‘An adventuress?’ Diniz said. He had flushed. Tilde had always rallied him on his admiration for Anna.
‘We rather suspected it,’ Gelis said, glancing at Tobie. ‘Maybe Julius did, too. But if she wanted someone to keep her, she was generous in the way that she paid for it. She could be wise. She was gifted. She was beautiful. Kathi found her a friend. So did I. So, we thought, did Nicholas. She was always thoughtful with Nicholas.’
‘You might almost say,’ Moriz said, ‘that it was Nicholas she was interested in, and that marrying Julius was only a means to an end. Julius did not pursue her, although he thought he did. Anna was already enquiring about Nicholas from everyone she met, and had placed herself in Cologne before Julius encountered her at all. When Nicholas went to Poland, she followed. When he went on to Caffa she followed, too.’
‘She wanted the gold,’ Gelis said.
‘I expect that played a part,’ Moriz said, his voice softening a little. ‘I expect Julius wanted it too, for his business. But now, of course, that has gone.’
‘But,’ said Diniz, ‘why should she be interested in Nicholas? She married Julius. Nicholas had a wife and a family.’ He broke off. He said, ‘I thought she was fond of him. I saw them together, like Gelis did. I thought she was fond of Nicholas, like sister and brother.’
‘You might not be wrong,’ the priest said. ‘Human nature being what it is. But there is something more there than simple congruity. I went to see Bonne.’
The tall, demure girl in the convent, whose submissive manner had proved to cloak something that might have been hatred. Gelis said, ‘She didn’t talk?’
‘More, I think, than she did when you saw her,’ said the priest. ‘She is tired of being immured, and whatever her mother has promised her, it will not hold her in subjection much longer. She would not give her away, but on the other hand there is genuinely little she can remember of her earliest childhood, beyond being with Anna, and then in the house of the Graf. I did learn one thing, by trickery.’
‘You?’ said Tobie, pallidly sardonic.
‘A matter of birth dates and arithmetic. Bonne is two years older than we have been led to believe.’
‘In order to claim the paternity of the Graf?’ It was Diniz who spoke. Gelis could not have found breath for a question. She heard Tobie shift, and made the slightest of gestures to reassure him. She did not look at him. She didn’t want to see his expression. She could feel Father Moriz watching them both.
Father Moriz said, ‘I assume so. Tobie: when you went to see the vicomte de Fleury, and later to Eccles, what did you learn about the vicomte’s late-born little daughter Adelina?’
Now Gelis caught Tobie’s gaze. He said slowly, ‘That she was brought up in convents. That she cut herself off from the family.’
‘That she had red hair?’ the priest said.
‘Yes,’ said Tobie. He did not move. Neither did Gelis.
The priest said, ‘For although Bonne told me little, I found a nun who knew, by accident, more than she did. She remembered Bonne’s mother, she said, as a young girl in a convent in Burgundy. The strange thing was that her name then was different. And that her hair had not been black, but bright red.’
‘Dear Christ,’ Tobie said. He said it quite slowly, and his eyes, equally slowly, came to rest on the priest’s face as if his despair and his knowledge could somehow pass unspoken between them.
But of course, it could not. So Father Moriz had to say, gently, ‘I see that you know more of this girl, this red-headed girl of whom the vicomte was speaking. She would be, then — Diniz will correct me — the pretty child-aunt of Nicholas, two years his junior, who was reared in the same home by his mother, and shared his first years in the house of Jaak de Fleury? Then if you know more, I think you must tell us.’
‘No,’ said Gelis. She saw that Diniz, too, had become very pale.
‘I agree,’ Diniz said. ‘I don’t want to hear.’
‘I commend you both,’ the priest said. ‘You are both concerned for the reputation and privacy of Nicholas. I am sure Tobie respects those as well. But I also fear that it will serve Nicholas better, in the end, if this particular seal of his childhood is broken. Am I right?’
Tobie did not answer, or observe any of the niceties. He sat, his neck bent, his hands spread on the unstained stretch of robe at his knees, and considered. When he spoke, it was in a slow measured voice, without passion. ‘Jaak de Fleury was a man who abused children. Adelina was five. He kept her for a year in his house, and another two years, unknown to anyone else at the time, in a secret house outside Geneva. During that time he not only taught her to behave like a lover, he taught her to love him. Then the affair was discovered, and Adelina was separated from Jaak without explanation. She never saw him again.’
It was Father Moriz who asked, in a quieter voice than Gelis had ever heard him use before: ‘And Nicholas?’
It was from Tasse, of course, that: Tobie had all this knowledge: the knowledge he had withheld from Gelis herself on the only other occasion this had been mentioned. Tobie said, ‘Jaak only liked girl children. He beat Nicholas and starved him, and threatened him, but Nicholas didn’t mind, for he understood that he deserved most of it. And anyway, he had consolation.’
And now she knew. The loving, easy-going ways of the boy-apprentice in Bruges, taking his joy where he found it, and giving it, too. She said, ‘Esota.’
‘Jaak’s wife,’ said Tobie. ‘As crazed as her husband, but different. The love she gave Nicholas was the same as his mother’s, but with carnal happiness added, or a version of it which he accepted unquestioningly as he accepted the love of his mother, who had abandoned him and the unfeeling world at the same time. Esota was quite deranged by the time that I met her, but she must have been a feather bed of warmth to him in that cold household. Later, of course, he would grow to understand what had happened, but he must always have remembered how it was, then. I can’t imagine how he felt, the day they told him she was dead, and because of something he had done.’ He stopped and said, with an unexpected change of tone that was almost petulant, ‘Now I shall have to tell Kathi.’ And, a moment later, ‘And she will ask me, yet again, how I could have left him.’
‘No, she won’t,’ Gelis said curtly. ‘This time, it was done for a reason.’ For a moment she struggled. Then she said, ‘But such a childhood — would it not unite a boy and girl who suffered through it together? Would they not want to find one another?’
‘They were five and seven,’ Father Moriz said quietly. ‘Neither would realise what was happening at the time. But to the girl, it must have seemed that she was always the rejected one. Her mother died, and she was reared by her own grown-up half-sister Sophie who, however kind-hearted she was, must always have loved her little son Nicholas better. Then Sophie died, and Nicholas went straight to the arms of Esota, who was also Adelina’s rival for Jaak. Of course, there is an affinity there: the affinity of blood, and experience. But there is also, I fear, the possibility of something much worse. After all, Adelina and Jaak were niece and uncle. She had learned, I think, to love Jaak’s attentions. I believe she may try to force the same unnatural bond upon Nicholas. Fortunately Nicholas is a generation away from the taint.’
No one spoke. Gelis’s spurt of anger over Tobie’s deceit had already faded. He had been protecting Nicholas. And he had not discouraged the theories that Kathi and she herself had begun to entertain about the wise, considerate woman who was to be a sister to Nicholas. And now the whole tragedy was truly in the open.
Gelis said to Father Moriz, ‘So you think — so we all think —— that Thibault’s daughter Adelina is Anna von Hanseyck.’
‘It seems very likely,’ said Father Moriz. His face, full of pity, told how accurately he had noted the new waves of dread that engulfed her.
‘And I have told Nicholas not to come home,’ Gelis said. ‘Because of David de Salmeton, I have locked these two together in Moscow, as they were in Geneva.’
&
nbsp; Chapter 36
IF COWARDICE COULD reveal itself, as had been shown, in a man’s reluctance to exert himself for his own wife and family, then Nicholas maintained his dubious reputation in the following weeks, and did nothing that could be misinterpreted as courageous.
By exerting extraordinary caution, he succeeded in preserving his skin in a wild and dangerous land, where the frozen hardships of winter gave way to the creaking ice and scouring torrents of spring, and the breathless profusion of summer brought with it other ravening dangers, human and feral.
He achieved it largely by staying indoors with Fioravanti. When Julius, increasingly impatient with his self-limiting business, called to summon him to a race, or a bear-fight, or a fowling foray, Nicholas was always deep in consultation with a metal-founder, or required at a briefing for masons, or was expected to be in attendance on the Grand Duchess at the castle. He knew Julius was weary of Russia. He knew that on one of these hunting expeditions he would find himself tied to his horse, being conveyed, with the utmost good humour, in the direction of Bruges. He stayed indoors.
His engagements were not exclusively spurious. Because of his knowledge of Russian, he had appeared with Fioravanti before the boyar Duma and before the Grand Prince himself, assisting the Italian to explain his work and his theories as the cathedral progressed. Sometimes the interrogations strayed into other areas: Muscovites were eager to know about western construction and artillery. The questions varied with the experience of the boyar: recently, as the power of Moscow extended, princes from outside the city had come to join the representatives of the old, untitled Muscovite families; the Duma spoke with mixed voices. It was also apparent that, when roused, the Grand Prince harboured imperial ambitions: to place Novgorod the Great wholly under his suzerainty; to absorb the buffer regions that lay between him and the Tartars; to free himself, one day, from the Golden Horde itself, and throw down the small, shaming, tribute-collecting office of the Tartars at his castle doors.
In all of this, he was liable to find himself nudged, Nicholas could see, by the former papal ward, his portly young wife, aged nineteen. Since the elaborate obeisance that had drawn her eye, Nicholas had found himself many times in her presence. She was always heavily attended by her women, and her bulk was always encased in great parallelograms of stiff jewel-sewn silk, with the pendicles of Byzantium dangling at each round, painted cheek. She dressed as her Imperial forefathers had done; she spoke Greek, not Italian; and she adhered to the Orthodox faith, not the Latin she had been sent to encourage. Her shining obesity and the coats of bright colour that disfigured her fine-grained young skin were also part of her Greek and Russian heritage, and in themselves the mark of beauty and authority. No one had quite understood as much in Cardinal Bessarion’s palace in Rome, where, as he had heard, the catamite Nerio had smiled, and Jan Adorne had been tricked into bursts of crude laughter.
No one laughed here at the Grand Duchess Zoe-Sophia. Replying to her questions, you observed the etiquette of Constantinople, and bowed yourself out in the same manner. Sophia was not interested in gunpowder or weaponry, but she was interested in trade, and Julius’s company was already buying for her. She was also avid for craftsmen. Under Bessarion, she had probably had her fill of learned lecturers: she had no plans to begin an academy. But it was Bessarion’s enthusiasm for Fioravanti, whose very nickname was that of the Cardinal’s hero, which had inspired the invitation that brought the mason-engineer here to Moscow. Now she wanted others, but found it hard to attract them. There was as much money and a better reputation to be had in the comfort of Mantua or Buda as there was in this country — unless, of course, you drew double wages as a spy. Some of the earlier incomers had tried that, and been found out. Now both Sophia and her husband were wary.
Nicholas was not, now, short of money himself. He had some jewels left, adroitly hidden, but since joining the architect, he had increasingly been offered payments for his work: where the building was concerned, expense was no object. And though Julius was now back and holding the reins of his own business, Nicholas had drawn some personal profit for the deals he had made, and continued to do so. Because living was cheap, and there were so few outlets for money, wealth soon accumulated. Fioravanti had used some of his capital to turn his workshop into a training school. Instead of being paid, many of the young men who came to work on his site or at the drawing boards offered him fees for the schooling he gave them. Half the work he did was experimental. He drew plans. He used new tools — a compass, a level. A special kiln had been built to make the hard, prime-quality bricks he required: the walls of white Kama sandstone were to be filled with brick and cement instead of gravel and sand, and he had taught the masons new ways to cut stone. This building, on the brow of the hill, was to brush the sky; was to be higher and lighter than anything Muscovy had previously known. The Dormition. The Assumption. The Uspenskii Sobor. The caves at Qirq-yer had possessed a Church of the Assumption as well.
When he and Nicholas talked, it was generally about the cathedral, but it might as easily be about road-making or bridges or dams. Often, he would draw Nicholas to speak of John le Grant and his cannon, and they would discuss, yet again, the problems of countering heavy artillery, and how to break the impasse of costly, time-wasting sieges where neither side had the ability to prevail. After these sessions, the wall-boards would be black with impassioned drawings. Nicholas lived, from day to day, in an agony of uncertainty and apprehension, but his work concealed his feelings and preserved them from crumbling, like Rudolfo’s strictly mortared new walls.
As the weeks went by, there were cracks in the rampart of silence. He knew, before the winter was over, that Mánkup in Gothia had fallen; that the fratricidal prince Aleksandre had been executed and his wife and daughters sent to harems. It moved him more to hear, later, that Abdan Khan the commander had escaped, leading his Circassians east of Kerch to the valley of the Kuban, and safety. They said that his pregnant wife had given birth on the vessel that took them, and that he now had a son, Kesa. The name, picked in pride and defiance, was neither Cairene nor Gothian, but Cherkess.
He knew his own son was alive, but only because of the pendulum. He carried with him Gelis’s letter, brought by Julius and therefore read by him. It added little to what Julius had already told him: that the danger from David de Salmeton was known, and would be dealt with, and that he was not to come back. And so he was not coming back.
He did not, of course, cut himself off from all connection with Julius or Anna: he simply entertained them in his house, and discouraged appeals to his better nature by filling the room with other people. Fioravanti generally had some business to talk over if Julius was present, and Nicholai de’ Acciajuoli never absented himself from a social occasion on any level, whether to shine at it or deride it. Impatience overcame Julius once, to the extent that he upbraided Nicholas in public for neglecting his family and overstaying in Russia, when company business required them both elsewhere.
To that, Nicholas merely answered, ‘Then go back yourself. I’ll come when I can.’ And, when pushed: ‘Then expel me as your partner, and keep the loan you were given as my forfeit.’ He thought, then, that Julius was within a fraction of going, but Anna restrained him.
The next time they came, Julius was called away suddenly, and left Anna behind, promising to return to escort her home. Fioravanti was absent, but there were three eminent boyars in the room, an Italian goldsmith, and a few of the absent architect’s more promising trainees, who sat as close to Anna as possible, and gazed at her, awed. She smiled and spoke to them all, but spent more time, as was right, with the boyars, interrupting herself on occasion to spar with Acciajuoli, who liked to inject a light irony into the unrisen dough of boyar discourse, increasingly thickened by drink.
Watching the pretty woman and the elderly gentleman, so socially adept, Nicholas saw, yet again, how they took pleasure in their exchange. Both were solemn; only by the tone of their voices could you tell they were bantering
. Anna’s face was illumined. Nicholas remembered the times when he, too, had been free to talk to her like that, and the sound of her laughter. He could not risk that now. With Julius here, God knew how it would end.
In fact, of course, Julius was not there. The light waned, the youths reluctantly left, and still he had not returned. The princes one by one fell asleep, and their servants came, as was the custom, to carry them home. One roused on leaving, and broke into song, and then vomited. Acciajuoli said, ‘I shall escort the Gräfin to her home. Her husband has been delayed.’
Anna smiled. She had bought silks in Novgorod, and her slender skirts moved upon one another, layer on layer, as she changed her position. Her sleeves lay at rest on Rudolfo’s priceless tiled floor. She said, ‘Are you afraid to leave Nicholas and myself together? Julius will come. He had enough confidence, you will remember, to confide me to Nicholas in the Crimea.’
‘As her servant,’ Nicholas said. ‘Which, of course, I still am. Monsignore, go home. If no one comes, I shall escort her myself.’
A less skilful man might have thought it polite to insist. Acciajuoli smiled, kissed the lady’s hand, and, escorted by Nicholas, limped to the door, where his servant was waiting. The door closed. Nicholas turned.
Except for Anna, the room was quite empty. The planed timber walls breathed their resin, and the precious objects of Fioravanti’s collection, a little disarranged by the company, defined the declining light in slow-swimming glimmers of silver and marble and bronze. The air sank through the window: the acrid, earth-smells of Moscow, as distinct as the fruit, musk and incense of Trebizond; the fish, clay, and camel manure of Timbuktu. The sweat, flowers and bath-oils of Tabriz; the rotting fish of the Faroes. The hot, peppery, ammoniac stinks of the dyeyards in Nicosia and Bruges. The scent of love in Bruges; the one he would remember, when all the others had gone.