Caprice and Rondo Read Free Page B

Genoese, who hold the great commercial port of Famagusta. Sensing that, of the two Lusignan “scorpions,” James holds the winning edge, Nicholas agrees to enter his service. He intends to design the game this time, not be its pawn, but he doesn’t reckon with the enmity of Katelina, who comes to Rhodes to warn Carlotta against him, or the sudden presence of Simon’s Portuguese brother-in-law Tristão Vasquez and Vasquez’s naïve sixteen-year-old son Diniz, all three of whom do become pawns.
    Nicholas is now the lover of Carlotta’s courtesan, the beautiful Primaflora, whose games he also thinks he can control, and he recognizes a crisis of countermanipulations brewing between Katelina and Primaflora. Only at the end of the novel, after Katelina’s love/hate for Nicholas has been manipulated to bring Tristão to his death and Diniz to captivity under James, after Nicholas and Katelina rediscover intimacy and establish the truth of their relationship, after a brilliant and deadly campaign waged by Nicholas for James has brought him to ultimate tragedy—the siege of Famagusta which he planned and executed has resulted, without his knowledge, in the death of Katelina and the near-death of Diniz, trapped in the starving city—only at the end does Nicholas fully admit even to himself that much of this has been planned or sanctioned by Primaflora, intent on securing her own future.
    In the end, too, the determinedly rational Nicholas gives vent to his rage. Punishment for the pain of the complex desires and denials in his private and public history cannot be visited upon the complex and only half-guilty figures of his family or his trading and political rivals and clients. But in this novel, for the first time, he finds a person he can gladly kill, the unspeakably cruel Mameluke Emir Tzanibey al-Ablak, whom he fatally mutilates in single combat while James, unknown to him, has the Emir’s four-hundred-man army massacred in a preemptive strike carrying all the glory and damnation of Renaissance kingship.
    Like Pagano Doria, like Nicholas himself, Primaflora is a “modern” type, a talented and alienated “self-made” person. Unlike the other two, Nicholas has the memory of family in which to ground a wary, half-reluctant, but genuine adult existence in the community. At the same time, however, he avoids close relationships: he has established the Bank of Niccolò as a company, not a family. But, resisting and insisting, the members of the company forge bonds of varying intimacy with Nicholas, especially the priest Godscalc and the physician Tobie, who alone at this point know the secret of Katelina’s baby and carry the dying woman’s written affirmation of Nicholas’ paternity.
    Nicholas’ only true intimate, however, is a man of a different race entirely, the African who came to Bruges as a slave and was befriended by the servant Claes, who first communicated the secret of the alum deposit, who traveled with him to Trebizond to run the trading household, and to Cyprus to organize and under Nicholas reinvent the sugar industry there. His African name is as yet unknown, his Portuguese name is Lopez, his company name Loppe. Now a major figure in the company, and the family, he listens at the end of the novel as both Nicholas and his new rival, the broker of the mysterious Vatachino company, look to the Gold Coast of Africa as the next place of questing and testing.
VOLUME IV : Scales of Gold
    For those who know the truth, the deaths of Katelina, Tristão, and Tzanibey, the brutal forging of a new monarchy for Cyprus, even Nicholas’ alienation from and reconciliation with young Diniz, have stemmed from honorable, even noble motives. But gossip in Europe, fed by de Ribérac and St Pol, puts a more sinister stamp on these events. Under financial attack by the Genoese firm of Vatachino, the Bank of Niccolò undertakes a commercial expedition to Africa, which young Diniz Vasquez joins partly as an act of faith in