Caprice and Rondo (98 page)

‘I don’t think,’ Gelis said in a murmur, ‘that you ought to give in to nostalgia. You do have a plan?’

‘I did,’ he said. ‘For different weather. No
galoppini
.’ He kept his voice soft, but could not prevent it from lightening. This was how, once, they had talked.

‘Life is full of surprises,’ Gelis said. ‘You
have
got the knife?’

‘Sitting on it,’ he said.

‘Painful,’ said Gelis. ‘They’ll have to unshackle me to push my head under. I’ll try what I can.’

‘Gelis,’ he said. His voice was not light, now.

The clanging got nearer, and the redoubled light.

‘Thibault relayed your message,’ she said. ‘It is true for me, too. I am only sorry for …’ But she could not speak his name.

‘But Jodi is quite secure,’ Nicholas said. He had lifted his voice, directing it at Anna, who had entered again. Behind her, with a sonorous clangour, the water magazine was approaching. Nicholas said, ‘By tomorrow, everyone who matters will know who Anna is, and how unsuitable such a match will be. I have appointed other guardians. There is no possibility that Bonne and Jordan could ever marry.’

‘No one would believe you,’ Anna said.

‘Oh yes,’ Nicholas said. ‘There is proof. I had hoped to deal with this privately, but if we both die, Father Moriz will publish the truth. Julius will learn it as well.’

‘Julius!’ Anna exclaimed. She laughed.

‘Do you think he would stay married to you?’ Nicholas said. ‘If you let us go, you can return east with Julius and live out your life, respected and wealthy in Poland. If you do this, you lose everything.’

‘Don’t you think it is worth it?’ she said. ‘I want to watch your face as she dies. I want to tell you something that none of your friends knows, and then I want to watch you die, sobbing.’

They were filling the tank. The fog curled down from the hatch, and the icy air, and pools formed on the deck. It would not take long. They only needed enough to cover her head, when they held her face down. Anna sat. The men climbed up and down. Gelis watched the water, not Nicholas. She looked very tired, and as stiff as if she also had been kicked. Nicholas found Anna’s gaze on them both, and looked down. Then the water was sufficiently deep, and Anna’s men went to Gelis and unshackled her wrists, and she rose in their grasp, and looked at Nicholas.

Anna said, ‘Would you like to say goodbye? A farewell kiss? Look, I think he is moist-eyed already. But first, perhaps we should take away the knife he is sitting on.’

Before she ended, Nicholas had twisted and kicked. As he hoped, Gelis threw herself forward, but the man at her right arm held fast, while the other leaped before her, intending to catch the knife as it flew. It meant that her left arm was free.

It would have offered nothing to graceful, feminine Anna. But this was Gelis, to whom a man’s world was not simply hunting or ledgerwork, and who had fought on a ship off the African coast. Who had always fought, damn her.

She had seen, watching Nicholas, that there was nothing to catch. The kick had been a feint. The next moment, he sent the real knife skimming towards her, and Gelis lunged once again. Since both men were going to get it before she did, there was not much point, she evidently saw, in competing. She plunged for the nearest scabbard instead, heaved out its sword and banged the owner hard on the back so that he screamed and staggered forward. She put her foot out as he passed.

Before her husband’s fascinated gaze, the man stumbled, flailed, and floundered up to the rim of the tank. There was a clang and a splash, and Nicholas laughed. Gelis frowned, and her remaining opponent looked round, which was unwise, for it allowed Gelis to knock the sword from his hand and slash at him with the point of her own. He gasped and fell. Anna screamed at him. The eyes of Nicholas were on Gelis who, stooping,
collected the rod that unlocked the shackles, and started to back. In a whirl of red hair, Anna followed, the fallen man’s sword held low in both hands, like a spear. It quivered. Her eyes were not on Gelis, but below her, to where Nicholas half knelt, still chained.

He said impatiently, ‘Well, use your head.’

‘I am!’ said Gelis indignantly. Anna made a stroke at her and she countered, sobered. The staple and Nicholas were just behind her. The man she had knocked down was stirring, and an ominous splashing could be heard from the tank. Anna drove forward again, this time towards Nicholas. Gelis knocked the blade aside, and it fell. Nicholas said, ‘Sweetheart,
date stones
.’

Without the endearment, it was a very old code between them. He saw Gelis stop, and glimpsed the curve of her cheek as she smiled. Then she ducked, and as Anna came forward again, Gelis picked up first one bucket, then another, and threw them, hard.

The pails were of leather, and heavy. They smashed into both lanterns, plunging them all into a darkness full of blundering figures. A person with whose shape he was intimately acquainted fell into his arms and sadly, out of them again, attended by a clatter of metal. His shackles fell off. He caught and kissed the nearest bare part of his rescuer and heard her breathlessly laugh. Then he and Gelis were fighting their way side by side in the dark to the steps. Fighting with fists and shoulders and elbows, for there was no place in this darkness for swords. He heard Gelis use, viciously, a word of Astorre’s, and was swamped again with pain and with love.

They had the stairs at their back, when Nicholas heard the thud of many feet up above, and the barge sluggishly tilted. About him, the grasping hands slackened. Nicholas realised that the wounded man had fallen back, and that the other had stopped, apprehensive. Then came the rush of scent and the slither of silk and he sensed, since he could not see, that Anna had found a weapon, and was going to use it. Nicholas took his wife by the hand and pulled her, fast, up the steps, throwing up the hatch lid at the top. He did not know whom he was going to meet. It might be David de Salmeton.

He stepped out first; then drew Gelis up after him. Her hand was sinewy, and sweaty, and what he could only describe as protective. He wondered if she would think he was shaking from fear. Around them was freezing air, and darkness, and fog, and a circle of brands, glimmering in the grasp of a shadowy troop of armed men. There was nothing to show whose they were.

The hatch creaked, and another figure stepped into the thick, swimming light. Her hair gleamed red and gold, and her face was that of a ghost. ‘Help me,’ said Adelina de Fleury. ‘This is my attacker, who has
followed me all the way from Russia. And his wife, as perverted as he is. Help me, whoever you are.’

A man stepped forward. ‘Me, I’m called Andro Wodman,’ he said. ‘Gentleman, and Conservator of Scots Privileges in Bruges. And this is the private militia of my lord Louis de Gruuthuse, Governor of Holland, whose wife, you may recollect, is a van Borselen. Our orders are to let your men go, and to take you to my lord’s house in Ghent, where you may stay in a safe place until you are called to answer for what you have done. Pray to come forward. It is not our purpose to harm you.’

‘What!’
said the woman. She said a great deal more, but no one replied. Nicholas drew Gelis back as Adelina de Fleury was led respectfully past, and did not move when she struggled to face and revile him. When he did not reply, she fell silent, and allowed herself to be taken onwards again. Her footsteps descended, and faded. Only then did he heave a long, shaking sigh, and look at Wodman.

‘The
galoppini
,’ he said. ‘You took your bloody time.’

‘You obviously managed,’ Wodman said. ‘What are you whining for this time?’

T
HE
MANSION
OF
Louis de Gruuthuse in Ghent was nothing near the size of his palace in Bruges, but it possessed secure rooms, and the kind of household which could both serve and guard anyone kept there. By the time the Scots Conservator and his two companions arrived there, Adelina de Fleury was not to be seen, and only Marguerite van Borselen was waiting, in her bedrobe, to bring them out of the fog and into the warmth of her chamber. There was steaming wine ready to pour.

‘The young woman is safe, and being looked after. So sad! She seems very wild in her talk, but most persuasive: Louis says she is quite insane, and I am not to go near her, nor should you. And I should think not; look at you; this is what she has done to you both? And Nicholas? You are safely back?’

‘I am safely back,’ he said. ‘But would not have remained so, except for Gelis. You have a very … 
combative
cousin.’

‘So was her sister,’ said the lady of Gruuthuse. ‘I always said, they needed a man to keep them in order. It does not do to cling together like shellfish; but nor does it do to stay apart for too long.’

‘I must remember,’ said Nicholas. Gelis looked at him, but he was gazing down at the cup in his hand. Under the blanket he had been given, he had stopped shivering, and the better light, while revealing the contusions, also showed her, for the first time in three years, the face she knew so well, and the changes in it. Then he looked up and smiled, and she felt the colour rise in her cheeks and her throat.

Nicholas cleared his own throat. He looked at Wodman and said, ‘You say that the Gräfin’s husband is coming?’

‘Father Moriz will bring Julius tomorrow. Today,’ Wodman corrected himself, looking at the dark windows. ‘He will have been told what has happened. But of course, he will have to see for himself. As for our original anxiety, Buchan has gone, taking de Salmeton with him, and will presumably stay in the Tyrol until spring. All the threatened danger has gone. You and your family are safe.’

Nicholas said, ‘I am glad you came when you did.’ His eyes kept returning to Gelis, who was still flushing. He had forgotten what fine skin she had.

Her cousin Marguerite said, ‘And now you are both going back to the palace? Come: I shall find you better clothes. You must be longing, Nicholas, to see your son again.’

‘He will be asleep,’ Gelis said. She glanced at Nicholas, and away.

‘Then perhaps you would rather stay here? We have rooms enough!’ She was being both tactful and kind. Before they were married, Gelis had admitted him to her room at the Hôtel Gruuthuse in Bruges. He rather thought Marguerite knew it. Marguerite said, ‘Consider it while I bring you something comfortable to wear. Meester Wodman will help me.’

She disappeared with the Conservator, who appeared familiar with the house. Gelis said, ‘He is staying here. I don’t know if I want to be so close to Anna again.’ She was sitting, her eyes on the fire.

Nicholas said, ‘My luggage is at the Sersanders’ house. Kathi gave me the key.’

‘Who else is there?’ Gelis said. She was looking at him again.

‘No one. That is, there is a housekeeper who lives there. She will make whatever arrangements are wanted.’

‘That sounds very suitable,’ Gelis said. When told, Marguerite seemed to think so as well; Wodman grunted. It was not pleasant, issuing again into the cold, but the journey was short, and their escort delivered them to Anselm Adorne’s house in good order. Nicholas had a key. He opened the door, and she entered a modest tiled hall, warmed by a stove, with three doors leading off, and a narrow staircase which rose to a second floor and then stopped. There was no sign of life.

Nicholas said, ‘The housekeeper’s room is beyond that door. There are two sleeping chambers upstairs. I put my coffers in one.’

‘You thought you were going to face David de Salmeton’s men,’ Gelis said. ‘You must have wondered whether you would come back here alive.’

Nicholas sat on the stairs. ‘Not with my infallible plan. If they weren’t misled by Clémence, they would try to take you. But I would be
guarding your wagon, with Wodman somewhere close at hand to track me, and bring the militia.’

‘But he got lost in the fog. And they captured you, as well as me. And it wasn’t David, it was Anna.’ Gelis leaned on the ornamental stair-post and looked down at him. She rested her chin on her arm. ‘I thought you were clever.’

‘Thank you,’ he said.

She lifted her chin from her arm. ‘That’s not what I meant. How did they capture you?’

He said, ‘They slapped you, and I offered myself as a professional mediator.’

‘Just as I thought,’ Gelis said. ‘What happened to chivalry? Pretz and Paratge? Grant victory to this worthy knight, for whom await two rewards: heaven and the recognition of noble women?’

‘It was too foggy. Noble women would never have noticed me.’

‘You may be right,’ Gelis said. He was gazing at his clasped hands, one knee up, his ravished sleeve against the stair-wall. She took a firmer grip of the banister. ‘And even if they had, would they have deigned to proceed? You are still married.’

He looked up slowly. She could not read his eyes. He said, ‘How do you know?’

‘That you didn’t annul it? You told Anna so. That you married in the first place? I seem to remember it. The
abboccamento
. The
impalmamento
. The
ductio
, even. I am sorry for what happened next.’

‘You thought I deserved it,’ he said. ‘And then I seem to have proved that I did. We are back where we began. It is night. There is a bed. We may part; we may stay together. You must choose.’

‘Nicholas?’ Gelis said. He looked up. ‘
I
must choose? You care so little, you will let me break the marriage or not, as I want?’

‘I care so much,’ he said, ‘that I can’t in fairness speak for myself. How can I? You stand to lose far more than I do. You’ve found a fitting career at the Bank, but I couldn’t join you. Once I’ve put away David de Salmeton, I should have to leave.’

‘For Russia?’ she said. ‘You’ve launched a fine business there, so they tell me.’

‘For Julius,’ Nicholas said. ‘Not necessarily for Russia. I came to realise, in the end, that I was treating Russia as I did Scotland. I was working for my own benefit, not for theirs. And if I couldn’t do better, it would be wrong to go back.’

‘You could do better. You could help them,’ she said.

‘No,’ he said. ‘It needs someone else.’