The Unicorn Hunt

by Dorothy Dunnett

  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’

  ‘Oh, I know him,’ said his metallurgical priest. ‘We spoke a few times in Bruges.’

  ‘Did you?’ said Nicholas. He was aware of saying it sourly, for it explained a number of things. The rest of his mind was on the other problem.

  John le Grant was
thinking on the same lines, it seemed. He said, ‘You say your lady’s still with Adorne?’

  ‘They’re spending Easter in Rome. After that, instead of sailing from there, they propose to come north and take ship from Genoa. Adorne has a programme of calls he means to make on the way to the Holy Land. Corsica, Sardinia, Tunis – the voyage could take seven or eight weeks.’

  ‘What will she do?’ le Grant said.

  ‘Stay with her party,’ said Father Moriz unexpectedly. ‘For if she comes here, no doubt she knows you will attempt to obstruct her.’

  ‘That’s what I thought,’ Nicholas said. It surprised him that anyone else had worked it out. He could, of course, send persuasive friends to try to separate her from Adorne and bring her back home. He could go himself. But even if he contrived to get her away, it was hard to know how to keep her from going to Egypt, unless pinned down in irons. And that was not – not yet – part of the game. Anyway, as soon as she was alone, she’d take ship somehow. He had resigned himself to that.

  He decided to leave Venice before April was finished. He had some business to do in Florence. If he got to Alexandria in June, he could keep ahead of her all the way if he wished. He could vanish.

  He made his final calls. He had not avoided the homes of those Venetian merchants who had married the sisters from Naxos, but he had not, as it happened, spent any time with the princesses alone. One of them was the mother of Catherine, the girl married on paper to Zacco. The future Queen of Cyprus was sixteen and Zacco, of course, was his own age exactly. Nicholas happened not to encounter the girl, but received a box of Greek sweetmeats and a sugary farewell from the exquisite Fiorenza her mother.

  Although her kiss was deep, his response – once automatic, overwhelming – was reliably absent. He wondered if, at twenty-nine, this was usual. First the years of natural joy; then the rule of passion closely confined by society; and finally conjunction to order, as with Sigismond’s whores. If he had to, he could become the lover of Fiorenza or Violante once more, but he was no longer driven by appetite. It seemed likely he never would be again.

  Which was convenient. Nicholas left Venice satisfied, no matter how he left the Venetians.

  The elderly galley Ciaretti, highly taxed (as privately owned galleys properly were) and loaded by Livornese boatmen (as was the rule) moved out of her own Porto Pisano at the end of May, bound for Alexandria. With her she carried her patron, Nicholas de Fleury, Knight of the Unicorn, and for sailing-master she had John le Grant, fulfilling again the role he had occupied at his first meeting with Nicholas. Or half the role. Then, he had also been sailing-instructor.

  Nine years before, his first ship, she had carried Nicholas and his company to all that awaited him in Trebizond. Now she was expendable. He had lent his better ships, for one reason or another, to the Signoria. They were well insured. He disliked both of them.

  Behind in Venice, the Bank under Moriz, Julius and Cefo was primed to subside into its usual routine, but with more than its normal vigour.

  Behind in Florence remained a number of satisfied merchants, a busy agent, and various amused or astonished representatives of the families Medici and Strozzi. A week before their departure, Alessandra, purveyor of spectacles and mother of Lorenzo Strozzi, had let Nicholas take her hand, lying back in her chair attended by the sisters Antonia, the future wife of her son Lorenzo, and Maria, bride but not yet bedded wife of Tommaso Portinari of Bruges.

  Alessandra had said, ‘Marietta would never have done.’

  The sisters looked down. ‘No,’ Nicholas had agreed. Everyone knew whom Lorenzo’s first choice had been, and why it had been firmly scotched.

  ‘I have to tell you,’ Alessandra had continued, ‘that I fear that you, too, have been irresponsible in your selection.’

  ‘You disapproved of my wife,’ Nicholas had said. ‘But a van Borselen is not to be sneezed at.’

  The matriarch of the Strozzi family had almost smiled. ‘I am unlikely to disagree. I assumed, for that reason, that you would wish to keep her, although her precipitate arrival last autumn seemed childish. It is clear, having spoken to her, that she is so far from childish that she poses a problem.’

  He had released her gnarled hand and sat back, displaying amusement. ‘I am used to capable women, madonna.’ The girls peeped at one another, and away.

  She said, ‘Oh yes, you see me, a widow, managing my possessions. You saw your first wife, also a widow, do likewise. I daresay the same applies even to courtesans.’ Her spectacles slanted. Her mantled head, lifted, brought the cords of her neck into view. ‘A married woman who runs after power, signor de Fleury, may end as a rival to her husband, instead of a partner. You should have asked the good Duchess Isabelle to pick you a bride. Sweet maids like Antonia and Maria ask nothing more than the arms of a good husband about them, and to experience the joy that many handsome children will bring.

  ‘There is no happiness like it,’ had continued Monna Alessandra, bestowing a fond if absent smile on each of the sisters. ‘Those who pretend otherwise are misguided, and must depend on a good man’s love to correct them.’

  It had been an extraordinary conversation, too good to keep to himself. He couldn’t tell anyone. What she was saying was, Get her to bed.

  *

  The last message to reach him from Venice began so ominously that John le Grant enquired what it was. Nicholas read the gist of it aloud.

  Instead of proceeding to take the slow-moving great ship from Genoa, half of the Baron Cortachy’s party had elected to travel instead by one of the faster pilgrim galleys from Venice. They had arrived in Venice. They had even called at the Bank. They wanted spectator seats on a boat for the Ascension Day ceremony.

  ‘Gelis?’ had said John le Grant at that point.

  ‘Wait. No,’ Nicholas had said. ‘The monk, the Duke of Burgundy’s chaplain and Daniel Colebrant. Only three went to Venice. The rest stayed with Adorne.’

  ‘Taking the leisurely trip via Tunis,’ le Grant said. ‘So you’ll be in Egypt before your lady, right enough. But she’ll be expecting you. Are you going to let on that you knew she was coming?’

  ‘Oh, she knows that,’ Nicholas said. ‘She knows I’d be tracking Adorne. I was bound to be told she was with him.’

  John said, ‘So what has she done with the boy? Left him with Margot in Bruges?’

  ‘The Patriarch didn’t say so,’ Nicholas said. If Margot was in Bruges, then certainly she came there alone. He added, ‘It’ll be all right. There are nurses.’ As always, John left the subject as soon as its interest had faded. He never had to check John.

  They made only one call of note before finally leaving the Italian mainland. Lorenzo Strozzi, thirty-seven years old and a little plump and a little naked of hair, was waiting in person at Naples to embrace Claes his young playmate from Bruges, and sweep them to his sumptuous mansion.

  Plied with comfits and Candian wine, they congratulated Lorenzo on the beauty of Antonia his betrothed and conveyed the salutations of his lady mother Alessandra, and found themselves launched with remarkable speed on an agenda of solid business exchanges to do with spectacles, the Catalan market, and several agencies which they shared.

  As befitted the company advisor to King Ferrante of Naples, Lorenzo knew all the gossip of Naples and a good deal of the gossip of Rome as it referred to the affairs of Bruges and the Tyrol, and Venice, and Scotland. About the gossip of Cyprus he was even more forthcoming.

  ‘It’s true. Zacco doesn’t feel committed to his little Venetian Queen: they’re only married by proxy. Rome has had overtures from him. So have we. We had a message from Zacco last week. If he repudiated Catherine and married our King’s lady daughter, what would Naples do for him in return?’

  ‘A lot, I imagine,’ Nicholas said. ‘It might come cheaper for Zacco than Venice. Why don’t you put together a nice dowry with a lot of ships and soldiers and trading concessions wrapped in it, and see what he says?’

  ‘Is that your conside
red opinion?’ The Charetty army had once fought for King Ferrante of Naples. Naples respected the Banco di Niccolò, not least because of its political acumen.

  ‘Unless the girl has two heads. You’d get a good bargain. And a jumping-off place in the Levant, with some luck. We spoke of alum.’

  ‘Yes.’ When they talked about money, Lorenzo’s eyes always shone. He said, ‘You’re going to send an offer to Persia? To Uzum Hasan?’

  ‘And put a proposition to the Sultan in Cairo. The possibilities,’ Nicholas said, ‘are infinite.’

  ‘And I take it you think that it’s safe?’ Lorenzo said. ‘Your going to Egypt?’

  ‘Since I helped kill the Mameluke commander in Cyprus? I think it’s quite safe,’ Nicholas said. ‘It’s a new Sultan now. They didn’t close down our agency even when Khushcadam still ruled, and John has been accepted for years. They need our trade.’

  ‘Everyone does,’ said Lorenzo Strozzi, a touch smugly.

  ‘What was all that about?’ said John le Grant later, in his new, neutral tone of enquiry.

  ‘Just to see if he would rise to something,’ Nicholas said. ‘Isn’t he rich?’

  The rest of the voyage was less tiresome than Nicholas had expected. On board ship, there was always something to do, especially when, as now, she was heavily armed, with bowmen and gunners to exercise. The Ciaretti was his ship, intimately known to him from several glorious voyages: he could do anything that he wanted, day or night.

  Between Naples and Alexandria they fired no guns in anger and lost only one man: a page wasted with sickness. That was a tribute to excellent provisioning, because the ship made few calls, steering clear of the Venetian islands. In normal times a trading galley like this, well supplied with fresh water and food, could be kept virtually free of disease. The pilgrim galleys were different. With their foul crowded holds and mixed races, the passenger galleys were breeding-beds for bloody fluxes and fevers, their wakes pierced by sinking bodies shackled with stones and packed with rank ballast sand in their shrouds.