Gemini (14 page)

‘Worse,’ he said.

‘Aye. So you’re sending to him, is my guess. And nothing’ll happen until he sends back. But meanwhile, you’ve done that lass a rare service, Nicol de Fleury. I’d kiss ye for it, if ye didna have such a sore face.’

He laughed, but all through the meal he found himself thinking of Phemie Dunbar. He had told her not to go north. So long as she stayed fast in Roslin she was safe. But anyone, seeing her now, could guess that the child was conceived in the latter part of the autumn. And would remember that, during that season, Phemie had not been in Scotland at all, but in Bruges.

Then the meal ended at last, and Nicholas left. He was free to make the next call on his stirring agenda: to visit Adorne’s nephew, Sersanders, and tell him how Robin fell. And refrain from telling him anything else.

Oysters, where are you? I want to be kidnapped, tonight.

A
RRIVED IN THE
dark, as now seemed habitual, at the great Berecrofts house in the Canongate, Nicholas bestowed suitable drink-silver upon his princely escort from Roslin and watched them depart. Under the lanterns at pend and at porch, the engrailed cross of St Clair had made its own emphatic statement: none of your anonymity here. There were several heads out of windows already.

As a result, he didn’t have to rasp at any doors: one was flung open at once and Archie’s chamberlain came out, followed quickly by Berecrofts the Younger himself. Nicholas relinquished his horse and came forward. ‘No news. I’ve just called to see you.’

‘Oh,’ said Archie, changing colour. Then he swore. ‘God’s bones, I’m turning into a woman. Nicol, I’m sorry. Ye look—’

‘Wabbit. I feel fine. I’ve just come from Roslin. I’ve been talking business with Nowie.’

‘Nowie?’ Archie said.

‘Well, not yet; but I’m working on it,’ said Nicholas. ‘Sir Oliver Sinclair at present. And saw Cochrane and Whistle Willie as well. Now I remember why I left Scotland. Is Sersanders in?’ He was so tired he felt queasy, but knew from experience that it would pass. There were two flights of stairs up to the main hall, which was bigger than his had been. When he had had his bureau in Edinburgh, he had built the house next door. Just outside the portals to Edinburgh; just up from Holyroodhouse; just round the corner from the road leading to Leith. A substantial property, which he had sold, like everything else, and which Archie had bought for Kathi and Robin, his son. And which was now occupied, he supposed, by Anselm Sersanders, Kathi’s brother. Or Saunders, as he
heard Archie calling him. It was shorter. And two Anselms would be confusing, in trade.

He wondered what name Phemie would give to her child, which none here knew about, and none must suspect, or not yet. Nicholas had Phemie’s note to her lover, slipped him before he left Roslin. It would have to travel by ship. He would ride to Leith at first light tomorrow. This was his third day in Edinburgh, and he was sad, and elated, and exhausted. He hadn’t realised how easy it had been, surviving in Moscow, or Tabriz, or Thorn. He thought, with despair, that what he actually wanted, imperatively, was a woman. No; specifically, it was Gelis, alone.

Sersanders (Saunders) appeared. He said, ‘Nicholas.’

It was not ecstatic. From his point of view, Nicholas had done everything in his power in the past to damage Scots trade, in a successful attempt to harm the St Pol family. Now he was back. The fact that he had been accepted in Bruges; that dowry gold had replenished the Scots treasury; that the St Pols were being slowly re-established, had not wholly reassured Kathi’s brother. He sat on the edge of a table and said, without shaking hands, ‘You’ve no news of Robin. No. Did you ever find out who made an exercise-bag of your face?’

The answer, if he had been willing to give it, was yes. The minions of Henry de St Pol, who was or was not at this moment in his apartment at Holyrood, awaiting him. Or wrecking it. Or standing behind the door with an axe. Nicholas said, ‘I’d forgotten about it. Did you get Kathi’s letter?’

Some of the grimness left Saunders’s face. He had always had a short temper, perhaps because he was smaller than most men. People underrated Adorne’s Scottish agent his nephew, unless they noticed his shoulders and arms, and heard what he could do in a tournament. He was in his early thirties, and ten years older than Kathi. Now he got up and walked to a stool nearer Nicholas, where he sat down. He said, ‘I’m sorry. She said you were badly hurt at Nancy yourself. But you seemed to be interested only in trade, and it was my understanding that you had come back to settle accounts with the St Pols and de Salmeton. Until you do, it seems everyone is in danger.’

Adorne must have written before Christmas. It was natural. Nicholas said, ‘I need a reason to stay, and some pieces to play with. It’s a little early to expect anything else, but I haven’t forgotten. In fact, I’ve made a reasonable start. I’ve muzzled Kilmirren himself, and taken his grandson into my household.’

‘What!’ said Archie. He sat down. ‘He’ll kill you.’

‘That’s what Wodman said. He’ll watch out. I wondered if Saunders would also like to give me a hand.’

‘With Henry de St Pol!’ said Kathi’s brother.

‘He’s going to despise common management and deal-making, but he reveres the chivalric arts. If I set up a few exercises, would you give him some show-fights?’ said Nicholas. ‘Or am I asking something too dangerous?’

‘Against that little braggart?’ said Saunders. ‘Dangerous for him, I can tell you. I couldn’t hold back if he provoked me.’

‘But you could teach him?’ Nicholas said. ‘The Guard won’t. They’re uncomfortable with him: he’s too young, and he shows off. He needs someone to practise with who’s hard, but fair. Someone he can admire. He’ll end up adoring you. And then there’s David Simpson.’

‘I don’t think Simpson will end up adoring anyone,’ said Archie of Berecrofts. ‘Kathi says he will lay plans to kill you, but not yet. Not, ideally, until your family are here and can witness it.’

‘So I have to get rid of him before that,’ Nicholas said. ‘Will you tell me all you know about what he is doing? He seems very rich.’

‘He is, if he has your African gold,’ Saunders said. ‘Kathi says that you think that he has. But he lives genteelly in Edinburgh, at Blackfriars, most of the time, as agent for the Apostolic Collector, Camulio. You know him?’

‘Prosper de Camulio? Yes. He came to Bruges as a Milanese envoy. We did a deal once, in Genoese alum. So they both stay in the guestrooms at the Blackfriars?’

‘Camulio does,’ Archie said. ‘Simpson occasionally lords it at Beltrees. Or he’ll spend some nights at Newbattle Abbey. The Abbot likes him. All those Norman families, and David’s French Archer connections. I’m told he gives his services free.’

‘For what?’ Nicholas said, without emphasis. He was thinking.

‘Don’t the Sinclairs have a lot to do with Newbattle, Nicholas?’ Archie said. ‘One of the founding families, and next door to Roslin. They still lease bits of land to the chosen ones—the Cochranes, the Prestons, a doctor or two. God, you want to keep in with the Sinclairs and their tribe of physicians, Nicholas lad, if you’re going to go on the way that you’ve started.’

‘You’ve changed my mind. I think I’ll stick to trade,’ Nicholas said. He went on, in fact, to talk about trade until they had lost their uneasiness. He wanted help, but not until he was ready. Simpson hadn’t publicly threatened him, or done anything against him in Scotland as yet: the reverse, in fact. To kill him now would be murder. And that would be unfair.

W
HEN HE EVENTUALLY
found his way to his chamber in Holyrood, everyone had gone to bed except Andro Wodman, who was visible, fully
dressed, throwing illicit dice in a storeroom with a senior carpenter. Nicholas flung his saddlebags down and went to join him.

Round the bandaging, Wodman’s face was purple and yellow. Archie had been right. They did need the services of a medical team. Nicholas said, ‘I’m sorry. I had to stay last night at Roslin. What’s happening?’

‘I know. One of Tam Cochrane’s cronies came back.’

The carpenter, by which term was understood a highly trained, blue-blooded expert called Lisouris, said, ‘And you’re going into business with Nowie?’

‘Sir Oliver Sinclair to you,’ said Nicholas sourly, in the knowledge that Lisouris certainly did call Nowie ‘Nowie’.

‘And still got your arms and your legs? Watch it,’ said Lisouris, who looked like a dancing-master.

‘So what about Henry?’ said Nicholas. If he sat down, he wouldn’t want to get up. He recalled, with amazement, believing at some point that he wanted a woman.

‘He’s asleep. In the next room to yours. Sweetly sorrowful because, having invited him, you weren’t there.’

‘So what did he do?’

‘Went to Mass, made sexual advances to one of the monks, and was dragged in front of the Abbot. He’s leaving tomorrow.’

‘Oh,’ said Nicholas. He sat down.

‘Well, it’s what I expected him to do,’ Wodman said. ‘He didn’t. It makes you feel anxious, doesn’t it? Whatever he’s planning, it’ll be a lot worse than that.’

‘You bastard,’ said Nicholas, and got up. It was as difficult as he had expected. Bed, when he got there, was blissful. He was almost asleep when he remembered his saddlebags, and a passing impression, as he emptied them, that something was missing. He lay for a moment, swore, sat up, and then stood. By the dying light of the brazier, he could see something that he hadn’t noticed before, pinned on the wall. A square of paper.

A letter
.

No, a drawing. A careful drawing, beautifully done in two colours, of a fox and a hare and two dogs.

‘I thought,’ said Henry’s voice from the door, ‘that you liked to look at it, maybe, at bedtime. You sleep better, don’t you, with a little something from home? I have an old bit of blanket, myself. Good night, Uncle. Sweet dreams.’

The door shut. Nicholas crossed over and looked at the drawing, then took it down. Apart from the pin-holes, it was perfectly smooth and intact. For a moment, he had an impulse to crush it; then sensibly didn’t.

He had been going—he was still going—to Leith, to send it tomorrow,
along with the other letter, which was next to his skin and had never left there. The letter, in Phemie’s level writing, to Anselm Adorne.

T
O
G
ELIS VAN
B
ORSELEN
, looking back to the halcyon years, Bruges had seemed a fine place to rear a child, with its ranks of handsome brown and red houses, ribboned with silvery water and knotted with bridges and wreathed about with its churches, its abbeys, its gardens. Warm and compact and thronged; full of vigour; full of surprises; the richest and most cosmopolitan small business town in the world, Bruges flowered all through the year, but never more so than in September, at the coming of the Venetian galleys, and at Carnival-time, just before Lent. The two marvels of a child’s year; of Gelis’s year, when she was small. There, up on the Belfry, was the platform from which the speaking-trumpet announced the results of the lottery. There, on the Minnewater, once filled with laughing, tumbling skaters, was where she, a fat child, had first met and been enchanted by Claes the apprentice, soon to be Nicholas.

There, within the walls of the Hôtel Jerusalem, was the lovely church built by the Adornes, where Nicholas, brave and young, had entered into his first marriage, with Marian de Charetty. And there, in the great Palace of Louis de Gruuthuse and his van Borselen wife were the rooms where her own wedding contract to Nicholas had been signed, just a few streets away from where Gelis’s sister Katelina had wilfully made him her lover, in the hapless affair that had ended in the birth of a child.

Katelina had died in Cyprus, long before Gelis’s own marriage to Nicholas, blighted for eight years, but now mended. Katelina’s child had another name, in another country, and believed himself to be another man’s son. It was small Jordan, born to Gelis and Nicholas, who should be growing up here as his parents had done, revelling in the whole noisy life of the town: the clack of the looms and the chime of the work-bell; the chanting of children and fullers; the barking of dogs and the cry of the moneychanger wheeling his cart. The rattle of horses bearing officials and merchants about their business. The thunder of wagons and carriages crossing the drawbridges and entering the various portals. The creak and splash of the mills on the water; the rickety chorus of the mills on the walls. The market smells of fish and fruit and butcher-meat. The odour of paint from the book-stalls and the workshops and Colard Mansion’s window, and of ink where the printing-presses had been set up. A town of merchants and artisans. A town where children lived with their parents. A family town.

It should have been like that, but the Duke’s death had brought Lent in Epiphany. Mourning did not enter into it: every municipality, every province with whom the late Duke had been at odds instantly saw a chance for advancement, and seized it. In Bruges, there was a disturbance
almost at once, only reduced when the little Duchess, advised by Louis de Gruuthuse, assured them that their traditional privileges were secure. To keep Bruges calm and safe, she appointed four captains, one of whom was Anselm Adorne, lord of Cortachy.

It had worked, for a bit. Even when the Estates of Holland, swept by local fervour, proposed to end the tenure of Gruuthuse (not a Hollander) as their Governor, Gruuthuse merely acceded, and the office was passed, without fuss, to his brother-in-law. Wolfaert van Borselen was cousin to Gelis, and so was Gruuthuse’s own wife. She still felt safe.

Then had come the ill-advised attempt to cajole or buy off the King of France, or at least win time to rebuild the Burgundian armies. King Louis, that masterly tactician, had received the pitiful letters of the little Duchess and the Duke’s widow the Dowager; had listened to the Burgundian envoys—Gruuthuse, the Chancellor Hugonet, Wolfaert van Borselen—and had finally lent ear to the worried envoys from Flanders, who were not in immediate danger from the advancing French armies, and who were thriftily unwilling, as always, to pay for yet another Burgundian war.