Gemini (104 page)

Considering what this had entailed, Lord Cortachy and Saunders his nephew looked as marvellous calm as two pax-boards to the many guests from Linlithgow who counted them friends. Of course, when you got up to the hall, everything would be of the best. With Seaulme directing, the wagons from Stirling would have been stripped in a trice, and the linen, the staff, the provisions all punctually dealt with—none of your beans with their pods on, or windy meat here. Even the Master Cook would have to keep his mouth clean, or dip his hand in the swearing-box. There! What did I tell you? Wax lights. And the Queen’s own patterned hangings. And linen napkins, all new-chopped from the roll.

Of course, his lordship’s own house in Bruges was a palace with its own kirk, and his cousins were doges in Genoa. That was why the Genoese Bishop was here, on top of Nowie Sinclair and Will Knollys and a few others you wouldn’t expect in the same room—as well, of course, as all the ones you would. Kathi, the spunky wee niece, chatting with Jock Ross and the comfy widow that once had Cuthilgurdy. The bald Italian doctor, him that was a dab hand at itch of the purse; and the unchancy one, Andreas from Vesalia, that some people thought dabbled in magic.

Julius, the lawyer from Bologna who looked so rich and grand, but could keep you roaring over a wine-cask. The Scandinavian shipmaster, Crackbene, with the fine armful of a wife, jabbering away at the Queen in her tongue. Big Nicol’s clever lady, as good as a man in the warehouse, and the laddie their son, a well-mannered wee loon, standing listening to the young Prince. And the Prince glancing at Big Nicol, who had not been the same since Will Roger lost his head—or, to be sure, had it half cawed off him—at Lauder. Yon was a shame. The two of them on the fiddle and drums, late at night, fleeing with Danzig beer, and making up verse about every bastard at court, so dirty and daft you could shite yourself. Those were the days.

‘Poor Uncle,’ said Kathi. ‘Doom threatens the nation, and he has to give a party for himself. We thought you wouldn’t come.’ It sounded
challenging. She added quickly, ‘Not for personal reasons. I know you advised against this.’

‘I was probably wrong,’ Nicholas said. ‘And your uncle deserves to be honoured.’

Her uncle deserved to be honoured, and so she hadn’t protested; but she understood Nicholas’s unease. The truth was that the supper was more than it seemed. It was an excuse to bring together men who could not appear in Edinburgh, but could inform the Queen of what was happening there. Avandale, Argyll and Scheves were all privately here, and Avandale’s kinsman recently departed from Edinburgh Castle: John Stewart, Lord Darnley, who had commendably saved his young kinsman Johnnie Ramsay at Lauder, and who had daughters contracted to the heirs of Argyll and Jock Ross.

The feast for Adorne was thus, in part, an excuse for the Queen’s faction to meet without being identified. In the wrong quarters, such a concourse might seem like a second Court, a duplicate of the King’s. In reality, it
was
a second Court. The Queen was the legal guardian of the heir to the throne. If the King died, hers was the power, and these might be her ministers.

Nicholas had thought it naïve, Kathi knew, to expect to hide such an event. On the other hand, hearing of this, Albany might well become cautious. If he threatened the King, demanded too much, the realm had another alternative.

Nicholas was speaking. ‘Bel is here?’ He had come with Tobie and Julius and Andro, now healed and back in the Canongate. John and Moriz were among those left behind. And Robin, of course.

Kathi said, ‘The Queen likes her. Bel’s staying in Edinburgh for Christmas with Fat Father Jordan and Bonne.
Belle, Bonne et Sage
.’ She broke off. It was not the way to talk about a bereaved father. But he deserved it. He deserved it.

‘Bonne? Whom no bridegroom has yet received, veiled and blessed? She isn’t here, is she?’ said Nicholas. He spoke as if he didn’t know. He didn’t perhaps realise that she had seen the list of all those specifically debarred, of whom Bonne was one.

Bel was coming over, and with her was Abbot Henry of Cambuskenneth. Bel stood before Nicholas, her gaze strict, and did not raise her arms. After a moment he bent instead, and kissed her raised hand. There was a ripple of silver: the trumpets were about to announce their procession to the table of honour. Once, Nicholas had stood in this same banqueting hall and invited the mockery of the Court, for his own ends. Now, no one here would mock him, nor he them, except from affection.

Kathi smiled at the thought, and then realised how meaningless it was as a yardstick. Yesterday had been the Feast of St Nicholas. This
year, no one had marked it. Another year, she had heard, the King of Cyprus had honoured Nicholas at his table, beside all the lords of that name in the land. He had been a Knight of the Sword before he became a Knight of the Unicorn. He was attending a banquet for her uncle in a modest palace in a small country; but he was capable of making his name anywhere, and always had been.

H
ENRY
A
RNOT SAID
, ‘It is a new fanfare. Tell me what you think of it; and of the music at the end. All harmony is not finished, you know.’

‘For some it is,’ Nicholas said.

H
E STAYED AS
long as he should, and added his lifelong accumulation of awe and admiration and gratitude to the praise presently heaped on Adorne. And Adorne, in his answering speech of wit and grace, included the name of
Nicholas vander Poele, or de Fleury
in the long list of those whom he in turn thanked for their friendship, while his prosaic niece smiled through her tears. Then the tables were cleared, and the music began for the dancing, which was led, with the sweep of her train, by the small, erect Queen on the arm of her husband’s first Knight of the Unicorn. She looked like her picture. Camulio had brought over the rest of the altar-piece, in boxes from Bruges. It had been quite a nuisance.

The other Knight of the Unicorn waited so long, and then made his discreet exit. Pursued, to his surprise, by a page, he let himself be conducted to a guest-room. He expected an emergency meeting: the morning had been devoted to conclaves, but new disasters unfolded by the hour. He entered the room. The door shut. But instead of Avandale or Argyll, he faced the solitary figure of a woman. It was Bel of Cuthilgurdy. He revolved.

‘I told them to lock it,’ said his elderly captor. ‘That is, I hope ye werena on your way to the necessary. But there’s a place over there, if ye were.’

He made a sound of despair that was almost a laugh, and sat down. Her face, round as ever, had acquired no structural elegance with the passing of years, but the thick, fair skin was unblemished and the brown gaze as amiably critical. Being at Court, she had exchanged her usual coif for a full head of sail with pearls in it, and her shapeless portly-sleeved gown was still shapeless, but cut out of velvet trimmed with black fur, and set off with a necklace of hawsers and hatch-lids. The hawsers were gold, and the hatch-lids were set with cabochon rubies. He had observed them at the start of the evening, and knew what he was being told.

She said, ‘Struck dumb?’

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘But you have not been so afflicted, I suspect.’

‘Aye. I spoke to Julius,’ she said. ‘About myself and St Pol. It was time. He had half the story: some from Wodman; some from Stewart of Darnley.’

‘And you told him the rest,’ Nicholas said.

‘It was going to come out. I told you. All the Archer families knew of the famous Jordan de St Pol, who once commanded the French King’s Archer Guard. They knew he had a wife. If they went to Chouzy, as you did, they’d find my daughter there, and learn from her name who her father was. So tell me what you know. Ask me questions.’

‘I don’t need to,’ he said. ‘Years after St Pol left the Guard, you were living in France in the Scottish Princesses’ household, and mixing with the Scottish Archers of the day. You were a widow, with a young son at school in Cambuskenneth. You met and married Perrelet d’Échaut, whose father had been granted a seigneurie at Chouzy. When d’Échaut died in his thirties, he left you also to care for the daughter you bore him, and for his own sister Aleis.’

She was looking at him with compassion, as if he had lived through it, not she. She said, ‘You know most of it, then. Peter and Alice Shaw, just, they were called: my second man and his sister. It was no great drama, Nicol. He was a grand man, my Peter, and brave with it. So was his sister. She was five years older than Peter, married Jordan de St Pol at fourteen, and bore him two children, Simon and Lucia. Then she was stricken with the trembling illness, and lost most of her sight, and her senses. Jordan was a trusted man at the French Court by then: he couldna nurse her. He found it hard: he was bitter at times; but he was loyal; loyal; and stood by her till she died many years later. That is why I don’t leave him, Nicol, nor him me. Don’t mistake me. I can see the worst of him better than anybody. Whiles we canna thole one another. But our lives are bound together. And mine is a voice that sometimes he’ll listen to. Mine and Andro Wodman’s.’

Of course. Wodman had become an Archer of the Guard before Bel left France. And he, too, had protected this clever, cruel man. Nicholas said, ‘He tried to rape Gelis’s sister.’ He couldn’t let that go unsaid in the presence of anyone trying to excuse Jordan.

Bel’s colourless eyes studied him. The compassion was still there. She said, ‘But he didn’t, did he? Don’t you think that says something? A big, powerful man can usually get his own way. He did get his own way. He lays plans, Nicol, like you do. I tried to tell you that, once. He follows a plan, and won’t drop it. Now he has disowned you, you are disowned, and for ever. I have no family claims: he will keep me by him for comfort, but that is all. There is no one else. There is nothing more, in my view, for anyone to fear.’

They looked at one another. ‘And you have told the others?’ Nicholas said. ‘Since, as you say, it was half known already?’

‘I have told them all,’ Bel replied. She drew a long breath. ‘Mind, the old man won’t like it. He was never fond of me being known as his wife’s brother’s widow. He thought I’d tattle, maybe, about Alice. He persuaded himself that I was with him and Lucia because I needed the shelter. I’m tired of that, now.’

‘Hence the vulgar display of rude wealth. Julius will want to marry you,’ Nicholas said.

She smiled. He said, ‘Why else are you telling me? St Pol made it clear he never wants to see me again.’

She said, ‘Think what he had just lost. He may always feel the same, or he may not. I told you because I hear that this winter is dangerous for you and your friends. Seaulme Adorne went to confession this morning and wrote out his will: did you know?’

Gazing at her, Nicholas swore, and then apologised slowly. He said, ‘I knew this assembly was wrong. I knew it.’

She said, ‘If he is in danger, then so is everyone attending tonight, including yourself. But he may be over-cautious, thinking of Efemie. He was worried, too, that Saunders would leave and set up house in Lille, now his lady’s husband has died. But you are not meant to know that.’

‘Everyone knows that,’ Nicholas said. ‘Also that he is shipping her and her daughter over here. There would be someone to bring Efemie up, apart from Phemie’s sister in the north. There is Kathi, and all of us.’

‘Nicol,’ she said. ‘If one of you dies, you may all die. There is something grievous ahead. Andreas feels it. I think you feel it, too. It is not just your own loss, is it, that made you flee from the music? Kathi said that you would.’

‘It was the very, very bad man on the viol,’ Nicholas said. ‘No. It was just because it was music. I don’t have any fearsome premonitions. I never do.’

‘You once had, for others,’ Bel said. ‘It seems to me, from what Gelis has said, that you expected to know, wherever you were, if ill had come to her, or the bairn.’

Nicholas said, ‘That was then, close to the years of divining. I didn’t have the gift before, and I don’t have it now. I don’t want it, especially not for myself.’

Bel said, ‘Because you have no fear of death. Is that it, Nicol? Still? You have family, friends, a cause you are making your own; but your own end is of no importance to you?’

Nicholas looked at her. ‘You should have a talk with Prosper de Camulio. Am I not blessed, who am fulfilling every Christian exhortation? I am content. I am resigned. I am not pestering the Almighty with demands for my survival. I just don’t want to hear that bloody viol playing again.’

There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘Oh, come to me here, my poor, silly bairn,’ and held him, her hand tight on his hair, when he came.

After a time he spoke, without moving. ‘Once I thought that perhaps—’

‘—we were kin? No. Of the heart, maybe.’

‘I think so,’ he said. He didn’t look up. When he spoke again, it was with a steadier voice. ‘Bel, I am so sorry about your own family. Both your husbands, and then your one son. I wanted to say so. I didn’t want to make it difficult between you and St Pol. And I am so grateful for this.’

‘But?’ she said. He had stirred, to look up at last.

‘But please don’t make it hard for me, either,’ he said. ‘Please, Bel. Please.’

T
HE GATHERING AT
Linlithgow dispersed, and no one appeared to have taken note of it. Four days later, Parliament met, and announced its final enactments. The word flashed from the Castle to the Canongate inside the hour.

‘Blind Harry,’ said Robin.