Gemini (101 page)

Which connected it all to the St Pols, and accounted for the silence of Nicholas. Whether or not it had anything to do with his birth, he never volunteered anything about the St Pols. And it was time, whether he wished it or not, that that changed. Abbot Henry had said as much, and her uncle Adorne. If only Julius were not there, she would have broached the subject herself.

But Julius, being there, had found topics even more interesting. ‘So
what about the stupid business at Lauder? I could have told you Tam Cochrane would go his own way. You should have been there. Someone said you had drawn up a blacklist of the killers. Do you want any assistance?’ Kathi looked at Bel, and Bel closed her eyes.

Nicholas said, ‘I’ll tell you if I do. At the moment, we don’t want to antagonise anyone. Anyway, we don’t really know who they are.’

‘I heard Fleming and Crawford and Alex Home,’ Julius said. ‘And Will Knollys has a finger in most things. And what about the message that told Simon you were going to York? Who sent that? It was meant to kill you. It was just luck that it drowned Simon and Henry.’

‘Yes, wasn’t it,’ said Bel, heaving herself up. ‘Kathi, hen, I’m for bed. Will you see me upstairs?’

In her chamber, Bel put Kathi into a chair, and sat down herself. She said, ‘Now, now. He’s not a frail reed, our Nicol, and he knows Julius through and through. Let them be. Julius will keep treading on toes, just to see what will happen, and Nicol will give as good as he gets. Sometimes a good hearty blow does more for a pain than a tickle. Have you and he spoken about Will Roger yet?’ She knew everything.

‘Yes,’ said Kathi. ‘Indirectly. He will come to it, later.’ She shook herself. ‘I’m sorry. I forget that he can deal with these things now.’

‘Oh, he needs us as well,’ the small woman said. ‘Especially Gelis and you. I think we’ve turned out a good man, between us.’

‘And the future?’ said Kathi. ‘Who wants him out of the way, Bel? Who sent that message to Simon?’

The colourless eyes studied her. ‘Some say it was your uncle,’ Bel said. ‘Even sober men like John and Tobie and Father Moriz were wild enough to consider it. But there’s Andro to say that it wasn’t: that he saved his life when he could have killed him, there at Heaton. And for the same reason, it wasna Andro himself.’

‘You know it wasn’t my uncle,’ said Kathi. She felt frightened.

‘So does everyone else. It was but a rumour. Like Nicol, he is envied. Your troublemaker may be someone like that: just a man who resents the Burgundians.’

‘But he had to know that Nicholas was going to York,’ Kathi said. ‘Only we knew that, all of us: the House of Niccolò, if you like. Us, and the high-ranking men who arranged it all—Avandale and Argyll and Whitelaw, and Liddell and Albany—whose entire plan depended on Nicholas coming back safely. No one else …’ Then she stopped, seeing where she had been led.

‘So it couldn’t have been Simon’s father,’ Bel said. ‘I could have told you that. When Jordan embarks on a piece of wickedness, he takes pleasure in signing it. Or if he doesn’t, I can usually tell. No: Jordan de St Pol wasn’t the author of the sad, sad thing that ended today.’

She got to her feet. ‘Lassie, we both need our beds. Tell me, is your uncle about?’

Kathi jumped up and took the small, puffy hand she was offered. ‘He’s in Linlithgow with my brother. Why?’

‘Tell him to come by and see me one day,’ said Bel of Cuthilgurdy. ‘And give me a wee cheep as you go. You’re a grand lassie, Mistress Katelinje Sersanders of Berecrofts.’

The door gently closed. Carrying to bed the small, dry kiss that was her wee cheep, Kathi heard, from below, the comfortable flow of men’s voices: Julius and Nicholas, disputing languidly over something. Bel had been right. While Nicholas had such friends, he was safe.

T
HE ELABORATE, DIFFICULT
programme, object of so much anxious thought, slowly began to unfold. The semi-avuncular Earls of Buchan and Atholl and their younger brother, the near-Bishop Andrew, stole out of the Castle, and reached a satisfactory understanding, part of which involved the retiral of Scheves, and the promotion of Andrew to be Archbishop of St Andrews, with the financial help of the town. The uncles returned to the Castle (leaving behind a certain amount of unexplained luggage), and the lords Avandale, Argyll and Scheves vanished from Edinburgh.

The Duke of Albany and the Provost laid polite siege, with a small force, to the Castle of Edinburgh, accompanied by a number of cannon and some handguns, but no ammunition. Carriers of wine and provender were stopped on Castle Hill and requested by bowmen to go away. The Governor of the Castle issued a furious complaint, followed by an order to lift the siege under pain of artillery fire. The Duke of Albany and the town bravely repeated their demand that the King’s grace of Scotland be instantly released. The Governor (the Earl of Atholl) refused with equal firmness, but did not fire his guns, which was as well, since they would have flattened the town.

After a siege of over a month, in pleasant weather, the Castle found itself starving, and sent its thinnest envoy to announce its surrender. The date was Michaelmas, that time in late September when the Dozen and the Heid Court went about the business of choosing Provost, Dean and officers of the Guild of Edinburgh for the following twelvemonth. In the final, flamboyant act of his term, Wattie Bertram, in the clean doublet and sark brought by his wife in a basket, rode by my lord of Albany’s side into the Castle on the newly let-down drawbridge, and after an interval emerged again with a pedestrian escort of honour, at the head of which rode Sandy Albany, with the King sharing the saddle behind him. The King had a fixed smile, but Sandy’s was large and damp and looked
genuine. They rode together all the way down to Holyrood between cheering crowds, briskly assembled, and feasted together all night. The King, it was seen, was not hungry, but Sandy made up for it.

A
DORNE SAID
, ‘
YOU
wanted to see me?’ The day after the feast, it was the first opportunity he had had to ride to Stirling.

Bel said, ‘Aye, I did. There’s something I want you to know. There’s something needs doing, and I don’t know who else to turn to. Forbye, it’s in your own interests.’

Adorne said, ‘You don’t need to say that, Mistress Bel. You only need to say, as I am sure you can, that it is for Nicholas.’

Later, leaving the house, he thought to call on the young lady Bonne, placed these several months in the august home of the late Sir William Charteris. His widow, by birth a Stewart, was perhaps too well connected to produce husbands for impecunious foreigners, and none had so far appeared. The nun, Sister Monika, was permanently settled in Elcho, and had washed her hands of the whole affair. The girl Muriella, a handful, was now with Malloch cousins in Edinburgh, in a bleak farm on the far side of the Nor’ Loch. She had sung, with her brother, in the memorial service held in the Collegiate Church of the Holy Trinity for Will Roger. Adorne had been there. So had Kathi. So had Nicholas.

Thinking of it, Adorne found himself again moved, as he had been moved to tears by that glorious, unbearable ceremony. And if he felt so, he could not imagine how Nicholas had felt. Years ago, lost in the toils of his miserable plot, Nicholas had sat there, in that beautiful church, and denied the music that Will Roger had made for him. Then Roger had forced him out of his isolation, and had given him in return a burnished talent, and a pass-key to happiness. Next had come the great Marian work they had created together, and after that, alone or with Nicholas, Roger had been spurred to compositions, from sacred to lyrical, that he would never have troubled to create on his own, enriching the lives of all his hearers, whoever they were. If much of the inspiration for the church had been Flemish—through Bonkle, through vander Goes, through Adorne and his friends—then much of what had followed was owed to Will Roger. The foundress, the Dowager Queen lying in her Trinity tomb, had died too soon to know it; but in the north aisle lay someone who did—Bishop Spens, who had also built nearby, and had become one of the sardonic circle of Will Roger’s admirers.

All those living were there, although only some, like Nicholas standing apart, were able to offer the dead not only their grief and their love but their voices, floating aloft, traces of the mind of God in the sky. They had sung the ‘Stirps Jesse’ again, from Willie’s marvellous responsory, and all the other music was his. At the end Nicholas, adopted into the
body of singers, had disappeared in their company, leaving unexplained the last piece of music, performed with John Ramsay and written, you would say, with all the beauty of Nicholas’s voice and that of young Johnnie in mind. The text was not elegiac, nor was the singing, which was triumphant.

Now, in visiting Bonne, Adorne was minded to perform a service for Nicholas de Fleury if he could. They had been at odds in the past, with good reason; but now, all that was done. He braced himself a little.

Bonne, the subject of dutiful visits from M. de Fleury, but few from her stepfather Julius, was flatteringly grateful to have the company of a well-born, worldly-wise man who could speak of Flanders and Germany. ‘Would you prefer to go back?’ Adorne asked.

Encountered outside the cloister, Bonne von Hanseyck was a handsome girl, solidly built, with well-brushed brown hair and a sharp blue gaze which might disconcert weaker mortals. She said, ‘I think not. As someone pointed out, my presumed father’s family have shown no eagerness to accept me. I begin to fear I am unclaimed goods, like M. de Fleury.’

‘He has managed well enough,’ said Anselm Adorne. ‘Enough at least to have time and money to set aside for someone carrying his mother’s name. But it would spare him, of course, if you knew who your real father might be. You are less sure that it might be the Graf? Is there nothing you can remember?’

He listened. It had never been easy to piece together Bonne’s past. Once, her self-proclaimed mother Adelina had professed that Bonne was the daughter of Marian, Nicholas’s first wife, born in secret and adopted and brought up by Adelina. Adorne was willing to believe that Adelina was not the mother of Bonne, but not the rest of it. All the proof, all the probability was that Marian had borne a dead child, and concealed it from Nicholas to spare him unnecessary grief. Whoever Bonne was, she had been gallantly claimed by the Graf before he married Adelina. And nothing Bonne could remember had ever explained where Adelina had found her.

Nothing she said now added to what Adorne had already heard. Adelina had introduced Bonne as a love-child of the Graf’s when she and Julius first met. It had been in Germany, in Cologne, and Gelis, who had been there at the time, had the same impression exactly. So had Father Moriz, who had made later enquiries. After so long, no one was going to remember events in quite the same way, but in one particular they agreed: Bonne’s parents were unknown, and likely to remain so. But Nicholas, none the less, was taking the responsibility for her.

It made Anselm Adorne think of his Efemie, who was five, and old enough now to live with her nurse in one of his houses in Linlithgow, with her cousin Saunders to entertain her. Adorne, also, came almost
every day to visit his daughter, as he had omitted to do with the children who were now grown up in Bruges, and who sent him admonishing letters from convents. It was not their fault. He had been negligent. But there was the humbling example of Nicholas—Nicol—who had grown up fatherless and virtually motherless, and yet could open his heart to care for Phemie, and for everyone’s children, not just his own. When in Edinburgh, Lord Cortachy made a point of talking to young Jordan, when calling on Gelis; and spending some time in the Canongate with six-year-old Rankin, Robin’s newest trainee and heart’s joy. Rankin was never relinquished to accompany his mother’s uncle, but occasionally Adorne would borrow Margaret, the boy’s older sister, and take her to stay with Euphemia.

His heart went out to them both: his little deaf daughter and his great-niece, just two years her senior, with her long lashes and quick smile and tapering fingers, so like his own. When, one day, he would no longer be there, he trusted his nephew Sersanders to look after them; setting aside any other entanglements he might have. But he liked to think of the two girls growing to womanhood with the infinite blessing of Nicholas’s care, and that of Katelinje. It was too late for Jan and Antoon and Arnaud and the rest, but with these children, he could make a fresh start.

He spent some time with Bonne, and then left, having achieved, he thought, very little. But his expectations had been low. He became immersed in certain preoccupations of his own and was not necessarily delighted to hear that Prosper de Camulio of Genoa was coming to Scotland to take up his bishopric in this, the non-fighting season of winter. Adorne’s connection with Genoa was past. He had begun to think that Bruges might be behind him as well. Lodged in an alien country, itself on the edge of rebellion, he had found a place where his experience could make a difference; a kingdom he could help make effective. He had concluded, quite recently, that this was the way he wished to finish his life.

He had also realised that he owed much of this decision to his regard for Nicol de Fleury. It was important to him that de Fleury should equally make this commitment to stay, and that he should not be impeded by any faceless threat to his safety. Adorne wished to trace the perpetrator of the slaughter at Heaton. Mistress Bel had concurred—had indeed felt uneasy enough to approach him. Kathi, when told, had been less eager to revive what had happened. Adorne had mentioned his interest to no one else. As a magistrate, he had tracked down lawless men often enough. These investigations took time and patience and dedication, but he had all of those. It was a wry atonement to Nicholas for all those well-deserved beatings, long ago.

Nicholas himself, who would have stopped him, was at Holyrood all through October, shut off from his wife and his family; locked into the
sequence of events, deadly, farcical, that he had helped set in motion. Even had he desired to leave, Albany would not have allowed it. Albany had received certain promises, and was waiting, critically, to see them carried out. Only then—when restored to all his former lands and offices, when the King had bestowed upon him his dead brother’s earldom of Mar, with more honours to come—only then did Sandy’s face lose its starkness, and his daily bouts of camaraderie with the King begin to sound natural. The King, by contrast, was losing whatever ability or willingness he once had to respond. Filled with fear and bewilderment, surrounded by men he did not trust, James did what was asked of him, quite simply, lest he be killed.