Scales of Gold (5 page)

Later, sitting alone with Gregorio, Cristoffels said, ‘He is not the same as his letters. As clever, but not the same.’

‘He has been travelling,’ Gregorio said. ‘You are remembering him as he was. He is older.’

He saw Cristoffels glance at him, and then smile. He had to smile back. Age was relative. Nicholas was twenty-three.

Chapter 2

J
ULIUS OF
B
RUGES
, thumping into the Ca’ Niccolò next day, pounded up the stairs to the private office and banged Gregorio on the back. Gregorio’s quill split, and he got up. He said, ‘You came. I didn’t expect you so … Good.’

‘You think I had any choice?’ Julius said. He often envied Gregorio, getting his own way for two and a half years. But, of course, that had come to an end. He looked about. ‘And very nice too. So what’s going on? Where is he?’

‘Nicholas went out early this morning,’ Gregorio said. ‘But Lopez is about; I’ll get someone to call him. You look very fresh. Did you have a good journey? Who came with you?’ Noticeably, he didn’t say what was going on. He looked, Julius thought, a little distraught. Julius was amused but of course, didn’t show it. He felt playful.

He said, ‘I brought along Tilde de Charetty. She’s sitting upstairs in your grand room with Margot. Your mistress and mine.’ It was a joke. Mathilde de Charetty, having inherited the Charetty company from her mother, was the employer of Julius. She was seventeen years old and no one’s mistress, as yet, in the other sense.

‘So how does she feel about Nicholas?’ Gregorio said, getting up and putting his doublet on. He called to someone as he opened the door. He looked really unhealthy. With Nicholas around, Julius wasn’t surprised. It had been Gregorio’s choice to leave the Charetty company and join Nicholas. The last time Nicholas had been in Bruges, Tilde and her sister had had him arrested.

Julius said, ‘I told her she damned well had to be polite, but you’ll never get her to trust him. All right, you came to Bruges and convinced her you could set up a branch without harming her. But now here’s Nicholas back, with a reputation that would sicken a weasel. Can we rely on him to respect an agreement?’

‘Yes,’ said Gregorio.

‘Well, that’s reassuring,’ said Julius tartly. He’d expected some help from Gregorio. They were of an age, and both lawyers. They had both been working for Tilde’s mother’s dyeworks in Bruges when Tilde’s mother took a fancy to one of her apprentices and married him. And now the apprentice occupied his own three-storey well-furnished Bank on the Grand Canal by the Rialto. Here.

Gregorio said, ‘I really can’t tell you more: he only came back yesterday morning, and we’ve talked nothing but business. But Tilde and Catherine, after all, are his step-daughters. I’m sure he won’t let them down.’

‘Tell that to Tilde,’ Julius said.

They went to tell it to Tilde. On the way, in between pricing the furniture, Julius learned that Nicholas had left before dawn for a series of meetings which (he gathered) might well last until nightfall. Nicholas would be compelled to see to his cargo, to report to the Signory, and to spend some time at the yard where his damaged roundship was being placed in dry dock. He had also (Gregorio said) sent to arrange several personal visits.

‘I can guess where,’ Julius said, though he couldn’t. When Nicholas was a boy, the whole of Bruges always knew where to look for him, give or take a hayloft or two. Of course, he was out of the kitchen league now. Ruminating, not without some nostalgia, Julius climbed the staircase and found himself confronting Loppe, planted foursquare at the top like a tombstone. Julius seized and shook his hand, while Loppe’s teeth and eyes shone. Until joining the Charetty company, Julius had never expected to find himself on any sort of terms with a Negro; but Loppe, of course, was unique. He hoped to God, again, that Tilde would behave herself. Gregorio opened the doors of the salon.

Both the women were there. Margot got up and came forward. No one had ever worked out how a man like Gregorio, with his pedantic style and scrag-end face and abysmal swordsmanship, could attract and keep a handsome woman like Margot. Julius, like everyone else, had tried to fathom why the two didn’t marry, and had even asked two or three times, but without receiving much satisfaction. He could imagine several possible reasons. Julius himself, as it happened, was the result of an embarrassing slip by a celibate. He didn’t know where Margot came from.

Mind you, youth counted for something and, even beside Margot, Tilde de Charetty didn’t come off too badly. She had missed her mother’s strong chestnut hair and high colour, but she was rounded all right where she should be, and her solemn expression
suited the shape of her face, although her brow, like her temper, wrinkled too easily.

After Marian’s death, Tilde had gone about in old-fashioned thick-folded robes, with her brown hair in tightly coiled plaits. As her manager, Julius had found it depressing. Recently, however, she had seemed to take stock, and sent her mother’s costlier clothes to be remade. Today her hair rippled loose from a caul, and she had on an exceptional pendant and an overdress grand enough to be bridal. She had behaved remarkably well, too, on the journey: six weeks from beginning to end, with all the roads crowded, and snow and mud over the Alps.

Of course, she had travelled here from Flanders before, escorted that time by Gregorio. Now, she jumped up flushing as soon as the lawyer entered the room, and her expression changed to a smile. She had expected Nicholas, Julius saw. She had always blamed Nicholas for inducing her mother to marry him, and had a good deal more to blame him for now. That was why she was here. Concern for her trade was the least of it.

Gregorio looked pleased to see her as well. He took her hand in his old-fashioned way and said, ‘Demoiselle, welcome to Venice. You look charming. We are all so happy to see you.’ He didn’t release her. He said, ‘You remember Loppe? Now factor for all the Bank’s sugar estates.’

The flush and the smile had been for the man who was kind to her when her mother died. Loppe was the slave elevated by her mother’s apprentice. ‘I remember him, of course,’ Tilde de Charetty said. ‘That old broker at Sluys had him before we did. It must be useful, being able to swim.’

Fortunately, in all the years Julius had known him, Loppe had never taken offence. He said, in his accentless Flemish, ‘Buoyancy, demoiselle, is always an asset.’ He had had command of five languages even when he first came to Bruges. He waited, and sat when Tilde did.

Tilde looked at Gregorio. ‘Margot says you don’t mind our coming?’

‘No, of course not, although you’ve missed Nicholas. He’ll call on you as soon as he can, that I promise. Where are you staying? With the Medici bankers again?’

‘Yes. Margot seemed to think,’ Tilde went on, ‘that we might see Claes today. In a few minutes. When he steps in on his way to Murano. Perhaps we might go to Murano along with him?’

She had called Nicholas by his dyeyard name, and you could see Gregorio didn’t much like it. Or perhaps it was the suggestion about Murano he didn’t like. Julius found his interest sharpening.
Murano was an island one mile north of Venice. Why was Nicholas going there? He said venturesomely, ‘A voyage? In this heat, what could be better? Unless, of course, we should be intruding?’

‘Perhaps he has a wife there,’ said Tilde de Charetty. ‘Another wife. He seems very carnal by nature.’ She sat, her hands in her lap and her eyes modestly on them.

Julius nearly laughed. Instead, he said hastily, ‘We kept hearing gossip.’

‘There was something, a matter of form,’ said Gregorio. ‘Nicholas has no ties at present. I don’t really see why you shouldn’t come with us to Murano. Nicholas and I have an appointment, but you could pass the time viewing the island. And you can exchange all your news on the way.’

‘He’s not in prison then?’ said Tilde de Charetty.

Gregorio, rising to summon a servant, turned and stood still. ‘No. Why should he be?’

‘We heard about yesterday’s killings. Didn’t he kill someone yesterday? And these stories of what happened in Cyprus. You know. That’s why we’re here.’

Gregorio came back. He said, ‘I thought you were here to make sure he respected your dyerights in Bruges.’

He’s worried, Julius thought. He’s not sure of Nicholas. But now he rather likes the idea of our meeting him. Why?

Tilde said, ‘Tommaso Portinari says vander Poele has turned into a soldier and got a taste for killing, the way some people do.’

Like an extremely deep bell, the soft voice of Loppe contradicted her. ‘I should not say so, demoiselle, and I was in Cyprus.’

Tilde turned her head. ‘I thought you were on the sugar estates.’

‘Then perhaps,’ Loppe said, ‘let me say that I was in the boat yesterday when the two men were killed. One was an assassin, and the other his hireling. Meester Nicholas shot one of them only, to preserve his own life.’

‘And that is true,’ Gregorio said. ‘If you want to know more, Nicholas will tell you, I’m sure, when he comes. Meanwhile, I should much rather hear your adventures. Let me send for some wine, and perhaps something to eat.’ He went again to the door.

‘Well, thank you,’ said Julius. ‘But to return to the shooting. Who paid the assassin? Do you know?’

A servant appeared. Gregorio spoke to him before he replied. Then he said, ‘It seems to have been an Egyptian. Someone from Cairo with a grudge against Nicholas.’

‘Because of the massacre of the Mamelukes in Cyprus. We heard about it in Bruges,’ said Tilde de Charetty. ‘Claes. I couldn’t believe it. Tommaso Portinari –’

‘You heard in
Bruges?
’ Gregorio said.

She looked at him in the way Julius knew all too well. She said, ‘I told you, that’s why we came. Because of the letters from Cyprus to everyone. I don’t really think Nicholas will want to keep his Bruges bureau open now, do you?’

‘Letters to whom?’ Gregorio said. He came back and sat down.

‘To virtually everyone. She’s right,’ Julius said. ‘The Scots, the Portuguese, the van Borselen family. I’m not surprised Nicholas is afraid for his life. I’m only surprised a Mameluke got there first. I hope he’s well guarded.’

Gregorio looked from Julius to Tilde. He said, ‘And that really is why you’re here, I suppose? If Nicholas dies, you’d like to know our contingency plans for the Bank?’

He sounded brusque. More interestingly, he hadn’t asked who sent those informative letters from Cyprus to Flanders and Portugal. He didn’t need to, Julius supposed. Everyone, including the insurers, knew who had stolen from Cyprus with the
Doria
, the Bank’s missing roundship. Everyone knew that the letter-writer was the same person. ‘It’s nothing to do with us,’ said Julius in a mollifying way, shaking his head several times in Tilde’s direction.

Tilde said, ‘But the Bank is rich, isn’t it? If they kill Nicholas, Meester Gregorio, will you get all the money?’

There was the kind of pause that often followed Tilde’s interventions. Then Gregorio said, ‘All the founding members of the Bank possess shares. Those of Nicholas would go to his heirs. The names of these are his own concern, surely. And as it happens, he’s quite well protected. I think you might even count on his survival.’

It was unlike Gregorio to be caustic with Tilde, but Julius couldn’t blame him. The brat had come here, for sure, chiefly to witness the denunciation and downfall of Nicholas. But there was more to it than that. If Nicholas died without contriving to marry again, Tilde and her sister might have a very good claim to inherit.

Nicholas arrived half an hour later, bringing with him the heat of the May afternoon and, Julius supposed, an excellent briefing from Loppe, who had excused himself earlier. The doors opened. Tilde half rose and sat down. Julius got up and walked forward and found a reminiscent smile sliding on to his face. He said, ‘You bastard, you look just the same.’

‘How disappointing of me,’ Nicholas said. ‘Thriving on money, I suppose. How are you? And Tilde? You’ve caught me, I’m afraid, in a crisis. Would tomorrow be better? Or do you really want to come with me to Murano?’ Julius stopped smiling.

Quite apart from that discouraging greeting, Nicholas did not, in fact, look quite the same. The stupendous brocade must have
impressed the shipyard, if not the Palace. His hair had been brushed straight and compelled to stay that way under an expensive hat of fine straw. Below it, his face had the stretched look that comes after long travelling and dubious food. Julius, recently consulting his mirror, had noticed that he looked almost the same way himself.

It accounted also, Julius hoped, for the present attitude of high-handed detachment: not something Nicholas had ever been guilty of in the past. Half the time, in the old days, he appeared to be sitting inside your mind. Today, he showed no desire to come closer than spitting distance, even when he turned his attention to Tilde. His gaze, mild enough, reached her face by way of the stuff of her gown and her pendant. And Tilde, sustaining the survey, tilted her head and returned him a smile that made Julius wince.

Nicholas gave no sign at all that he noticed it. He said, ‘It sets you off, as is perfectly fitting. I don’t want to quarrel. We shan’t do you any harm with our branch. I have nothing to do with dyes now.’

‘I know. You lost the royal dyeworks in Cyprus, didn’t you?’ Tilde remarked. ‘To the Vatachino. Julius says the Vatachino are going to be the big new power in trade.’ If you looked closely, you could see she was breathless.

‘Everyone in business has a frightening story about the Vatachino,’ Julius said quickly. ‘They’ve got a foothold in Bruges, and they’re into every damned thing.’

‘Especially dyes. Perhaps you ought to be watching them instead of me,’ Nicholas observed, still very mildly.

‘Julius isn’t refining sugar like you are,’ Tilde said. ‘Julius thinks we should stick to our business. The Vatachino must have cost you quite a bit, this last year or two.’

‘It’s kind of you to be worried,’ said Nicholas. ‘But I have tried to hold my own. Would you forgive me? I must get out of this rig before going.’