Gemini (26 page)

You would say, at first glance, a comely man; then an ugly one. Then you might change your mind yet again. The ambiguity was what had first attracted the attention of David Simpson, and no doubt Gelis van Borselen, who had also known him as a child. Gelis had passed through a fire of her own making in order to earn the right to live at his side. Now she would face anything for him. Yet, in all that, there was no rivalry between Gelis and herself. She, Kathi, had Robin. What bound Kathi to Nicholas was quite a different bond. And, today, perhaps also a lifeline.

Nicholas said, as if he had followed her thinking: ‘I’ve spoken to Tobie about Robin. He requires permanent care. But he will have to learn to think for himself.’

‘I know,’ she said. ‘We smother him. But he will need us less, soon.’ She hesitated, and then said what she wanted to say. ‘I have told Robin that he is free, if he finds it too much. Tobie says you can’t tell yet whether he’ll manage, because he’s so young. He has to find a method of living, but at the moment he’s tired, and his wounds are not fully healed. It will all take a while.’ She stopped again. ‘He has asked me if I think you will stay in Scotland.’

He said, ‘Who asked? Robin or Tobie?’

She smiled. ‘Both. I said I couldn’t say. I gather they didn’t ask you.’

‘Everyone else does,’ he said. ‘The answer is, I don’t know. I can’t be sure I can keep out of trouble. I need time, like Robin, to be sure I can manage myself. If this attempt is successful then yes, I should want to stay; but the decision must come from all of you, not from me. From my victims.’ His face, an untrustworthy witness, was rueful.

‘Would you let me tell him that?’ Kathi said. ‘Would you let me say that you have allotted yourself a certain length of time within which you mean to teach yourself … to—’

He made to stand up, and then didn’t. His face, a trustworthy witness, showed shock. ‘No, Kathi, no! It isn’t a parallel. Christ, he’s a boy fighting back from disaster, none of it his fault. What is wrong with me is my own fault entirely. If I fail—’

‘Yes?’ said Kathi.

He clearly hadn’t thought of it before. He said, ‘If I fail, I can simply go back to the dyevats, where I can’t damage anybody. He doesn’t have an alternative.’

‘So, knowing that, you will feel bound to help him through his trial,’ Kathi said. ‘And if you talk to him as you have talked to me, he may well think he can help you. At least, knowing Robin, he will try. And isn’t that what we want, to engage him with something? Business by itself won’t be enough.’

There was another blank silence. Then Nicholas said, ‘But if I failed, I should bring him down with me. He would lose his guide-rope as well.’

‘I’m glad you see that,’ said Kathi. ‘For if you stray, a lot of people are going to be hurt badly again. Robin won’t be alone.’

His face had stilled. He said, ‘I see.’ He didn’t inflect it. If he had, she thought she would have heard despair. He said, ‘I think you must be the hardest person I know.’

She said, ‘That’s what Robin says, too. Anyway, you were hard enough on the multi-talented Master Yare. Tormenting him with the Latin version. Making him sing the song with the Rs.’

She could see him manacle his thoughts in order to follow her lead. His face slowly became untrustworthy again. ‘Dame Music and her less well-endowed scholars Tom didn’t mind. He has such a wonderful burr[burh].
A ! mohrioh; A ! mohrioh; A ! mohrioh …
Robin enjoyed it, at least. And about oysters.’

For a moment, she had forgotten the connection between singing and oysters. Then she said warily, ‘What?’

‘Just this,’ Nicholas said. There was a little suede bag in his hand, which he brought across and, kneeling, emptied into her palm. ‘The fair stone Margarita which dwells there. For Margaret. The Icelanders reduced it to Groa, but I think Margaret of Berecrofts sounds better. I don’t know what to get Rankin. I’ll think.’

The pearl lay in her palm, lustrous and creamy on its fine chain. After a while, she looked up.

‘I sang for it,’ Nicholas said. ‘Perhaps one day Margaret will sing for it, too. I must go, or Clémence will chastise me.’

She followed him to the door, and he touched her fingers, and left.

She sang the pearl a short, suitable song, and went to bed. And, surprisingly, slept.

I
N
E
DINBURGH, THE
English envoy departed, with many fine gifts, on the heels of his moderately successful farewell tournament, and David’s Tower shook with dissension. Messengers seeking Nicol de Fleury waylaid him outside his house and took him up to the Castle, where he was pitchforked, with no visible pleasure, into the private lodging of Sandy Albany. Standing inside the door, Nicholas said, ‘My lord. Forgive my dishevelment. I have just ridden from Leith, and have not so much as entered my house.’

‘I know. What were you doing in Berwick? I wanted you here.’

‘I am here now,’ Nicholas said. Liddell was also in the chamber: steward turned watchdog who had not been so credulous as Sandy, renewing this relationship, but who was, Nicholas thought, at ease with
him now. And then he saw there was someone else—a young woman. A short, rounded girl of sixteen or so whose hair rippled red on her shoulders, and whose fierce young voice he had first heard on the sands of Leith, when she was eight. Margaret, Sandy’s young sister, once the illustrious charge of Kathi Sersanders.

She stood, feet astride, glaring at him. Her slippers were scuffed under her gown. She said, ‘Sandy said you had good ideas. Then when we needed you, you had gone. I don’t want to be married.’

‘Highness,’ Nicholas acknowledged. ‘The English envoy brought an offer?’ He emerged from his second reverence. From where he stood by the window, Liddell cast him a glance, almost of sympathy. Albany, sprawled in a chair, scowled at his sister.

Albany said, ‘If we find the situation intolerable, we shall deal with it in our own time. We are not short of ideas. We merely wished to test public opinion. The offers, such as they are, come from our side. His grace my brother has proposed that the lady Margaret and I marry the English King’s brother and sister. That is, that I should be contracted to Margaret, the widowed Duchess of Burgundy; and that the lady Margaret should console the Duke of Clarence, who lost his wife in December.’

Nicholas said, ‘I am not sure, my lord, that I follow. This is surely a gesture, no more. Neither marriage, however splendid, would suit English policy.’

‘Of course you are right, but James doesn’t think so,’ Albany said. ‘He is determined to abase himself before England. If this doesn’t succeed, he’ll marry Meg to some high-born English bab in the cradle, and she will be tied to London for life. Why were you in Berwick?’

‘Because Berwick is full of spies,’ Nicholas said. ‘And I had an excuse. I went to meet Katelijne of Sersanders and her husband on their way home from Bruges.’

‘Kathi!’ said Margaret. She stopped tramping about and looked pleased. ‘Did her husband die? Perhaps she would return to our service.’

‘She has two children. No. Her husband was badly wounded at Nancy, but hopes to continue in business. They are in the Canongate, opposite the old Berecrofts building.’

‘I shall send for her,’ Margaret said. ‘She will want another interest if he is sickly, or dying. And she also has good ideas. You helped my other sister with her marriage. Sandy is sure you can help us.’

But Sandy’s mind was on affairs other than marriage. Sandy was Warden of the East Marches and Earl of March, which meant he possessed control of the south-east of Scotland, down to the walls of the fortress of Berwick-upon-Tweed. The fortress and the town were the King’s. The King’s money paid for their fortification and repair, and the King recouped from the customs paid by foreign merchants. The
King’s wine and the King’s luxuries were conveyed by his merchants from the quayside at Berwick. Just recently, since the treaties with England, the King had made gifts of land within Berwick for his own state officials who now merited a presence there. The Lord Clerk Register and the customs controllers had joined William Scheves, and Wattie Bertram, that eminent citizen of Edinburgh, and those others who were already there: the Keeper of the Castle, the bailie and chamberlain, the representatives of the monasteries of Melrose and Newbattle, and Sir William Knollys of the Order of St John. Everyone upon whom the King’s favour shone obtained a place of honour in Berwick. To visit Berwick was to proclaim yourself a King’s man.

Albany said, ‘Spies? The biggest spy in Berwick is Tom Yare. I see his riders coming in through the ports and down to the Cowgate to have a quiet word with my lord of Avandale, or up the High Street to Argyll’s tavern, or disappearing through the pend to catch Master Secretary Whitelaw.’

‘It depends how you look at it,’ Nicholas said. ‘At least they’re spying for Scotland. It’s the English sympathisers I should be interested in myself. But it disturbs you, my visit to Berwick. And Sir James can probably tell you more than I can.’

The easy flush came to Albany’s skin. He said, ‘I am not disturbed. I expected you to be here, and you were not. That is all.’

‘I shall try not to disappoint you again,’ Nicholas said. He was tired of standing, and perhaps they noticed it, for he was given a seat and some refreshment while the lady Margaret set herself to discover, to her own satisfaction, all the pertinent details of Messire Nicholas’s disconnected married life and present amatory liaisons, if any. It came to her, with delight, that naturally, Messire Nicholas had rushed to Berwick to enter the embrace of the demoiselle Kathi, to console her for the crippled, the dying, the incapable husband. Was this not the truth?

Neither Albany nor Liddell was interested enough to rescue him, so he had to devise his own means of countering it all. It reminded him of the old days at Haddington, and Kathi, aged fourteen, driven to wild exasperation by this same shallow, wilful inquisitiveness. And yet there was no malice in it. Bleezie Meg, the small royal hoyden, was as natural now as she had been then, and was not deserving of harshness, so he showed her none. It dragged on for a long while, and by the time it finished, he was too late to call and see how Robin had settled, so he walked down, in the lamp-studded redolent darkness, past the descent to the Horse Market and on to his own house in the High Street.

Lowrie, the latest in the long line of chamber-servants, had already unpacked the saddlebags brought from the ship, and the wall-sconces were trimmed, and some dishes set out under cloths. Nothing in parlour or bedroom appeared to be smashed, torn or burned, although Master
Henry, said Lowrie, had spent that day in the house, and was in his chamber at present. Nicholas, not entirely depressed by the news, did not at the time observe the man’s slight hesitation when dismissed. He was disposed, deep in thought, on the window-seat, the candles dimmed, the elements of his small feast strewn about him, when the door opened silently and Henry came in.

From the window, his head lodged in a resigned way against the wainscoting, Nicholas could not read his expression. As Henry said nothing, he spoke. ‘I’m sorry I had to go without warning. It was to bring Berecrofts back. There is some pasty left, if you want it.’

‘Not particularly,’ Henry said. His voice sounded blurred, as if he were drunk. He added, in the same blurred voice, ‘But you should be pleased. Are you pleased, Uncle? Your friends did this to me, once.’ But before he had halfway finished speaking, Nicholas had crossed the room and was confronting him with a muttered word that would have earned him short shrift from the Abbot of Holyrood. Then he turned the boy to the light.

The bones of the face were intact. The skin clung to them in glazed and discoloured pillows; the eyes were slits; the lips bloated and shapeless. And the bruising ran down below the throat of his shirt and was part of the reason, no doubt, why he held his shoulders so stiffly. When he moved, he moved with a limp. Of all his beauty, only the golden waves of his hair were untouched.

‘Who?’ said Nicholas.

‘You don’t need to know,’ Henry said. ‘I am going to kill him tomorrow. I only wanted you to note the provocation.’

‘I am noting it,’ Nicholas said. ‘Strip. I want to see the rest of it.’

‘It has been seen,’ Henry said. He detached himself, concentrating a little, and let himself into a seat. ‘There is nothing broken.’

‘How many?’ Nicholas said.

‘Oh, thank you,’ said Henry. ‘So you don’t imagine I just got the worst of it against a very big man?’

‘Not unless you’ve wasted every penny spent on your training,’ Nicholas said. ‘So when, where and how many? And, of course, why?’

‘I upset people,’ Henry said. ‘There were six of them. Paid bullies, of course. In the dark, on my way home. Someone came by and interrupted them.’

The words emerged from the fluffed lips with all the old insolence. Looking down, scanning all he could see, Nicholas recognised, as he always had, the kind of courage that was greater than other people’s, because it was not instinctive. He said, ‘I’m going to try and give you some wine. Does your grandfather know?’

‘No,’ Henry said. ‘That is why I am telling you.’

Of course. His grandfather would try to stop him—would stop him. Nicholas, the enemy, wouldn’t.

He could drink, after a fashion. It turned out that he was hungry, and Nicholas sent him back to his room and found bread and milk and some honey, which he melded and brought him. He had not offered to undress him, and the boy had done so himself. He sat up in bed, commenting, ‘You make a good servant, Uncle. Might we make a permanent arrangement? All my meals, when I want them? A ready hand to empty my privy?’

‘A ready hand to find an unbruised place and bruise it,’ said Nicholas equably. It was not how he felt. He had just realised who had ordered this punishment, and whom Henry was proposing to challenge tomorrow. While the boy ate, Nicholas left the room. When he came back to collect the empty bowl, he leaned over the bed, to Henry’s amusement. Then the amusement turned to rage, for there was cord slipped and knotted across Henry’s bruised chest and round his wrists and the bedposts, and while he was straining painfully against that, Nicholas took his hammer and nails to the shutters and lifted the key of the door.