The Unicorn Hunt (43 page)

The factor stood, a cup in each hand. He said, ‘You’ll excuse me,’ and laid one at her side. His employer took the other and held it out to Gregorio. He said, ‘Thank you, Master Oliver. We’ll join you below. Mistress Bel is upset.’

The door shut on the factor. Nicholas sat down between Bel and Gregorio. He looked at Bel. ‘Whatever the complot, you could have spared Semple,’ he said. ‘He knows well enough where you stand. As a matter of interest, Diniz wouldn’t bring Tilde to live here. And he still owns the
quinta
.’

‘Whatever the complot?’ Bel repeated.

‘There isn’t one? Then what have you and Gregorio been wasting time talking about?’

‘How to send you back home,’ Gregorio said.

‘For Simon’s sake?’ He rose, smiling, and filled a cup for himself. Gregorio saw it was water, again.

Gregorio said, ‘For everyone’s sake. This is not how you and Bel should be talking.’

‘And how are you going to send me back home?’ the other man said. He was watching Bel.

‘What do you see when you look at me?’ she said. ‘Apart from dule, dule and sorrow? Where is your babe? Where is your courage, that you turn your back and run from a failure? And what is your excuse for being here, if not the death of Simon and Jordan?’

‘Why do you defend Simon and Jordan?’ Nicholas said.

She looked at him. ‘I have defended you in your time. Did you deserve it?’

‘Most certainly not. Well, what would reassure you?’ said Nicholas de Fleury. ‘Gregorio, tell her. I am here in Scotland for profit. To develop some land. To set up some trade. To allow, yes, some marriage difficulties to settle themselves. But I shall be returning to Gelis. I don’t mean to stay here for ever. And whatever ensues, you are secure in your house. After all, I killed Lucia to get it.’

Gregorio rammed down his cup. Bel said, ‘I don’t want the house.’

Gregorio said, ‘Bel, the house is yours without rent for as long as you wish. Do you think he’d put you out, or exploit you?’

‘She has a house at Cuthilgurdy,’ Nicholas said. He cleared his throat. ‘Her son stays there. If I’m right?’

Cuthilgurdy was not far from Stirling. Her livelihood, they all knew, came from there. She had once been married, they knew, but had never mentioned a family. They had never asked.

Bel said, ‘You’ve been busy.’

‘Given our last conversation,’ he said, ‘it seemed advisable. I have no plans for your house. If you want to leave it, that is your affair. Make your arrangements with Master Oliver.’

Her lips parted. Then she said, ‘Aye. I’ll do that. And now I think I will go.’

Gregorio looked from one to the other. He said, ‘Nicholas?’

‘No,’ said Nicholas.

She left. On the threshold she glanced back at Nicholas de Fleury and Gregorio glimpsed, for a second, the look that they exchanged. His breath caught in his throat, for he recognised that
he had seen it before: this silent collision of pity and pain. The woman again had been Bel. The youth – the child – had been Simon’s son, Henry.

For all the rest of that journey which was to take them, in the end, to Beltrees, Gregorio was thankful for the presence of Oliver Semple, broad and weathered and slow and emphatic of speech, who rode beside his new foreign employer, and to whom Nicholas de Fleury spoke all the way, evenly, of practical things.

Until they left behind the Little Hall and Kilmirren, Gregorio did not realise how much he had been counting on Bel to reach Nicholas: to stem and dissolve the coating with which, film upon film, he was separating himself from them all. Now he saw that it had already been too late last winter. If Bel had not then shaken his purpose, she was not likely to soften him now.

Deep in thought, Gregorio rode. There was one formal call still to make: passing through Semple land, they must pay their respects to the owners. Arrived at the thick-walled fortalice of Elliotstoun, Gregorio roused and saw for the first time the long valley flashing with water and the wooded slopes beyond which they were bound. About him, the scented air sparkled with birdsong. It came to him that he was looking at beauty.

Since duty required it, he passed indoors with the rest. The goodwill of the Semples was essential but, as the afternoon waned, he saw that Nicholas was concealing impatience. They were close to Beltrees and the tower he was building. In the nature of things, he must be anxious to see it, for it was plain that his stay in Scotland was not going to be brief. He had said he was returning to Bruges. He had not said which month, or which year. Eventually he stood and made his excuses, and finally they all resumed their horses outside, and the last part of their journey began.

It was short. They rode along the south shore of the loch, the sinking sun flashing gold in the reeds and on the moorhen spinning furrows among them. Far away, fish were rising. Elliotstoun was a mile and more behind them when Oliver Semple turned his back on the water and put his horse to a flowery lane that meandered uphill between alder and thorn, winged with leaflets.

It was very quiet. Twice they smelled wood smoke and heard distant barking, and once a woman milking a cow turned her head slowly to watch them. Her face lay like a coin on sheared velvet. No one spoke. Above their heads a blackbird decided to make a declaration of joy and did so like one of Will Roger’s mellower clarions. The crowded houses of Bruges seemed by comparison a
russet Necropolis. Poring over papers, exercising the legal, the actuarial skills, Gregorio had failed to allow for enchantment.

‘Wait,’ said Nicholas. He spoke as if he knew what Gregorio was thinking. He did not look round.

Wait.

The lane, ascending its last, indolent curve, began to bring them to the crown of the long, flanking ridge they had been climbing. For a moment, looking back in the leonine light, Gregorio saw loch and valley changed, as the woman had been, into something of Byzantine richness; water transmuted to satin; grass to fur, set with escarpments of topaz and onyx, studded with beads and blisters of gold. His heart filled, so that when his horse stumbled, he all but left the saddle. Oliver Semple lifted his voice. ‘And here we are. But you need to go canny, my masters. These God-damned carts fairly gut the fairway from under you.’

The lane had gone. Instead, in a welter of churned stones and mud, a wide black highway had taken its place, driving along the spine of the ridge from the west, torn-up bush and shorn stubs at its edges. Tracks from it ploughed down the slope at their feet, descending into a distant depression. And in the depression, hell had been re-created.

Sprawled before him, raw in the sun, Gregorio saw a seething carcass set on a smoke-blackened eminence. Vibrations of sound shook the air. The air itself had turned rotten; the stench made him cough. The shock made him dry-mouthed with nausea.

‘I knew you would like it,’ said Nicholas de Fleury.

The illusion, of course, lasted only a moment. Later, he was to wonder at his own strange reaction, and at the conviction he had that Nicholas had somehow brought it about. What he had seen was only a massive building in embryo. The ribs were scaffolding; the skeletal frieze printing the sky was formed of wheels and pulleys, cranes and windlasses; the maggots, in cap, hose and tunic, were workers.

The haze that wreathed it came from lime-dust and cook-fires and furnaces, and the smell from the turf huts, the shelters, the horse-lines and the stables that clustered below. The buzz was human conversation, rising above the squeak of windlass, the blows of hammer and chisel, the clack of tumbling stone. It included laughter and the voices of women. He could see two of them scaling the rise, a basket of washing between them, their skirts kirtled up to the thigh. He could see a third at the door of her hut, speaking round her raised, dimpled elbows as she knotted
the band round her hair. When she heard the horses and turned, the sun moulded itself on her body. Presently she lowered her arms and began to draw up and fasten her bodice.

The factor said, ‘You can’t keep them away, and it saves the chiels from stravaiging into the townships. They’re nice enough lassies, although there are others just as handy and cleaner. Tam Cochrane will tell you. He’s there now.’

‘And we can sleep there?’ said Nicholas.

‘Ye’d wonder, I agree, but you can. And there’s room for your men. You won’t know it when there’s a proper road made, and the grass grows, and we get some trees planted. Here you are.’

Gregorio didn’t speak. He could already see, approaching closer, that this was not the massive stronghold of his earliest fears, from which the men-at-arms of de Fleury would descend to spoil and harry Kilmirren. For one thing, the Semples of Elliotstoun were far too shrewd to allow him to build one.

But it was not, either, the mystical palace he had begun to dread, riding up through the sunshine: the
très riche
home, born of five cultures, into which a nameless rich man might pour all his longings.

Before him, half reshaped and still building, was the residence, without walls, of a powerful man with powerful connections. The comely range of living quarters now forming round the embryo square was of a style to lodge lords and their retinues rather than a troop of light horse. The hall and chapel which adjoined it were new and far from complete, but Gregorio saw the promise of tall windows surrounded with vine-scrolls, and colonettes and capitals that reminded him of France, rather than Flanders. Next to the hall was the tower, once the only occupant of the rise and now half restored, its windows enlarged and the space between them newly banded with ornament.

Three floors of that were secure, they were told, and would lodge them that night. The master mason already had his room there, and the vaulted cellars served as tool-store and tracing-house, and supplemented the long thatched lodge in the yard, thick with powder, where the masons patiently sat, carving stone.

Cochrane, when he emerged, was also coated with powder and still, absently, held a saw in one hand. Oliver Semple, as from long practice, ducked to one side when he started to speak. They were by now dismounted, and standing scattered among the giant rouleaux of timber, the new-cut stacks of stone, the piles of lime and the mountains of sand, the baskets and barrows, the canopied workspaces where men mixed mortar or sharpened blades at a forge.

Everyone worked, and everyone looked at M. de Fleury while working, so that the great hoist turned slower and slower and the withy ladders became congested with climbers, and the bucket banged on the side of the well. The faces under the caps were friendly – dirty but friendly. Most were labourers, but one or two were craftsmen whom Gregorio recognised. A carver, a tiler, a cutting-mason already employed in the Casa di Niccolò in the Canongate.

Members of a new army indebted to Nicholas.

Master Oliver, raising his voice, introduced M. de Fleury and Master Gregorio his lawyer, and announced that it was proposed to drink to the patron’s good health at sunset. There was a satisfied cheer, and M. de Fleury briefly addressed them. The master mason, still gesticulating with his saw, then placed himself before the arrivals and proceeded to lead them to the four quarters of the yard in order to explain, with some passion, the curiosities of his handiwork. The light faded. Gregorio followed.

None of this had anything to do with the Bank of Niccolò, or with Venice or Bruges, or with John sweetening the Mamelukes in Alexandria, or Astorre in Burgundy, or the trade links Nicholas was forging with Scotland. Gregorio could not guess its significance and, now, was reluctant to try.

He felt, in the midst of despair, a distinct cordiality towards Thomas Cochrane, master mason. He had felt the same for Will Roger. He then wondered if Nicholas had selected them, or the other way round. He knew, with absolute certainty, that he would never feel free of responsibility until he saw Nicholas drunk. Draining his cup, he could not think, all through supper, how to explain that to Godscalc.

The only conversations Gregorio ever succeeded in having with Nicholas were in their sleeping-chamber at night, when the other man was effortlessly caustic and he was exhausted. That night, although starved for sleep, Gregorio was driven to accost him again. ‘What the hell was all that about winter herding, and stable dung for the barley, and compulsory fencing, and pastures for ewes with their followers? You know less than I do about farming.’

‘I got it from Katelijne,’ said Nicholas de Fleury. ‘Who got it, in turn, from the factor at Dean. She thinks a landowner should know about land. I’ve told Oliver to keep the Semple boundaries healthy, and leave the rough land between me and Kilmirren to look after itself. What he does in between is his business. What do you think of our champion Oliver? Better than Roland?’

‘Jannekin?’ Gregorio said. Young Bonkle knew trade inside out,
but perhaps he had too many kinsmen. On the other hand, this man was a Semple.

Gregorio said, ‘They both have connections. Semple has the experience, I agree. But if you’re expecting to farm, why have we been making all these digressions? Perhaps the land can produce coal, or lead, or silver, or gold, to hear some; but none of it is on the ground that you’ve bought.’

‘That’s why Katelijne thought I should concentrate upon farming,’ the other man said. ‘And of course I shall, after the wedding. Six shillings and eightpence a sheep – isn’t that staggering? And pease at thirteen shillings and fourpence a boll, and peat available for nothing at all. Don’t you think I should settle down here, if I survive the duel with Sersanders?’

‘Sersanders?’ Gregorio said.

‘You’d forgotten. The joust. Part of the wedding festivities. I’ve offered Paisley Abbey a window to intercede for me.’

Gregorio had actually seen the cartoon-scroll below, with a figure on it not unlike Bishop Graham. Gregorio said, ‘If you stay, you will have the most beautiful small palace in Christendom. Those are tiles from the Maghgreb, commissioned surely to fit in that corner.’

‘My dear,’ Nicholas said. When feeding the parrot, he always seemed to drop into Spanish. ‘Like God, right angles transcend creed and frontier. Tiles fit anywhere.’