Nicholas lifted his head. For the first: time since the beginning, Anna’s eyes rested on his. Nicholas said, ‘I would wish to continue serving my lady. But if there is no choice, I will leave.’
‘Then I agree,’ Anna said; and bit her lip. She did not look round as he was turned from the room, and he did not see her leave, for by then he was locked in a cell. When, finally, he had begun to lose confidence, the door was opened, his pack was thrust in his arms, and he was marched under guard from the fortress. He thought, striding down past the mosque, that he saw the imam’s face, but he made no effort to stop. Nor did he pause as he passed the bulwark of Prosper Adorno, the blood already washed from its walls.
His escort changed at the drawbridge, and when he was turned out through the portals of Soldaia he was surprised to recover his horse. His Genoese safe conduct, of course, was now lacking. He could not enter Soldaia or Caffa, Gurzuf or Alupka, Alushta or Simiez. He could not sail through the ice. He could not go home. He was, however, alive. Anna had saved him. He had not saved Ochoa.
There were a few things he could do, most of them dependent on other people’s initiatives. It had not taken long, indeed, to work out what all the possibilities were. In the aftermath of all that had happened, Nicholas found in himself a chilly resistance to more fruitless planning. There was a hospice most Latins stayed at, halfway between Soldaia and Caffa, which possessed a separate building for servants. By the time he got there he was cold, wet, and prepared to be fully uncooperative, even when one of the possibilities became a reality, and he was met by a groom that he knew. With the groom was another horse, and a saddlebag containing all the garments necessary to an Italian gentleman, including a razor. There was also a safe conduct, permitting Signor Paolo of Simiez to visit his cousins in Caffa.
It was not a wise plan, at this stage, to give way to his instincts. Nicholas accepted the bounty provided and descended next day upon Caffa in new guise, or in one which passed muster, at least, with the unsuspecting guards at the portals. Then he made his way, as directed, to the Franciscan monastery, where he was joined in due course by Ludovico da Bologna and the extraordinary woman who had just rescued him from a cruelly planned death.
The Patriarch, viewing him, issued a bark. ‘The puppy, restored! So, how are you proposing to thank us?’
‘By converting from the Muslim religion,’ Nicholas said. It was automatic. All his essence was concentrated on the still person of Anna, standing in the doorway, her smiling face running with tears.
She said, ‘What a transformation. I could almost marry you myself.’
‘Almost?’ Nicholas said. Her eyes looked feverish.
‘If she didn’t happen to be married already,’ said the Patriarch shortly. ‘I didn’t know your friend was a fool. How did that happen?’
‘Someone helped him escape in my name. They wanted to kill him.’
‘A Genoese scheme?’ said the Patriarch.
‘Obviously,’ Nicholas said. ‘It got rid of Ochoa, and gave them an excuse to get rid of me, whom they suspected. They didn’t expect Anna to race to my defence with such brio. I am sorry. I should be overwhelming you both with my gratitude. I can’t believe he is dead.’
‘It pains us, too,’ said Anna gently. ‘It was not your fault. You nearly lost your own life in attempting to rescue him. You’ve taken all the risks since we came — to obtain the goodwill of the Khan, and all the profit that brought. Now the Patriarch has arranged for you to hide here for the weeks that are left. Julius will come. And when we leave for Persia, we leave together.’
The Patriarch grunted. He knew, of course, as much as Brother Lorenzo about the gold and Ochoa. ‘Financial security’ had been the term Lorenzo had used. The Patriarch also knew that Anna and even Julius would expect, armed with gold, to descend upon Persia with Nicholas. Anna would have been frank about that. Now she said, hesitating, ‘Unless our plans ought to change. Ochoa is dead. It may not seem fitting to collect the gold and then leave, as if nothing had happened.’
‘There is no one else to receive it,’ said Nicholas. ‘It is mine, and I want to use it as I have said.’
He did not want to talk, and she respected it. Another woman who had done what she had would have longed to have her ingenuity praised; would have wished to relive, phase by phase, the threatening events of the day and their resolution. Anna left him alone, moving quietly about the guest-quarters they had been given. Presently the Patriarch went out, without waiting to share the supper dishes that a lay brother brought to their parlour. Even there, joining Nicholas, Anna asked his leave to sit down, as if he were her patient and she was his doctor.
Then Nicholas, pulling himself together, said, ‘Of course we must talk. I didn’t intend to go into retreat. Ochoa was scarcely a soul-mate, but I felt responsible for him; and it left me a good deal to think about.’
‘And reach certain conclusions?’ Anna asked.
She was dressed in the same gown she had worn to outface Squarciafico in the citadel. Only tonight, being private, she had set aside the stiff, jewelled headdress and allowed her hair to flow over her breast, while the heavy swathes at either temple were drawn back and united within a jewelled clasp. She had removed, too, the voile that had covered her throat and softened the neck of her gown. Now he could see the small pearls with which the neckline was sewn; and her breathing.
It was quiet. The candles flickered on the cloth, the dishes, the wooden trenchers, the good pewter cups filled with Chios wine. Nicholas felt both disembodied and its opposite — his head appeared light, but his senses were disrupted by the change in his dress: the thin lawn of the shirt; the velvet case of the doublet, wide at shoulder, narrow at waist; the libidinous freedom of untrammelled limbs, naked from ankle to thigh save for close-fitting hose. The contours of his face seemed to him untrammelled too; the play of muscle no longer stiffened with hair. Quite suddenly he began to feel, not a stranger, but his own person again.
Anna was watching him. She added, ‘Do the bruises hurt?’
He had forgotten his beating. He and Ochoa had both received a blow to the eye. Ochoa’s was cured.
Nicholas said, ‘Nothing hurts, when the alternative would have been death. Yes, I have reached some conclusions. Perhaps I should tell you tomorrow.’
‘Because I shall dislike them?’ she said. ‘Tell me tonight. And put down your knife. You are not eating.’
‘Very well,’ Nicholas said. He put down the knife and looked up. ‘I can’t stay on here. The Franciscans are being too generous. I can dress as a monk or a groom and escape detection, I suppose, for a while. But if I’m found out, they will pay for it, and so will the Patriarch. I shall need a day or two to prepare, but after that I shall start making my own way to the south. When spring comes, I shall be part of the way to Tabriz, and you and Julius will join me.’
Her eyes were black in the uncertain light. She said, ‘You would take such care for the monks? I am not surprised.’ Then she said, steadily, ‘So you will give up the gold? Without you, no one can trace it.’
‘Yes, they can,’ Nicholas said. ‘You can. I have the name of the ship it is coming by, and the name of the captain, and the password which will identify the lawful recipient. Ochoa wished me to have sole control, through use of the pendulum. I asked him to give me these facts to pass on to my heirs, who could not divine. He agreed. You and Julius are my heirs.’
Now all her face appeared shadowed. ‘Along with you. I do not want the gold if you are not there to share it. I don’t want you to travel alone, when you could remain here, safe with us until it comes. Nicholas, no. Stay with us here. Watch for the ship. Use your pendulum. Discover the gold in any way that you want, or let it go. But don’t disappear into the Crimea alone.’ And when he was obdurate: ‘Decide in the morning,’ Anna said. ‘You are tired, and mourning your friend. Make no decisions tonight.’
He was tired. He agreed, with a half-smile. ‘I see you are depending on the persuasive powers of the Patr
iarch.’
‘Or of mine,’ Anna said. She rose, lifting the flask ready to refill his cup, but stood instead, the metal gripped with both hands. She said, ‘If you go, this may be our last night in the same rooms, alone.’
‘You will have other company,’ Nicholas said. He sat very still.
‘But no one who owes me what you do,’ she said. ‘What value, Nicholas, do you set on your life? Is its redemption worth a kiss?’
Nicholas rose, but did not move from his place. He said, ‘What would Julius find seemly?’
‘I do not know,’ Anna said. Within the boneless clasp of her hands the flask tilted then languorously slipped; as she made a slight movement to catch it, the scented liquid pooled and fell from its lip, infiltrating the damask weave of her gown, dropping in luminous gouts among the small jewels and dyeing the warp and weft of the textile so that the pattern sprang into life, its leafy boughs, its blossom and tendrils enclosing her body. Ceres, goddess of harvests.
She dropped the flask in a daze and, plucking at the sodden gown, began to open it. Then, finding his eyes on her, she stopped.
Nicholas said, ‘Your maid will do that. Where is your room?’
In the warmer light, mellower than that of the tent, he saw again the fine modulations, the finished exactitude of the skin which clothed the rounded flesh of her breasts. Compared with that ethereal tailoring, his own dress scraped as if woven from husks. She took him by the sleeve and began to draw him erratically with her. She opened a door.
The bedchamber inside was empty. Nicholas said, ‘Anna.’
She shut the door. She said, ‘Julius cannot give me a child.’
‘Then neither can I,’ Nicholas said.
‘You will not give me a child, even after today? Then lie still,’ Anna said. ‘And I will take one.’
She tried to trap his wrists when he turned, and when he still pulled away, she dragged his doublet free of its clasps and tore the cambric. She clung to him as he moved, step by step across the tiled floor of the room, and leaned her weight on his shoulder as he took a seat at the writing desk, fending her off with one hand, which she seized. When he stretched out the other, she cried, ‘What are you doing?’
‘Writing,’ he said. ‘Giving you the secret of the gold. If I don’t survive, it is yours.’
She did not speak. As he wrote quickly, awkwardly on the shifting paper — the name of the ship, the other information he wanted her to have — she settled low at his side, sheathing his arm with both her own, her brow resting against him. Finishing, he saw, looking down, that her eyes were closed. He moved the paper gently towards her. ‘Anna.’
She opened her eyes. They looked sightless. She said, ‘You didn’t kill Julius. What do you owe him?’
‘This,’ Nicholas said. ‘And afterwards, you would hate yourself, and then me.’
Then she lifted her head. ‘If Julius were dead, would you love me?’
He laid the paper close to her hand, and rose before she could hold him. He said, ‘Is this love?’
‘I don’t know,’ Anna said. ‘I have never experienced it.’
He had been going to leave, but he paused. Then, as if he had again changed his mind, he turned and walked from the room, drawing the door to its close all in silence, so that the single clap as it shut bit the air.
He had said that he would stay for some days. But when they knocked on his door the following morning, they discovered that he had gone.
LUDOVICO DA BOLOGNA, when Anna found him, was philosophical. ‘Such altruism! Rubbish. A man of restless disposition, that is all. I should hardly have offered protection if I could not provide it. However. He has left me a note. I gather he believes he can amuse himself in the interior until the seas open again. He plans to join me on the way to Tabriz.’
Anna said, ‘He has a Genoese pass.’
‘He thinks it safer, it seems, to avoid Genoese seaports.’ The priest, who was eating, glanced up at her. ‘As soon as ships can sail, I must go. When is your husband arriving in Caffa?’
This morning, her face was frowning, and white. ‘In June. I wish it were earlier. And what do we do if we still cannot leave because we have to wait for this wretched gold? It belongs to Nicholas,’ said Anna fretfully. ‘He should have stayed.’
‘I am glad,’ said Ludovico da Bologna, ‘to see that you have joined the ranks of those who have learned to view the rogue in his true colours. Of course he should have stayed. Since he has not, I suppose your husband will decide what is best for his business. I shall be returning to the West, as is obvious, through Caffa. If you are still here, you may have my protection on your own journey homewards. The person of a papal nuncio, as you will have noticed, is sacrosanct.’
She could not tell whether he was serious. She supposed that he was, and thanked him. She felt a faint scorn, in the midst of her torment, that a man of God should be so little aware of human desires, and human fallibility.
NICHOLAS HAD GONE from Caffa when the letter from Brother Huon arrived at the Franciscans’. By that time, which was the third week in March, even the Patriarch had departed; but the German Contessa still held court in the town, and was pleased to take charge of the message, promising that Signor Niccolò would receive it as soon as he returned from his business in Persia. Then she presented the dazzled Brother with a little silver for the good of his house. He thought she looked sad.
At about the same date, late in March, a letter from the Abbot of the monastery of Montello found its way, along with four boxes, to the residence of Egidia van Borselen at Spangnaerts Street, Bruges. Having taken delivery, Gelis sat for a long time alone in her room with the letter, which informed her, with regret, of the death of the noble vicomte Thibault de Fleury. The brethren (it continued) would pray for his soul, and Brother Huon and the monastery remained the grateful beneficiaries of the family’s generosity. The boxes, which contained all the vicomte’s belongings, had been sent to her upon instructions conveyed by the vicomte in the last days of his life. He had died at peace in the Lord.
She wondered if he had. Then she laid hands on the chests, and unpacked them.
It took a long time. When at last it was done, Gelis van Borselen called her servants and had them replace and put into store the worldly possessions, superb in quality but no longer new, of the late Burgundian nobleman. Along with the doublets and cloaks, the gloves, the boots, the fine shirts and the jewels, the magnificent old-fashioned saddle and the silver harness stamped with his crest, she placed cartons of papers, neatly packaged and labelled in Brother Huon’s precise script, and containing the cream of his master’s correspondence over the years of his partial recovery — all of it scholarly, and relating, as she now knew to expect, to matters musical, mathematical, and philosophical. There was the battered script of a play. There were no family documents.
Except, that is, for the most recent packet of all, which was addressed in her husband’s handwriting to Monseigneur le vicomte de Fleury, and which she set aside, and reopened when her servants had left her.
The letter from Nicholas to his grandfather had arrived in time to be read. He had written it the day after receiving the message it answered, and had sent it by post: by a chain of couriers who, changing riders and horses, had taken it across Europe, in winter, in half the time necessary for a man on his own. She could not imagine what it had cost, or how he had paid for it.
Enclosed with his letter, Nicholas had sent to Montello a tract of music in two different inks, and a sheet containing a delicate puzzle which was clearly not of his authorship. This miracle of penmanship, circular in design, had nothing in common with the coded snippets that Nicholas sent her, dealing with practical matters. This was a work of art, elegant, poetic, mischievous even, for it contained words and phrases and fragments of verse which contributed by their shape to the picture, even though the whole made no sense. Then she turned the sheet over, and saw that Nicholas, setting his mind to follow his grandfather’s, had drawn and sent him
the resolution, in identical form. The translation began at the heart, as the smallest writing had done, and unfurled to the outermost edges. Beyond that, there was a space, and then a sheaf of words which were not in translation at all, but in the form of the original puzzle, which Nicholas had taken and used to add something of his own.
She thought at first that it was beyond her. The complexity of the puzzle far exceeded anything she had ever attempted before, or anything she had ever seen Nicholas do. And yet he had broken the code, and at a speed that had enabled him to send the letter off the following day. She sat thinking of that: of the locked room like this one in Caffa; of the silence, like this; and of the intensity of his concentration, hour after hour, until he won through to the solution. Until he did what his grandfather desired of him, and showed that their minds were alike.
It was simpler for her, for she had his translation of the main text before her, and it was only a case of finding the key. Even so, it was many hours before she knew what Nicholas had added, in that many-layered code, to his grandfather’s puzzle. And by then, she knew the words of the puzzle itself almost by heart.
The kernel of it had come ready-made, and there was little that was personal in it: words of solace, words of beauty, words of counsel culled from all the quarters, all the ages of the world. There was wit and irony, and some grains of rough humour: the spices of Thibault’s own mind that flavoured it all. Over and above that, the short addendum that bound it together was simply one of good sense and friendship.
We might have liked one another. There is no place for regrets. But it is not a bad thing to face life with a flower at the ear, as a dancer does, and this is my flourish for you. If you can read it.
She missed his other comment at first because it was attached to a classical quote, and itself in Latin. The excerpt, elegiac and simple, spoke of the poet’s grief over the death, by her own hand, of a dearly loved daughter. Thibault’s had added three sentences. What is harder than that to forgive? Harder even than hatred? Tell me if you know.