The Unicorn Hunt (50 page)

‘Compared with Henry, your child, Gelis, will be fortunate. He has a young and beautiful mother who has learned from her sister’s mistakes, and forgiven them. In Nicholas he has a toy-maker, a gentle protector, a man born to give children the happiness he was denied. A man who, too, has learned from the past, and is able to begin afresh, with his wife. Umar’s family did not all live, but yours will. And so –’ His voice faded.

Nicholas said, ‘Please. Please. Tobie, help him.’

Gelis did not speak. Tobie crossed quietly, his eyes on the pillow. Godscalc said, ‘I shall sleep more happily. You are not to be afraid.’

‘No. We are not afraid,’ Nicholas said. ‘We want you to speak to us.’

‘Even though, as always, it is not what you wanted to hear?’ He was smiling again, a little. The sheet moved to his breathing. They waited. He said, ‘Nicholas, I owe you not only my life, but my faith. Gelis, Tobias, I owe you all that followed. I shall not reward you with homilies, although my Church says I should. Tobie, trust where you have always trusted. You are right: you have not gone astray.

‘Gelis – Nicholas – look at me, not at one another.’ He stopped. He said, ‘If you would wish me Godspeed on my way, give me a promise.’

He stopped again, to get breath. Nicholas – not Gelis – spoke. ‘Whatever you want, you shall have.’

‘Do you think me so cruel?’ said Godscalc. ‘I ask only one thing. You may think it strange. Nicholas, will you promise me not to go back to Scotland?’

None of them, including Tobie, had expected that. Gelis looked across quickly. Nicholas, his eyes on the priest’s, wore a look of deep concentration. He said, ‘Never?’

Godscalc said, ‘No. I should not spoil a lifetime of plans. Only
for now. Only, say, for two years. Would you leave them in peace for two years?’

It was a strange phrase. Dying men exacted peculiar promises. One soothed, one agreed. Tobias, wholly concerned with the shell on the pillows, only came to realise in the silence that followed that Nicholas was not going to supply a comforting answer. Then Godscalc said, ‘Do you want me to tell Tobie why? No one here knows your strength of purpose as I do.’

‘No. I agree,’ Nicholas said.

‘You won’t go back?’

‘Not for two years. I promise.’

The face of Gelis, looking at his, was a mask.

Godscalc closed his eyes, as though to conserve, if he could, an extra measure of energy. He said, ‘I have heard more convincing avowals.’ The half-smile remained on his lips.

‘You want a Decreet Arbitral?’ Nicholas said.

‘What?’ said Tobie. Godscalc opened his eyes. Tobie saw that it was self-mockery that he had heard.

Nicholas, too, seemed to be smiling. Nicholas said, ‘Then let me do it in form.’

He had lifted both hands and laid them, as he knelt, upon the crucifix between Godscalc’s fingers. Godscalc gathered them, and looked up. ‘I promise,’ Nicholas said.

The two sets of hands rested. The crucifix glowed. Tobie’s eyes blurred. He did not know where Godscalc’s gaze had turned, but he heard his voice, sounding strange. ‘I say it again. Child: be my bridge.’

‘What do you want?’ Gelis said. The words had no timbre.

‘I want nothing.’ The once-big voice was full of pity. ‘I shall exact no promise from you: I have not the right. But we all tread one path. Stay with me on this threshold a moment, and help me remember the love that we share.’

He was smiling. Gelis leaned forward. Pale brow, pale lips, pale strand of hair fallen forward, she stretched her hands to her priest and her husband. For a space, flesh on gold, gold on white, something sacramental seemed to rest in the lamplight. Then, the hands drawing apart, it dissolved.

The crucifix shone. The door opened and closed. Gelis uttered a sound of protest, or appeal. The man, the child for whom Godscalc had waited, had gone.

Godscalc lay, his gaze upon the closed door, his face full of pity. Then he turned his tender smile to the girl.

After that, few came to trouble him. Gelis shut herself in her
chamber. Last of all, Gregorio knelt by the bed and received his friend’s blessing before the doctor dismissed him and the German priest, waiting quietly outside, was brought in. Presently the woman came whom Tobie trusted and, leaving the sickroom in her gentle charge, he went to the parlour where the sisters, Catherine and Tilde, sprang to their feet when he entered; and Astorre opened an eye; and Gregorio turned from talking to Diniz and John.

Tobie said, ‘He is sleeping. You’ll see him tomorrow.’

‘Shall we?’ said Gregorio.

‘I think so. But not very much longer. He has what he wanted,’ said Tobie. ‘Where is Nicholas?’

Catherine said, ‘We thought that you’d know.’ As Tilde had become plump and pale, Catherine had grown bright-skinned and shapely.

Tobie said, ‘No. Shall I look for him? He’s probably hungry.’

‘I’ll come,’ said Gregorio. Diniz rose.

‘Good God no,’ Tobie said. ‘I don’t need to call a man to his food by committee.’ He took his eyes from Gregorio’s, and went out.

Tobie’s association with Nicholas de Fleury went back a long way. He began his search, none the less, in a severely practical fashion, tapping at and opening the door of the chamber he used; strolling through the counting-house and its workrooms and offices; poking into this corner and that; and descending then to the yard, wandering casually from stable to storehouse. No horses had come, and none gone. He verified that Gelis was indeed in her room, and alone. He was unsurprised.

Their patron was not on the premises. He had gone out, on foot. And this time, no quack had forestalled him.

So where would a man go in Bruges on a warm midsummer night, his mind burdened with verse, or with numbers?

Once, it must have been easy. An apprentice, bruised in flesh or in spirit, would steal from his workshop like this; would tramp these cobbles, barked at by dogs but ignored by his betters. Then eventually, under some lamp, he would be hailed by his friends and swept off and consoled with cheap ale. Or he would find his way down to a basement, where a wench in her chemise would open the shutters, and then her chemise. Or if he wanted no company but his own, there were places under the bridges, or, in winter, against a warm chimney.

Where would a rich man go, bruised in flesh or in spirit? The rich had no refuge at all. Except in the past.

*

Against the later splendours of Spangnaerts Street, the Charetty dyehouse always looked shabby, even though the offices had been rebuilt after the fire they had had, and the house reconstructed for Henninc, and new and better storehouses had risen in place of the old to contain the perennial crates and baskets and sacks, the fleeces and the yarns, the bales of cloth and the barrels of alum, the parcels and parcels of dyes. The smell stayed the same: of wet wool, and queer herbs, and urine.

There had always been a wall. There had always been a place in the wall where apprentices could climb in and out to avoid the porter, or Henninc.

Tobias Beventini of Grado, physician, was ten years older than Nicholas, but he could still scale a wall, to the harm of his gown and his temper. Inside the yard, all was quiet.

Once the apprentices had slept in these sheds, side by side in the straw of the upper floors; and on Sundays filed down the ladder for Mass, while Marian de Charetty stood at the door and neatened their hair. Now they were used only for storage, because the apprentices slept in the house.

The shutters were closed, and the first doors Tobie tried were all locked. He had keys. Seized with this stupid idea, he had brought the keys with him from Spangnaerts Street. Nicholas carried the master. Tobie paused, and then continued to look.

It was the whine of the dog that brought him to the door furthest away. It gave to his hand, so that the warm stench flooding out shook his senses. It was followed by the nose of a hound. There were always dogs, and this one knew him, and knew Nicholas. It was glad to see him, and a little anxious. Because, of course, it wasn’t alone; otherwise the door would be locked. Nicholas wouldn’t confine it, and probably couldn’t contrive to expel it. Or didn’t care either way.

Tobie fondled the dog, and then went inside, closing the door. He felt for the lamp on its hook, and its tinderbox, which gave him a dim, unprovocative light to carry. He made no effort to call.

The ground floor held only merchandise. A ladder, inviting, led him to the airless heat of the loft. The dog padded below, its eyes shining. The muted light fell upon the humped shapes of sacks, patched with labels and scrawled over with writing. He understood what it said. Two years ago, he had taught himself in Oran, while waiting for Nicholas to come back from the desert.

Nicholas de Fleury lay near the centre, with the dyes, the drugs, the writing under his cheek, and his bent arm laid over them. Tobie buried the lamp in a corner, dimming it further. Then, sweating, he began to pick his way over.

Nicholas had been enveloped, too, by the heat. His discarded shirt, when Tobie touched it, was sodden. He himself lay on his face as if asleep; indeed, he could not have been awake and lain as still as that.

Tobie felt no professional misgivings. With Nicholas, of course, there was a history, but what he had glimpsed did not suggest fever. And however low he was brought, Nicholas fought. Conceding, tolerating, conciliating, he still pursued, with deadly accuracy, whatever objective he had set for himself. Which, of course, only he knew.

He was here because he was aware that he needed a respite. The desert had given him skills: he could identify stress, and recognise different kinds of exhaustion. Here he had sought, perhaps, the weightless peace of his boyhood. Or, more complex than that, the cradle of some early kindness linked, by the script upon which he lay, with another.

For a while, Tobie stayed. Because he was tired, he drifted now and then into sleep. As any doctor would, he came to the surface when Nicholas stirred or changed his position, however slightly. Nicholas. Claes vander Poele whom he had tended, dumb and desolate, in another place, a decade ago. He had witnessed, then, evidence of a hurt no physician could cure. And now, with the same Nicholas under his hand, a good man and a priest had proved helpless.

In time, the lamp flickered and Tobie rose to his feet. He dared not wait, and to end that shallow rest would be pointless. Climbing noiselessly down, Tobias Beventini extinguished and replaced the lantern and left, miserable because he was angry with Godscalc; and Godscalc was dying.

Chapter 24

H
ELD A WEEK AFTER
his death, the funeral Mass of the Charetty chaplain was widely attended, the Duke himself sending a representative (Tommaso Portinari), and most of the chief burghers of Bruges and their wives crowding into St Donatien’s in their black.

Apart from honouring the good man, commended by the Holy Father himself for his travails in Africa, Bruges was curious to witness the entire House of Niccolò on solemn display: Diniz de Vasquez and the two Charetty girls, one of them his wife; Tobias Beventini the doctor; the red-haired man they called John le Grant, who worked for them in the Levant. And most of all, the big fellow Claes himself, now Nicholas de Fleury, knight, who had come with Gregorio the lawyer all the way from the King’s wedding in Scotland to be at the deathbed. And got there, too, the very day the old man sank into his final coma.

The lady wife of Ser Nicholas wasn’t there, since she had to leave to return to her infant. And Astorre, the army captain, hadn’t been able to wait. But everyone else from the yards and the house had turned up, and the business closed for three days as a mark of respect.

Good feeling, that showed, since the old man had none of his own friends or family left, barring two Germans who had found themselves in the town. One of them, Father Moriz by name, had stood up in church and seemed to be telling them about Father Godscalc’s early days in Cologne. Then he had switched from German Latin to the Louvain kind, and read out a lot of things about Father Godscalc’s later life in Bruges and elsewhere which were very fine, and made those who could understand them blow their noses. Later, there was a Flemish translation for the women.

The funeral feast was well done, too, for those who were invited.
And everyone leaving St Donatien’s was correctly thanked by Claes – Ser Nicholas – himself at the door. They said he had had enough of Scotland and was going to stay and look after his own business now, which was only right for a young man with a wife and a baby. His first anniversary was just the other day now; but you couldn’t celebrate with the old man so recently gone. And if young Nicholas married Catherine off, they’d have a wedding to go to as well.

‘Ghouls,’ said the engineer John le Grant as the doors to the Spangnaerts Street house closed behind the last of the guests. He didn’t say it with vehemence, in case he needed the vehemence for something else. He felt drained, by death and by his first experience of Nicholas on his home ground.

He should have listened to Gregorio, with whom he had held, over the years, a long and illuminating correspondence. He knew Tobie and Godscalc and Astorre. He knew, God help him, the step-daughter Catherine. He had known the negro he used to call Loppe. He had been with Nicholas in Florence, in Trebizond, in Cyprus, in Venice, but never here, in the Hof Charetty-Niccolò, Bruges.

John le Grant, pioneer, shipmaster, gunner, had come from Alexandria to Bruges because Nicholas had demanded his services in Scotland. And now Nicholas was here, and not in Scotland. And he wasn’t making toys any more, or none that John liked the look of. Living with Nicholas had always been unpredictable. Now it was like running on top of an icefield.

Astorre, who had departed, had come off best. Late in the day of Godscalc’s death, Nicholas had taken Astorre to his desk and worked through the future of the army: listening; taking advice; bringing le Grant himself into the consultation, but always steering towards the plan he obviously had already made. Then Astorre, contented – even impressed – had gone off.