Caprice and Rondo (20 page)

Never trust blacks: they are vermin
. (‘Did some servant steal from him, then?’)

‘And why, Katarzynka, do you say his wife is not stupid and prudish, when Colà has described her to Paúel as both, and her son as a bastard?’

That had been just before Elzbiete and she parted company at the end of the long, fruitless search. Elzbiete had begun to express her regrets. But Kathi, her perceptions rubbed raw by distress, suddenly exclaimed in a low voice, ‘You knew! You knew from the beginning that Nicholas — that Colà had gone.’

And Elzbiete, pausing only a moment, had said in her most reasonable voice, ‘Well, Katarzynka, yes. But my father would be sorry if Colà left Poland.’

There was such a difference of height that Kathi had to strain to look up, as if she were trying to convince God of her innocence. She said, ‘But we don’t want him back. He couldn’t go back. I want to persuade him to stay here in Poland. Elzbiete, tell me. Tell me, where is he?’

Elzbiete gazed at her, frowning. ‘He can’t go back? Why?’

‘Because of something he did. I can’t tell you what, but your father would approve, I am sure. A great coup. The biggest act of piracy you could imagine.’

‘So he is rich? He has been ransoming prisoners?’

‘No. You don’t sell vengeance, you buy it,’ Kathi had said bitterly; and recovered. ‘So will you tell me? Please, where is he, Elzbiete?’

And Elzbiete had looked at her in silence and then had said, ‘With my father. My father will write. He writes a good hand, and can decline and conjugate too. Then, if he allows, I shall tell you.’

‘Without telling Nicholas?’

‘If you like. You still want to surprise him?’

‘That is one way of putting it,’ said Kathi.

But she revealed none of that to her uncle. To Robin, later, she said, ‘Benecke thought we’d take Nicholas home. I think I’ve convinced his daughter we shan’t. If we’re lucky, her father will send for us. Not my uncle, but us.’

‘Why should he?’ he said. They were in their bedchamber, and he was standing, fully clothed, at the window.

‘Because he wants me,’ Kathi said. ‘And he has discounted you. He thinks you aren’t really my husband.’

Robin turned. She could rely on him, always, to understand her. Youth and crones. She thought of what else went into that delicate equation. She thought of Marian de Charetty, who had fallen in love with her apprentice, who, from love and from pity, had married her. She studied, with furious affection, the young man before her who was the age now that Nicholas must have been then. Robin of Berecrofts had long guessed, before she had told him, that she was not a sensual being; that bodily pleasures meant little or nothing; that all her joy came from the mind. He had entered open-eyed into this marriage, feeling his way, never intruding, always controlling, as well as man could, the surging impulses of the blood. And she, fallen silent that first night at the sheer comeliness of him, unclothed, had made an equal pact with herself and with him, to give him all that she could, and nearly all that he could want. Only, always, she made the first moves.

As now, when she said, ‘And of course, he must be right. Or why else are you standing there clothed?’

Once he was with her, he could not always be gentle, nor did she want him to be, but studied how to bring him to deeper fulfilment; to realise the great urge that overwhelmed him. She learned too, how swiftly young hunger returned, and how to welcome and satisfy it. Working with him, she took a craftsman’s delight in his quickening breath, his moist skin, his clenched eyes wet, sometimes with tears. Then he was her child. The rest of the time, they were equals.

A
WEEK
LATER
, when no word had come, and Anselm Adorne was still held fast in Danzig, Katelijne Sersanders left her husband and, accompanied by a group of Teutonic ladies, rode out from the west gate of Danzig to visit the abbey of Oliva.

The church was tall, echoing and unusually narrow. The cloisters were like all other cloisters. The Abbot, although warned beforehand, seemed about to repudiate the arrangement. ‘The Confrérie have made me its custodian. I am not supposed to display it. Especially to …’ And he had glanced distractedly at Kathi.

‘My lord, she knows it’s here. Her uncle knows. Everyone knows. Does your lordship suppose we are about to help her carry it out of the country? Now, when the grain is about to come in, and you need all the advice you can get about taxes?’ The lady of Filip Bischoff could threaten.

The Abbot said, ‘Of course. I see your point. If Cracow knows, all the world knows, I suppose.’

‘Cracow? The King? The King has been told that the painting is here?’ asked Frau Bischoff.

‘Presumably so,’ the Abbot replied. ‘When his sons’ tutor was sent here, and saw it. And the other young man.’

‘His sons’ tutor? Signor Buonaccorsi, the scholar, was here?’

‘Callimaco,’ said Kathi to the air. ‘He attempted to murder Pope Paul, my uncle says. He used to live in Murano. Zacco helped him in Cyprus. He went to Constantinople, and tried to hand Chios to the Turks.’ She looked at the Abbot, who was old enough to think thirty-three young. She said, ‘Signor Buonaccorsi was here, my lord, to look at the painting?’

And the Abbot said, ‘No. I have already said. He wished to meet the foreign merchant with whom he had been corresponding. Colà. Nikolás. The surname escapes me.’

With whom he had been corresponding
. ‘De Fleury,’ Kathi suggested. She heard the tremor in her own voice. ‘The King sent this gentleman to meet M. de Fleury?’

‘Colà,’ said one of the ladies. ‘We knew as much. Did we not mention it? Colà received an invitation from the Court, but refused it. We found it most gratifying. There is nothing at Court for a merchant. Danzig is the place for a merchant.’

‘Or a pirate,’ Kathi said. A conversation came into her mind. Tedaldi. One of the patrons of Callimaco was the Medici agent Tedaldi, chief of the Florentine merchants in Poland. The
San Matteo
, with its Florentine crew and its Florentine cargo, freighted by the Florentine Tommaso Portinari, had been commanded by a Tedaldi. Before, that is,
it was captured by Paúel Benecke, with the loss of thirteen dead and one hundred wounded and the dispersal of all its cargo, including the great altar-piece by Hans Memling, which she was now about to be shown.

The King was interested in Nicholas, but Nicholas for some reason had rejected him. The meeting had been arranged in Oliva, where the painting was placed. The King might be under considerable pressure from his Italian colony to defy the Danzigers and hand back the Italian cargo. All these things her uncle needed to know. At the same time, of course, she would not have been allowed here unless everyone wanted her uncle to know them.

Kathi said, ‘So, my lord, might one see this magnificent work?’

It was a magnificent work. She had seen it before, or most of it. Angelo Tani and his wife on the back of the flaps, and then the triptych itself. The rainbow. The Elect, with Duke Charles curly-headed among them. And the Saved. And the Damned.

She couldn’t see Nicholas among either. He was probably somewhere in limbo. She did see someone else whom she knew. Tommaso. Tommaso’s neat coiffeured head on top of someone else’s limp body, kneeling piously in the pan of some scales.

It beat Sixtus. It beat Pope Paul’s successor, who provided his wealthier guests with ex-cathedra gold pots in the close stool. Despite everything, she found herself pink with foolish amusement.

Elzbiete saw it. She said, ‘Were you looking for someone?’

‘Yes,’ said Kathi. ‘I’ve found him. I can die happy, now.’

Chapter 4

D
URING
THE
DAY
, he was sober: he had to be. During the night, he was more often sober than not, according to his own choice. When the day came that Paúel Benecke ruled the habits of Nicholas de Fleury, then would life become ludicrous.

On the face of it, this was merely a race. The plains of Poland yielded their crops in the autumn, when the great highway of the Vistula might be low, and the shipping roads of the Baltic were closing. The grain came to the river, and waited. In spring, the world’s fleets came to Danzig. Last summer, fifty had sailed out in April, bound for Flanders and Holland and Germany. Through the summer, there might be a thousand ships more. They came for grain, and for copper and timber. The great estates sent their corn to the riverside granaries, and men like Paúel Benecke floated it north on rafts a hundred feet long and nearly thirty feet wide which were worth more in themselves than the corn, for the rafts were made of the mainmasts of caravels. Other craft, small and big, came as well, often manned by their owners: tenant-farmers and smallholders. And whoever reached Danzig first received most for his wheat, oats and rye, and his timber.

He had wanted to do this, even before Paúel had wrenched him away from the Mission and Danzig. It reminded Nicholas of Iceland, of which he often spoke entertainingly. It amused the flotilla: his remorseless mimicry, his scathing tongue, until he turned it on their masters, their institutions, themselves. And even then, they brought themselves to put up with it for, like the Icelanders, they had been locked in their houses by winter and would seize on any diversion.

But that was by night, when the concourses travelling the river would arrive at their next loading-port and, mooring the rafts to the quays, would leave their dogs or their guards by the silos and surge bellowing into the taverns. Or sometimes, as dusk overtook them, they would come to rest on some hospitable shore where the country people would flock
down to serve them, bringing black bread and sausage and cheeses, and frothless ale by the cask, and this season’s new batch of whores. Then the gambling and fiddling, the high-jumping dancing and singing would continue long into the darkness, until the most energetic lapsed into sleep.

Some rivermen, desperate for an advantage, tried to run the river with lanterns by night, but not many, and none could keep it up for long, however many polemen they carried.

That was why Nicholas never drank during the day. He had a reluctant respect for the power of the Vistula, this shining, swift-running highway which swirled through the fabric of Poland for six hundred miles to the sea. He had a respect for its dark, savage currents, and for the shifting white sand of its shoals. The men who manned the great rafts, poles in hand, provided the power and the strength, and dragged up the single unwieldy sail when wind and river might briefly co-operate. But it was the river pilots who were kings on the water; whose orders were law; and who rode their rafts with their steering-oars and their bodies, like men bounding downhill through snow, heeling out of one stream and slipping into the flow of the next, pitching safely aside from the watery glare of a shoal, even though the rafts lurched and juddered and bucked, and the timber groaned in the rush of the water. Sometimes even skill wasn’t enough, and a raft would strike and, bursting asunder, would send whirling downriver a pack of half-submerged logs: random, lethal. The rafter name for these,
wilki
, meant ‘wolves.’

Daytime was better than the night. You fought the river by day, and if you lost, you lost to the river. To lose by night in a brawl would be pitiful.

In the few days they had sailed, Benecke had been pleased to be complimentary. ‘You have the knack. You could learn the river in a couple of seasons.’

It was not true. Generations went into this skill, and every stretch of the bank had its experts. Nicholas had observed that much at least, even though they hadn’t come the whole way, but had picked up the fleet in the middle, after four days’ hard riding from Danzig. Benecke did not say whether he owned the raft that he boarded, or the rye that he took from the granaries: he had a share very likely in both. The raft was one of the biggest; a
marktschiff
built like a box, with room for over a thousand bushels of grain and twenty men, including sailors and steersman and cook, and Paúel Benecke and a discarded banker. It possessed some primitive shelter, to which they could retire from the wind and the rain, and where Benecke continued, if allowed, with the interrogation that had been going on all through the winter. Sometimes Nicholas humoured him for a time. There was something he wanted from Benecke. He had
lost some gold, and rather thought that Benecke had heard something about it.

It was never too hard, in any case, to answer Paúel’s questions. ‘Tell me again about Anselm Adorne,’ he was saying. ‘Do you still think you know why he’s here?’

Nicholas produced a long groan. ‘You know why he’s here. He has to wave a flag on behalf of the Medici: the Duke of Burgundy owes them a fortune. Bruges wants him to sort out its trade; and he’ll have a little mandate, I’m quite sure, from Scotland. And when he’s finished in Poland, all his masters would like him to keep the Pope happy without actually going on crusade. Hence the trip to comfort the Christians in Caffa, and the further trip to prod Persia into helping them, too. Anselm Adorne has a lot of friends in the Levant.’

‘Genoese friends,’ Benecke said. ‘Caffa is a Genoese colony. Do you trust him? He tried to usurp the Hanse trade in Iceland.’

‘He succeeded,’ Nicholas said. ‘He bribed the Danish officials. And someone in Danzig kindly helped him by delaying the ship they were building for me. And, as you know, I got a ship anyway. We all like it when you fall out among yourselves in the Hanse, because it adds so much to the business opportunities. What are you trying to get me to say?’

‘I’m trying to get you to tell me why you’re here. They say it’s because of a feud that went wrong.’

‘What a stupid idea,’ Nicholas said. ‘If it had gone wrong, I shouldn’t be here. And if it had been against Anselm Adorne, he’d be dead. You owe me some money.’

‘I bloody don’t!’ Benecke said.

‘You will, when you’ve taken this wager.’

‘You don’t have any money,’ Benecke said. He had never said it outright before. ‘What could you do if you don’t come with me?’