The Unicorn Hunt: The Fifth Book of the House of Niccolo

by Dorothy Dunnett

  She left, and he let her go. Then he said, ‘The maps are in my room. Gregorio, sit with me.’

  There was no one to serve them. Tobie waited some moments in silence, watching the great map of Venice spread out on the desk, with every house, every rio carefully marked, and the little jewel swaying over it. Then he went first to his own room, and after that to the kitchens, where he mixed draughts and loaded a tray. He had done it often enough in a long and exhausting campaign. Something to keep a man going and useful, without burning him out before time. When he got back and put the tray down, they were talking.

  Gregorio broke off and looked up. ‘She is here. The jewel says so. But Nicholas says she is moving.’

  Of course, he was speaking of Margot. Tobie said, ‘Do you think the child is with her?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Nicholas said. ‘And I don’t think Gelis needs to know that Margot is involved unless and until we find Margot and the … and Jordan together. It would be Carnival-time.’

  ‘Easier to hide,’ Tobie said. ‘You say Simon is here. Perhaps even his father. The sooner we find that child and Margot, the better. You should change out of that. If we have to go out, we should all be in masquerade. You want to keep your son this time.’

  He had got himself a fisherman’s costume. He was going to look a fool, and didn’t care. He saw Nicholas take some of his drink, and went off to dress. Gregorio had no disguise, but could wear a black cloak and mask. And Nicholas at least would be in black.

  They were all in the salon again by the time that Gelis returned. Her cloak was fresh; she wore a plain gown underneath it. She stopped a moment and then moved forward, scanning them all. Her eyes rested on Nicholas.

  He had not wanted to change. Tobie had had to persuade him that it was not irrelevant, and he had flung on the clothes, making his way quickly back, listening ceaselessly. Then she was there before him, her smile openly mocking. ‘Alichino?’ she said.

  The narrow pourpoint and hose, the single garland, the black diabolical mask in his hand with its soft fur and incipient horns were unmistakable. She said, ‘The devil-buffoon. How appropriate.’

  ‘I knew you would think so,’ he answered. He had some colour, and the worth of some hours of vitality, Tobie thought, depending on how much he was now going to expend. He said, ‘Did you bring something?’

  She brought it out from under her cloak: a little whistle on a silk cord. Tobie saw Gregorio swallow. Nicholas himself just said, ‘Bring it,’ and walked out of the room to his chamber. The girl, following, bit her lip, frowning at his back. When he sat down at the desk, she held back.

  He looked up. ‘Then give me it,’ he said. The whistle changed hands. He was going to use it, Tobie realised, as his pendulum.

  She had never seen it done before, Tobie guessed. He stood back with Gregorio, watching her move a step closer, then another, her eyes on his hand with the cord. The other, the left, was moving slowly over the paper. For a long time, she watched the glints and swings of the whistle. Then she caught sight of the diviner’s face and stood very still, her eyes on it.

  You would suppose that, in all the time they had spent together, she had seen something of this order of concentration. It occurred, in flickers, when Nicholas was calculating, or preparing a plan. Sometimes, devising some mechanical marvel with John, Tobie had seen them both like this, for odd moments. John thought of Nicholas, Tobie knew, as a master technician with no need for the softer emotions. In his heart, John thought that Nicholas was the same kind of man that he was. The trouble was, they all did.

  Tobie said, ‘If you are not getting results, you should stop.’

  Sometimes, he didn’t hear. It was Gelis’s voice saying, ‘Stop!’ that made him look up. The cord had inflamed the chafed part of his finger, but that was all. It had never been roused to full swing on this search.

  Nicholas said, ‘There are so many people. And he is being moved all the time. Is that possible?’

  She said, ‘You can’t tell who has him? Or why?’ She sounded distracted. ‘Or if he is lost?’

  ‘I can’t tell,’ he said. ‘I need to be there. Will you let me keep the whistle?’

  She said, ‘What will you do?’ Her eyes were on his face again, searching it.

  ‘Walk about,’ Nicholas said.

  ‘Then I’ll come with you,’ said Gelis.

  ‘We’ll all come,’ Tobie said. ‘Nicholas. You need ten minutes’ rest. Gelis will wait.’

  He had expected her to object, but she left the room quietly. Gregorio said, ‘Well?’

  Nicholas had threaded the cord through his hands and was looking down at the whistle, lying flat on his palm. He said, ‘They aren’t together. The signs for the whistle are in different places from the signs for Margot.’

  ‘What in God’s name –’ burst out Gregorio.

  Nicholas looked up. ‘She’s clever, your Margot. She doesn’t want to lead anyone to the baby until she’s sure it is safe. She probably knows who is here. When Gelis has gone, Margot will find us.’

  It brought Gregorio comfort but it was not, Tobie thought, necessarily true. The child might be missing, and Margot might be trying to find it. Or Nicholas, spent, was mistaken, and neither the child nor Gregorio’s lover was in Venice at all.

  He took Gregorio away, and left Nicholas to rest if he could. When he went back ten minutes later, he had gone.

  One by one, the masqueraders took to the streets after dinner: in couples, in companies. Katelijne Sersanders, called for by friends, received her uncle’s permission to leave. Her uncle also departed, bidden to celebrate with the Knights of the Order. Jan, attired in cocks’ feathers, had already met with his friends in some tavern. Katelijne saw a play in an adjacent Campo and then, pleading indisposition, excused herself and made her way home. There, she changed quietly and went out again, feeling loose-limbed and free, as in Egypt. Unhappily, by then the lie had come true. She did feel sick.

  Simon de St Pol, in ravishing costume, attended several parties and began, with a small group of acquaintances, to rove through the lanes and squares of the city. His father, for the nonce, stayed at home.

  Julius, dressed as a Senator, introduced himself into a number of illustrious homes and began to enjoy himself greatly. Cefo went off to the rooms of a young woman acquaintance. Tobie took Gregorio by the arm and propelled him outdoors in high anger. As well as Nicholas, Gelis had gone. Tobie had no doubt the two were together, and he proposed to discover them both before – as the Franciscan had hinted – they killed each other.

  Gelis said, ‘You can still occasionally surprise me. I thought you would have demanded your nursemaids.’

  There were fatigue-hollows under her eyes and she wore no mask and no elaborate headgear; only a netted cap into which her hair had been rolled and pleated with ribbon. Contradicting the simplicity, her cloak was a conspicuous one of white satin. You would say she was seeking a child, and wished to be easily visible. Or perhaps you would say that.

  She had been ready, of course, to come with him. If he found anything, she did not want Tobie or Gregorio present. And neither did Nicholas. He wore the whistle hung from his neck, where it rested in the swathe of his cowl, and over the black needlework of his tunic. The black hood bound his head, and the black brimmed hat was pressed, slanting over it. Between hood, hat and mask nothing human appeared. He saw and breathed through cut eyes and cut nostrils. He was not dressed for children.

  In his divining hand he carried his batocio, the small scrolled stick of the underworld being he represented, and three-quarters of his conscious mind clung to it. The stick was uneasy, stirring this way and that, but only a little. Never the heart-thumping blow he had experienced in the ducal Palace. He knew Gelis was glancing at him, for he was usually talkative enough, God knew. She didn’t press for an answer. She walked a fraction behind, and let him lead her.

  He had identified, now, the true impediment to his art, to his sorcery. Preoccupied since his arrival, he had f
ailed to visualise that on this, the last day of the revels, the city would fill like a cornucopia with people. Tomorrow was Mercoledì delle Ceneri. Tonight at midnight began the time for abstinence, penitence, when last year’s palm fronds became cinders.

  Today the palm branches were green, and these could be flowers or people who slowly flowed, cheek to cheek, through the paved lanes and the narrow canals between the tall marble palaces; or spanned each bridge like the fringe of a fan. People garlanded roof-tops and balconies and clustered in every piazza: round the bull-baiting in San Geremia; below the stages in the Campo della Salute where the actors stalked through their dramas; around the Campo Santo Stefano where the human pyramid formed and reformed and men wrestled naked, and artists sang and played carnival ballads to fiddle and lute; in the Campo San Polo where the Castellani and the Nicolotti staged a mock battle, and there was a bear and an ostrich and a live marionette, revolving to the sound of a musical box.

  The mild February sun glittered on everything. It glowed upon the drifting headdresses of chiffon, feathers and fur; upon the grandiloquent hats burgeoning aloft into tall sheaves of plumes; upon globes and hoops and castles of saye; whorls of satin, winged fantasies sparkling with sequins. It flashed upon foil and wire and ribbons of silver and gold; turned a wand of white gauze incandescent and played the shadows of giants and angels upon the silken white membranes of tents.

  The noise echoed under the blue slots of sky in the alleys and expanded into the air of the piazzas: the roar of talking and laughter, the surge of music, the patter of drums. And scent and colour jostled together, strident as noise: musk and ultramarine and magenta, turquoise and amber, iris, cedar and emerald, frangipani and violet and rose.

  Gelis said, ‘You can’t do it, can you? He’s gone.’

  It was not, for once, the voice of challenge, of scorn. Nicholas said, ‘I am going to try.’ Then he said, ‘Why do you care?’ A child passed, asleep on someone’s shoulder, its garland cock-eyed. There had been a group of small boys on a bridge, being helped to pelt one another with rose-water eggs: the fallen shells conducted a long swaying dance in the water. There were children everywhere, winged like angels, padded like elves. But he felt nothing; nothing.

  She said, ‘I care because he is mine.’

  ‘And I don’t?’ She had sent him to Cyprus.

  She said, ‘I don’t know, Nicholas, what you want him for. I hope I never find out.’

  They were in a crowded, shadowy lane. At the end, brilliant in sunshine, a masked youth leaned on the base of a pillar, one hand at the pipe in his mouth, the other tapping the little tambour which hung at his waist. As they came near he leaped down and led the way dancing, drawing the column of people behind him like an enchanter to the next play. From the curve of a bridge a tambourine suddenly rattled, and the strings of a guitar summoned, beckoned. The batocio stirred and flickered and turned but gave him no news. There were too many people. Holding his concentration, his senses sickened and swam. She put her hand surprisingly on his wrist and said, ‘Stop.’

  There was a great panelled door at his side, and he stumbled and leaned back against it. She released his wrist and stopped, too. The crowd continued to pass: cloaks, sleeves, trains of damask and silver; fans and muffs. Beyond an arch was the thunder of noise from the Piazza San Marco: its rows of stages, its thousands of people; the basilica with its mosaics like wrinkled gold skin at the end. He kept his eyes open.

  She said, ‘I could go on, but you can’t. Later, the crowds may be less. I have rooms here.’

  He looked where she indicated. It was not the doorway he occupied, but a more modest one opposite. There was a small balcony up above, bound with ivy. She said, ‘I stayed here before I sailed, in the spring. David de Salmeton arranged it for me.’

  His eyes had closed. He said, ‘Are you not afraid that I shall stop, when you say that?’

  ‘No,’ she said.

  ‘Or walk away?’

  ‘I am fresher than you are. I am not offering you my bed or my sympathy,’ Gelis said. ‘Only the opportunity to recover so that you can do what I want you to do.’

  ‘And after that?’ Nicholas said. He merely wished to hear what she would say.

  ‘According to my information, you did not keep your part of the bargain,’ she said. ‘The child is still mine.’

  He wondered what made her think that. Being the devil, he was equipped with a dagger. It was a real one. It occurred to him that he wouldn’t mind if David de Salmeton were in Gelis’s house.

  In fact he was not. The rooms he climbed to were empty. She went to fetch him some wine, and he pulled off his hat and the mask, and pushed back the cowl. His hair clung wet round his neck. He let his lids close, because it was quiet and he felt rather ill, and he knew that whatever occurred, for a while he was perfectly safe.

  Down below in the alley, a page in a moretta mask and striped hose occupied the grand doorway he had just left and began, absently, to play with a jew’s trump.

  Chapter 49

  GREGORIO SAID, ‘THERE’S going to be fog. We’ll never find them. We ought to go back to the Casa.’ They had been back twice already, in case Margot had sent a message or come.

  It was an hour to sunset and mist, like white smoke, had already drifted in from the sea and was filling the Piazzetta, so that the stalls of the butchers and the salami-sellers started to vanish, and the Doge’s Palace dimmed, arch by arch. The haze searched through the Piazza until only the bell-tower soared clear, a finger of rose against the fading Basilica. The final wan rays of the sun lit the Lion of St Mark, and the angels’ wings, and rested on the dull gold below, and then were extinguished.

  Tobie said, ‘I think the crowds are causing the trouble. No one can move. And Nicholas can’t fine tune unless he has peace. I hope to God that girl keeps her head.’

  The latter part of the pronouncement represented his doubts about Gelis. The first was, as ever, to keep Gregorio calm.

  What Tobie could not understand, himself, was how the first, violent intimation had managed to penetrate to Nicholas through crowds just as great. It had seemed to come, he remembered, most clearly from Gelis; and had registered, perhaps, the height of her despair.

  He had found it hard, himself, to keep his equanimity in this harsh, brilliant atmosphere of festival, sliding now, as the light waned, towards something darker, less innocent. Now the prostitutes were coming out in greater numbers, men as women, women as men; nursemaids with broad shoulders and thick calves pushing carts loaded with full-grown, lumbering babies, drooling, chanting, clawing at skirts with both hands as they passed. Every dark archway and porch seemed to be filling with rustling figures.

  The real children had gone; or he thought so until, his breath caught in his throat, he saw an imploring masked figure before him, a limp child in her arms, its golden hair lifelessly drifting.

  Tobie blundered towards her: she turned. He saw that the mask was two-faced; the figure that of a man; and the child in its grasp an effigy fixed to the stuff of his costume. Sickened, Tobie had hurried past.

  He got Gregorio to agree to go back to the Casa, and to meet him later at the Rialto. Their boat would be there. He counted on Nicholas to remember that, if all else failed.

  Nicholas woke up in darkness, suddenly. He had been asleep in a chair whose high back was comfortably padded, and which faced a small window whose panes glimmered white. He rose abruptly.

  A voice said, ‘The mist came down, but it is still very crowded.’

  Gelis. He could make out the outline of a bed, and then her shape, lying watching him. He wondered how visible he had been against the light, and if she had or had not guessed what wakened him. He said, ‘Do you have any particular resources for casual visitors?’

  There was a stand of candles by the bed. She struck tinder and started to light them. Her fingers were steady. Without moving, he saw that his dagger had gone. She said, ‘Through that door. There is no other way out: you will have to come back
here.’

  She had been watching him, then. He departed in any case, and found her standing when he came back, combing and pinning her hair. The line of her body had not changed. She said, ‘It shook you awake. A real sign this time. So where did it come from?’

  He walked into the room and stood looking at her. Behind his back was the other door which led outwards. He said, ‘Somewhere in Venice. This time, that is all I can tell you.’

  She finished what she was doing and sat down. She had regained all her composure. She said, ‘You mean that is all you will tell me. I offended you. I remember.’

  ‘In what way?’ he said. He stood, no less at ease, his back to the door. ‘My various mishaps in Cairo were not your doing. You even sent me your ring. As for Mount Sinai – I have to thank you, I gather, for rescuing me. That is, Father Ludovico did that, but you and he, I now see, are interchangeable.’

  He lifted his brows. She said, ‘He would never have forgiven me if you had died.’

  Her voice was calm. The pulse that had wakened him beat. He could find the child. It didn’t matter, now, what she said, except that the calmness in itself was an affront. He said, ‘Remind me. In Africa, when you thought Father Godscalc and I were both lost, did you feel nothing?’

  There was a little silence. Then she said, ‘Recently, you had cause to think me dead. I felt what you felt.’

  ‘I see,’ he said. ‘Certainly, it was annoying. All those plans gone to waste. Why did you go to wait for me at St Catherine’s? There was no gold. Or perhaps you didn’t know that?’

  ‘Does it make any difference?’ she said. ‘I wanted to see what you would do. So did the Patriarch. And he didn’t want you on Cyprus too early. On the other hand, I didn’t mind when you went. Did you go to Katelina’s tomb? I hope you did that much, at least.’

  Your sister was a sweet lover, and urgent as you are, and wilful as you are, but never, never …

  Nicholas said, ‘Shall I please you? For whatever rage, whatever hatred you feel against Katelina or me, you obtained revenge in full measure on Cyprus. Nothing would have taken me there but the hope of my son, and you and Father Ludovico between you saw that I had it. Yes, I prayed in the Cathedral. Yes, I left the Cathedral and went to the Franciscans’, and yes, I found there what you left for me. You are avenged. But in return, you cannot expect me to lead you to the child. And possessing the child, I shall need no others.’