Dorothy Dunnett - Caprice and Rondo: The Seventh Book of The House of Niccolò

THE LYMOND CHRONICLES

The Game of Kings
Queens Play
The Disorderly Knights
Pawn in Frankincense
The Ringed Castle
Checkmate

King Hereafter

Dolly and the Singing Bird (Rum Affair)
Dolly and the Cookie Bird (Ibiza Surprise)
Dolly and the Doctor Bird (Operation Nassau)
Dolly and the Starry Bird (Roman Nights)
Dolly and the Nanny Bird (Split Code)
Dolly and the Bird of Paradise (Tropical Issue)
Moroccan Traffic

THE HOUSE OF NICCOL

Niccol Rising
The Spring of the Ram
Race of Scorpions
Scales of Gold
The Unicorn Hunt
To Lie with Lions
Caprice and Rondo

The Scottish Highlands
( IN COLLABORATION WITH ALASTAIR DUNNETT )

FIRST VINTAGE BOOKS EDITION, AUGUST 1999

Copyright 1997 by Dorothy Dunnett
Introduction 1998 by Judith Wilt

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Vintage Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Michael Joseph, Ltd., London, 1997, and in slightly different form in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, in 1998.

Vintage Books and colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Knopf edition as follows:
Dunnett Dorothy.
Caprice and Rondo / Dunnett. 1st American ed.
p. cm.(The house of Niccol)
I. Title. II. Series: Dunnett, Dorothy. House of Niccol.
PR6054.U56C36 1998
823.914dc21 97-49458

eISBN: 978-0-307-76228-3

Author photograph Alison Dunnett

www.vintagebooks.com

v3.1_r1

For Annabella Charlotte Dunnett

When my chronicle of Francis Crawford of Lymond ended, it seemed to me that there was something still to be told of his heritage: about the genetic lottery, as well as the turmoil of trials and experience which, put together, could bring such a man into being.

The House of Niccol, in all its volumes, deals with the forerunner without whom Lymond would not have existed: the unknown who fought his way to the high ground that Francis Crawford would occupy, and held it for him. It is fiction, but the setting at least is very real.

The man I have called Nicholas de Fleury lived in the mid-fifteenth century, three generations before Francis Crawford, and was reared as an artisan, his gifts and his burdens concealed beneath an artless manner and a joyous, sensuous personality. But he was also born at the cutting edge of the European Renaissance, which Lymond was to exploit at its zeniththe explosion of exploration and trade, high art and political duplicity, personal chivalry and violent warfare in which a young man with a genius for organization and numbers might find himself trusted by princes, loved by kings, and sought in marriage and out of it by clever women bent on power, or wealth, or revengeor sometimes simply from fondness.

There are, of course, echoes of the present time. Trade and war dont change much down through the centuries: todays new multimillionaires had their counterparts in the entrepreneurs of few antecedents who evolved the first banking systems for the Medici; who developed the ruthless network of trade that ran from Scotland, Flanders, and Italy to the furthest reaches of the Mediterranean and the Baltic, and ventured from Iceland to Persia, from Muscovy to the deserts of Africa.

Scotland is important to this chronicle, as it was to Francis Crawford. Here, the young Queen of Scots is a thirteen-year-old Scandinavian, and her husbands family are virtually children. This, framed in glorious times, is the story of the difficult, hesitant progress of a small nation, as well as that of a singular man.

Dorothy Dunnett
Edinburgh, 1998

November 1473 January 1477
(Those marked are recorded in history)

Rulers

England: King Edward IV, House of York

Scotland: King James III, House of Stewart

France: King Louis XI

Burgundy: Charles, Duke of Burgundy, Count of Flanders

Pope: Sixtus IV (della Rovere)

Venice: Doges Nicol Marcello, Pietro Mocenigo, Andrea Vendramin

German Emperor and King of the Romans: Frederick III

Portugal: King Alphonse V, nephew of Henry the Navigator

Muscovy: Grand Duke Ivan III Vasilievich, Autocrat of All Russia

Scandinavia: Christian I

Poland and Lithuania: King Casimir IV Jagiello

Bohemia: King Wladyslaw, son of Casimir

Hungary: King Mathias Corvinus