Gemini (28 page)

‘A painful mauling, but it could have been worse. Next time it will be.’

‘So Jordan will want him back in his house?’

‘When I left, Jordan didn’t know,’ Nicholas said. ‘And I promised not to tell him.’

‘Because Henry is planning to do something nasty to Mar, and you don’t mind if he does?’

‘Because I know that a secret like that can’t be kept. I’ll wager anything you like that Jordan de St Pol of Kilmirren is enthroned in my house at this moment, brooding until I come back.’

There was a silence.
‘Anything
I like?’ Kathi said. ‘May I come and see if he’s there?’

‘No,’ said Nicholas. ‘Go home to Saunders. By the way.’

‘Yes?’ She knew the tone, and was thankful.

‘Ask Saunders why he used to go to Berwick so often.’

‘Berwick?’

He didn’t answer. His gaze dwelled on her, restored, and she felt the responsive colour tingeing her nose, not her cheeks. ‘All right. Berwick,’ she said.

L
OWRIE SAID
, ‘I’
M
sorry, my lord. They brought a hatchet. I had to unlock the door.’

‘So Master Henry has gone, and my lord of Kilmirren is still here?’ Nicholas said.

‘Merely to make Master Henry’s excuses,’ remarked Jordan de St Pol from the parlour doorway. ‘You expected it.’

He filled the doorway. It became light when he retreated and sat down. Nicholas followed him in and took the same place on the window-seat he had occupied only last night. Someone had cleared out the food. Nicholas said, ‘Since I lost my leverage, yes.’

The fat man was smiling, today. ‘Quite. The law will be happy not to pursue a case against Henry, provided Henry drops his complaint against Mar. The men who attacked you at Bonnington will, alas, remain for ever unpunished.’

‘Mar will try again,’ Nicholas said.

‘Of course,’ said St Pol. ‘What can one do, except hope my poor Henry survives it? You can’t imagine I care?’

‘Then why take him back?’ Nicholas said.

‘What shall I say?’ said Jordan de St Pol. ‘He reported a few of your minor business dealings but, really, not enough to be worth it. You learned even less, I am sure, and indeed suffered some loss. You have no idea what plans Henry now has for his horses. In fact … I have a theory. I think you were trying to suborn Henry from his grandfather’s bosom. Should I be right?’

This time, the smile of the fat man was lavish; the eyes bright, the lips a voluptuous rose. He waited. It was so quiet that Nicholas could hear the beat of his own heart.

‘No one could do that,’ Nicholas said.

The snowfield stilled; the hissing springs drained; far off under the glacier, Hekla breathed.

‘I should have killed you,’ said Jordan de St Pol; and rose; and walked out.

Nicholas remained on the window-seat. Presently, since there was a great deal to do, he swung his feet down and went to his desk.

P
RIMED BY THE
padrone himself, Kathi Sersanders was able, more than most, to appreciate what was happening during the following weeks.

Over the road, Robin’s father, in his level way, had resumed business; and the grandfather had retired, at last, to the family estate at Templehall. Saunders, under the impact of the murmured word
Berwick
, had ceased to be ashamed of his uncle, although he hadn’t brought himself to meet Phemie yet. Nor had he any idea what had happened at Berwick, save to mutter that it was years ago and irrelevant.

In their own house, the children had settled with Cristen, and Dr Tobie and Clémence had made a home of their building in the same yard. Robin was mobile now, wheeled from one room to another, and often over the road to Saunders’s office. It had once belonged to Nicholas, and had its own door. The counting-house, which was not so easy to reach, was upstairs. If Crackbene was about, he sometimes carried him.

Once installed, Robin would sit listening with frightening intensity to what was being said, and would take a determined part in all the discussions. To begin with, Archie steered these into areas with which Robin was conversant, but Robin soon noticed, and recognised when his ignorance was being treated with tolerance. Very soon, with ferocious dedication, he had set aside pain to master all they could tell him. And when Nicholas visited, which he did within their old house, Robin would test himself further, disputing over the developing business, which had once taken second place in his heart to the active world he had lost.

As he had been to Kathi, so now Nicholas was candid to Robin. Again, for the first time, he laid before the boy in the chair all his thoughts and his plans, and listened to Robin’s views. With Nicholas, Robin dropped the curt, probing manner he used with his peers, and relaxed into the low-key, speculative style that Nicholas encouraged. Only, as had happened with Kathi, Nicholas did not talk to him of Henry, or of anything personal. In some respects, no one could blame him. But he should, she believed, share some of his apprehensions with Robin—over the St Pols, for example, and Simpson. Robin wanted to help.

For the moment, though, he was fighting his way along the path they had designed for him, and it seemed to be succeeding, even if Dr Tobie sometimes left Robin’s bed, frowning, after one of the excursions over the road. You would say that Robin was learning to become used to his disabilities, except for those times when, talking business, someone
would lift and flourish a paper, or cross the room to a map, and Robin would instinctively make a half-movement. Then he would drop back and lie, his lips tight, his eyes full of cold rage.

As much as she could, Kathi shared in it, and absorbed the news that came from abroad, much of it from men who still worked in the disjointed establishments of the former Banco di Niccolò. Julius, the handsome lawyer, wrote from Germany and so did his partner Father Moriz and Govaerts their deputy. According to Julius, all business was suffering in the interregnum between the old Duke and the little Duchess’s new husband. According to Moriz, Julius had become the most popular widower in Cologne, to the amazement of his step-daughter Bonne who, of course, was still mourning her mother. They both expressed anxiety about Adorne, and about Robin.

News came from England: the King’s brother Clarence was under a shadow, and both royal marriage proposals were politely turned down. Meg was free. Kathi, who had made a first, cautious response to the cordial invitations from Court, found that Meg still possessed the attributes of eight, and assumed that Kathi was permanently fourteen. It was quite pleasant, in a confused way. The older sister, Mary, was absent, but Meg presented her to the Queen. It was less pleasant to be called
Katelijne Sersanders of Bruges: the crippled Berecrofts boy’s dame, you remember?
The Queen, however, had retrieved her good-sister’s gaffe with some skill, and when addressed in her own language, had expressed pleasure, but not the painful relief of her first years. She had been twelve years old when she came from Denmark to Scotland.

Will Roger dropped in. Once he brought a large hearty choir, and made it sing under Robin’s window. The children cried. Brought indoors, choir dismissed, he performed on the whistle and drank, and exchanged stories with Nicholas, so that Robin’s head switched from the one to the other. Robin said, ‘I’m supposed to have
soothing
music.’

‘Well, if you’re out of your head, I’ll give you it,’ said Whistle Willie, his grey hair on end. ‘But if you’re not, please excuse me. I get enough of that in the Castle. That young Johndie Mar is a devil.’

‘With drink?’ Nicholas said.

Kathi got up from her stool. ‘Do you remember Hugo the painter in Bruges? Hugo vander Goes? Dr Andreas said he’s having to go into a monastery. He drinks, and thinks he can’t paint, and they play soothing music to help him. He’s doing Canon Bonkle’s altar-piece.’

‘It doesn’t sound as if he’s doing it,’ Robin said. ‘So why is Willie playing up at the Castle? Are they all moody?’

There was a little silence. Kathi glanced at Nicholas and said, watching him, ‘Dr Andreas said something in Bruges. Something he suspected, or divined about their health. He didn’t say what it was.’

‘So come on,’ Robin said. ‘You’re the diviner. What’s wrong, Nicol?’
He had taken, recently, to this style of addressing Nicholas, and no one had commented, least of all the man he used to call ‘sir’.

Nicholas said, ‘Short tempers, poor concentration, varying amounts of intellectual capacity. They’re very like one another. Ask Tom Yare’s friend Scheves. And a streak of lunacy, if you want to throw in John of Mar.’

‘And the recently excommunicated Archbishop Patrick Graham, whom your kind offices elevated,’ said Willie Roger. ‘He went clean crazy, and thought he was the Pontiff. And he was a second cousin, wasn’t he, of the King’s?’

‘Is,’ Nicholas said. ‘Sad things are happening to him even as we speak. So who’s mad in your family?’

‘Me,’ said Willie Roger. ‘When I don’t get what I want. And what I want is
that
, sung immediately.’

That
was a piece of hideously difficult music, scribbled on ecclesiastical vellum. The composer, said Willie, was one of the Arnots. Nicholas sang, and Robin became very silent, so that they went back to chaffing again.

Nicholas, too, spent this time observing and learning. Henry de St Pol, returned to the home of his grandfather, did not go out until his face healed. After that, he divided his time between his guard duty, his new stud, and Leith, where he had begun to take a keen interest in coastal shipping. Having lived in and about Portugal, he was not unused to vessels, and a few of the skippers took him out now and then to practise his skills. At sea, he was not a bad companion (so said Crackbene’s spies), and the lads let him take part in the May King of the Sea contests, one of which he nearly won. Between that and looking out for Johndie Mar, he had no time, it seemed, to create pitfalls for Nicholas; and the deep hostility of his grandfather, which seemed immutable, now manifested itself only in contemptuous silence. Nicholas had not ended the feud with the St Pols, but he had its measure, at least.

David Simpson, passing one day, called on Robin, but was regretfully turned away, on medical grounds, by Mistress Clémence. He did not trouble to return and Nicholas, informed, recognised it for the cynical nudge that it was. Comfortably surrounded by bodyguards, David was waiting. David had relied on the St Pols to make life insupportable for his victim but, failing that, might condescend to provoke Nicholas into action himself. As Nicholas, of course, was presently proposing to do for friend David. But not until Robin’s future was as secure as might be.

In all of it, he had the support of Tobie and Clémence. The medical care that had brought Robin alive from Nancy was still there, bolstered now and then by unobtrusive help from the Castle, from the circle of physicians who still, no matter what their ostensible offices, watched over
the medical needs of the Crown. Soon, as Robin grew self-sufficient, Tobie would profit from a wider circle of interests, rediscovering the clients and friends of his previous stay. Now he was beginning to emerge from the nausea and weariness of the journey, and to rediscover the satisfactions of disagreeing, often, with Nicholas. He found the battles stimulating, and Nicholas quite often lost. Only occasionally would Tobie revert to the wretchedness that lay behind him, some of it evidenced in his concern for the other prisoner, John le Grant. Unhurt in a camp full of injured, alive in a field full of dead, John had at first retreated, as Tobie had, into the single-minded campaign to save Robin. That done, he had withdrawn into himself. Tobie had advised Gelis what to do, before he left.

‘What?’ had said Nicholas.

‘Nothing,’ said Tobie.

Nicholas himself, unmolested, began to move out of Edinburgh, to Stirling, to Dundee, to St Johnstoun of Perth. He, too, was interested in shipping. He was interested in currency. He talked to goldsmiths, and carried his findings not only to the Master of Berecrofts and Robin, but to the Councillors of the King. He began to know Argyll well, and understand some of his tongue and appreciate his subtlety. He held Avandale in the kind of respect that he had given, as a boy, to Adorne. But Avandale was royal, and you didn’t forget it, any more than you forgot the Orkney antecedents of Oliver Sinclair Royal, but without the royal flaws, as Bishop Kennedy had been.

So there was a lull. It wouldn’t be permanent, but it let him establish the groundwork of what he wanted to do. With the lengthening peace, the country had a chance to start building. In England, in France, in Burgundy, the effects of the Duke of Burgundy’s death, of the Duchess’s union, were surely being assimilated by now.

Even when the news came, in June, that Prosper de Camulio, the Papal Collector, had been arrested by the Milanese as a traitor and was not therefore returning to Scotland, it seemed to Nicholas that Simpson, with his own position to consolidate, would not change his tactics towards his victims just yet. Robin was slowly responding, Phemie was flourishing, Nicholas himself was doing what he had set himself to do. He beguiled himself with the idea that if Phemie’s child were born in July, he might even sail with her in August to Bruges, and spend time there with Gelis and Jodi. But that would excise two full months from his programme, and lengthen this interminable separation in the end. Also, David might follow him. It was Gelis for whom David was waiting.

All the time, Nicholas thought about Gelis; for these days, every sense was her messenger.

I
N BRUGES, THE
cells in the Steen, even the better rooms, were rank, now, with over-use. As the arguments and counter-arguments pounded on, the law hung suspended, and Anselm Adorne and his fellow magistrates lived from day to day in the prison, passing the time in the quiet pursuits of reading and card-playing and talking, the more timid taking their example from the courage of the rest.

Locked away from the fluctuating temper of the mob, they were treated with pointed aloofness by the gaoler, the bailiff, the turnkeys who supervised the cleaning of their privies and fetched the rough food that was all their staple. The provisions they relied on were those brought from outside: money gave them access to that, as well as to rooms on the upper storey, and bedding, and freedom from manacles. It did not buy exemption from torture. Not all had suffered; Adorne so far had been spared, together with two of his own closer friends: Paul van Overtweldt, who had been his First Burgomaster two years before, and the magistrate Jean de Baenst, who was related to Margriet, his late wife. Others, less lucky, had come back silent and limping and scarred from their questioning. Out of sixteen burgomasters and treasurers to be accused, the sole condemned man, Barbesaen, was guarded elsewhere.