor’s brain and inquisitive nature, was more apt to resist him: he didn’t fully understand Tobie yet. Nicholas who, after all, had advised his appointment, had shown a preference for evading his pastoral attentions, but had otherwise appeared free and open with him from the beginning.

  Godscalc observed that this candour had limits, both on the part of Nicholas and on the part of the others, discussing him. Born to gossip, neither Tobie nor Julius ever talked to him about Nicholas, which was odd in two grown men set under another much younger. Godscalc had expected flashes of resentment and pique, and sometimes heard them, disguised as impatience. But even such moments were overlaid by something else he couldn’t quite fathom. They never joked about his curious marriage, even in private. He gathered they respected Marian de Charetty. They also respected, he saw, the presence of a peculiar talent and, perhaps to protect that talent, had closed ranks about it. But for Tobie’s wine-loosened tongue, Godscalc would never have learned, he supposed, of the inadmissible connection between Nicholas and the house of St Pol. And yet both Tobie and Julius were uneasy prefects; like beings of one species set to guard another of unknown capacity. It seemed to Godscalc that, whether they knew it or not, the men who worked with Nicholas were afraid of him. And since they were human, that made them unpredictable.

  Now, as was his duty, Godscalc had come to discharge a small errand. Waiting for him to continue, Nicholas sat at ease, pen in hand, without rushing to shorten the silence. Godscalc cleared a space from a chest-top and perched his bulk on it. He said, “You have no ship-master yet.”

  Nicholas swung his head back like a joy bell and lowered it, beaming. He laid his pen carefully down. He said, “You want to talk German. You’ve been talking German. You’ve found Johannes le Grant?”

  Without blinking, Godscalc discarded five minutes of careful preliminaries. He said, “Yes. He’s good. He’s not sure if he wants the job, and would prefer time on his own to consider. I’m not to tell you how to get hold of him.”

  There was a persuasive silence, which he resisted agreeably.

  Nicholas said, “It’s very disconcerting. Tobie and Julius break promises all the time. He must be very good.”

  “He is,” said Godscalc.

  “But I have to wait for him. And you’re not going to tell me what will attract him. He’s German; and an engineer; and selective.”

  “He’s an engineer,” Godscalc said. “A pioneer, also. He dug countermines in Constantinople and nearly got rid of the Turks by flooding their mines and burning their props and forcing smoke and obnoxious smells down the tunnels. Very obnoxious smells. That’s all I can tell you. I’m not wearing one of those things.”

  Nicholas picked up, between finger and thumb, an Epiphany costume of Judas-pink satin. “No. That’s for Tobie,” he said. “You don’t want to go on his cart, you’d be blinded. And the one in front of it’s taking a leopard. That’s your dress over there.”

  “Where?” said Godscalc. He saw a breech clout and a mound of wool and two sandals. The mound of wool was a beard.

  The door opened. “Have you told him?” said Julius, strolling in. “A holy hermit, they want you for, father. The third best float in the procession. Palm trees. Caverns. A pillar to sit on. They’ll cheer you all through the city. I begged and begged, but they said it had to be a man in Holy Orders. They said they’d try to hide a brazier somewhere if the horses didn’t mind. Nicholas will be with you.”

  “Fully dressed?” Godscalc said.

  “You have your Faith to warm you,” Nicholas said. The rebuke hit, to a nicety, the voice of a priest they both knew.

  Godscalc said, “Then I must assume you will be more than fully dressed. As whom?”

  “I’m the lion,” said Nicholas. “Cosimino wanted a real one, but they said it would fight with the leopard.”

  “And the horses wouldn’t like it,” said Godscalc flatly. Of course he saw why they protected Nicholas. And he, too, for a moment felt a pang, for them and for him.

  On the day of the procession, fear was not in Godscalc’s mind as the four senior officials of the Charetty company pressed their way through the packed streets to the Piazza della Signoria where, the night before, the decorated tableaux carts had been assembled. The draw-horses and oxen had passed through before them: fresh dung curled round his toe-thongs. His colleagues had not lied, although their respect for the truth had been sparing. He was to appear, in holy garb, on one of the chariots; but a long and thick cloak was fortunately part of the costume. Julius, beside him, was a magnificent Roman. There were petals all over his armour where groups of girls had sought (and failed) to attract his attention from upper windows lined with Epiphany dolls. Nicholas padded behind, his head under his arm, talking to a Judas-pink Tobie.

  And that, of course, was quite ludicrous. All around them, in silks and furs, jewels and feathers, were other Medici men, heading for gilded chariots where they would arrange themselves, retinues of the glittering Kings. Tobie, in cerise silk and ostrich plumes, was meant to be of their number. It was out of the question that the Medici, experts in protocol, had intended Tobie’s master to come as a lion.

  Monna Alessandra, surveying Nicholas in her doorway, had emitted a sigh that would have felled a small tree. Before leaving the house, Godscalc himself had at least cornered the lion and tried to make him see reason. Nicholas had listened politely, fastening the fur up to his throat and placing his tail carefully over his arm like a pallium, before lifting his head from the table. He buffed both his eyes with his cuff. “You think I’ll offend the Medici?”

  Godscalc said, “They must have sent you a costume.”

  “I took it back,” Nicholas said. “My lord is Cosimino, you see. Not his grandfather.”

  Godscalc had said nothing more. Shrewd; shrewd as the cleverest merchant among them. So sharp he’d cut himself; one of these days.

  When they reached the Piazza della Signoria, the horses were still in their lines and the carts, which had been standing all night, had hardly got their covers off. It was starting
to rain. Above the roar of the encircling crowd and the high Tuscan voices of the performers, the orders, the warnings, the appeals of the organisers rose from four or five different places, hoarse and tetchy as ravens. Tobie disappeared, hustled off by a fellow in Medici livery. Julius followed him. Nicholas said, “That must be us.”

  The float stood, last of four, between the yellow bulk of the Republic’s Palazzo and the arches of the loggia with which it made a right angle. Prison, fortress, council chamber, the Palazzo filled the grey sky. Its corbelled battlements thrust over their heads, and the tower above dissolved into the clouds, from which a bell had begun tolling. The noise slackened below, and then began to climb as if fit for eruption. Arriving at the designated contrivance, which contained a lot of sand, a painted cave and a palm tree, Godscalc found a pair of steps and began to climb into it. He said, “Excuse me.” It was dry in the cavern, and there were two hermits there already. He bent and crawled in beside them. Someone said, “Where’s the lion?” He crawled out again.

  The lion was leaning against the next float, its tail hanging negligently over its arm. The cart contained a large sheeted object and several excitable workmen, to whom Nicholas appeared to be offering comments. The rain, increasing, beat down on his face. Still talking, he put his head on. His voice emerged from its jaws. On the float, a man in an ancient black cap dropped his arms and strode to the edge of the cart. Two other men promptly hauled the sheet down, exposing a large terracotta statue of St Anne on a rock, with accommodation here and there for performers. A fourth man, leaning over her lap, began attempting to pull the sheet up again. The man in the black cap stood glaring down and Nicholas, looking up, examined him amiably. The man said angrily, “My Marzocco!”