Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
He rode off, and did not know how long Jordan de Ribérac brooded alone in the saddle, looking after him.
Chapter 4
O
N THE THIRTEENTH
day of June, ten days after her husband left Ham, the lady Gelis van Borselen completed her journey from Cologne to Bruges, which she had left sixteen months before in the train of Anselm Adorne’s so-called pilgrimage.
From that extraordinary journey, Adorne had returned in April to his own grand house in Bruges, together with his son and his niece. Gelis had not seen him since he left Venice, and she avoided him now, not least because his home was sheltering the little royal lady she had once served, Mary of Scotland. Gelis did not want to meet the lady Mary at present, and have to answer her puzzled enquiries.
She had had to decide, before leaving Cologne, where best to settle in Bruges, to wait out the interim until her husband chose to communicate. She made the choice on her own. For three months, Julius had helped her balance her life with his careless goodwill and ample energy and total lack of involvement, but she refused to yield to his insatiable curiosity. Fortunately his interests at present were deeply engaged somewhere else.
On her own, therefore, she had determined to make no present demands on the courtesy of Adorne or invite the anxious questions of her former mistress by calling at the Hôtel Jerusalem, or risk the condemnation of her cousins by descending upon the Wolfaert van Borselens at Veere. She could have leased again the house she had shared with Margot and the child, together with Clémence de Coulanges and old Pasque, who had been so quick to desert her for Nicholas – or so she assumed. If they were not with Nicholas, no one had heard of them. If they were not with Nicholas, the child was lost as perhaps Nicholas wanted him lost, with everything taken away that was dear.
It was four months since she had seen her son, and he had only been two. She tried not to think of it, for even though she believed
she had wrung her throat dry, fresh rivers still came. And because the house would have cried for the child, she did not want to go there.
Which left the married home she had never occupied: the great Charetty–Niccolò house in Spangnaerts Street. This, besides the apartments of Nicholas and his staff, held the bureau of the Bank and the offices of the Charetty company, and was also the home of Tilde de Charetty, the step-daughter of Nicholas, and Catherine her sister, and Diniz Vasquez her husband who managed it all. The message which had reached Gelis in Cologne had been sent from there: it was to this house that Nicholas was communicating. Whatever it demanded from her in terms of brazen defiance, that was where she must go, for this channel was the only channel, she had long recognised, that would lead her, perhaps, to her son.
She had written therefore to Diniz, proposing herself. Nicholas would expect it, and for his sake they wouldn’t refuse her. She would not be welcome. Since the events of last year, all that masculine coterie at the Bank had become aware of her war against Nicholas, and after the kidnapping of the child, they had felt no call to continue to shield her. It was common knowledge by now that she had lain with Simon, Jordan de Ribérac’s son, in an effort to bastardise the legitimate child she was carrying.
The response of her husband, whom nobody blamed, had been to trace the child and take it away from her. Simon, who had thought the baby his own, had found himself a laughing-stock and a dupe, and had been dispatched quickly to his Portuguese property before he could harm her or himself. His spoiled brat Henry had been sent with him. Despite their absence, however, Bruges would not be a friendly place for Gelis van Borselen any more than Venice had been, where indifference and distaste had surrounded her. Adorne had shown her courtesy, and Gregorio pity, that was all.
It would not stop her from entering Bruges. Nicholas had come close to breaking her this time. She could think of nothing, attempt nothing against him until she knew the child to be safe. Meanwhile she still had her pride, and her courage. And later, they would find out, all of them, what she could do.
Nicholas forced her to wait for a month, during which he sent her two messages. The first told her that he was in Hesdin. The child was elsewhere. If she moved without orders, she would not see him. The second summoned her, at last, to the Burgundian camp.
By that time, even Tilde de Charetty had begun to lose her aversion for Gelis van Borselen, two years older than herself, once the plump, wilful child who had been so enchanted by Nicholas the
apprentice. As she, Tilde, once had been, before she met and married her beloved Diniz.
At first, learning that Gelis proposed to come and stay, Tilde had refused point-blank to have her. Her sister Catherine shared her view. In vain, Diniz had argued that the house belonged to the Bank, and that Gelis had at least as much right to live there as they had. In fact his arguments lacked some conviction. They all knew, now, what Gelis had done. It was Adorne’s niece Katelijne who, dropping in at the height of the dispute, changed their opinion.
Since returning from pilgrimage with her uncle, Katelijne Sersanders had occasionally called on Diniz and Tilde de Charetty. The attraction, naturally, was Tilde’s baby – a daughter called Marian after Tilde’s mother. Adorne’s wife sent it presents. Paying her first visit in May, Katelijne, seventeen, single and active, ate the cakes her aunt sent, talked to Tilde, talked to the baby, folded napkins, mended a fringe, finished some sewing, offered to make a straw basket and dispensed news.
Some of it, but not very much, concerned her recent pilgrimage, during which she had briefly run across Tilde’s stepfather Nicholas de Fleury, who had taught her how to weave baskets. Having disposed, without detail, of the pilgrimage, Katelijne entertained Tilde with an account of the present war being waged in the Adorne household, currently lodging a branch of the Scottish royal family together with fifty attendants. They had been there for over a year.
‘Officially,’ said Katelijne, unpacking three papers of powders, ‘the Duke of Burgundy doesn’t know they are there, because the Princess’s husband has been condemned as a traitor in Scotland, and Burgundy shouldn’t be sheltering him or his children.’
‘When is the second one due?’ Tilde enquired. She brought a bowl, and watched Katelijne start mixing.
‘In the late summer, they think. They ought to leave now, while the Princess can travel, but they won’t know where to go until the English succession is settled. The Earl of Arran can’t go back to Scotland, and the Princess his Countess won’t leave him.’
‘A fine-looking man,’ suggested Tilde, with all the complacency of one married to another such.
‘It wouldn’t matter if he looked like a boot. She worships him. It makes Jan puke,’ Kathi said. Jan was Adorne’s son, her cousin, who had returned from his pilgrimage with the offer of a good job in Rome, and was not at all pleased to be stuck in Bruges with a household of foreigners.
‘And you?’ Tilde had said. ‘Do you want to stay with the Countess, or go back to help with her sister in Scotland?’
Kathi’s eyes, as sometimes happened, had lost focus. She concentrated again. ‘I liked Scotland,’ she said. ‘I shouldn’t mind going back. There’s your mixture.’
‘What is it?’
‘Flea paste,’ the girl said. ‘I wondered if I remembered how to make it.’
‘Dr Tobias,’ said Tilde. ‘Of course, he was with you as well. Do you know he has gone? Back to his hated uncle the physician in Pavia. No one knows why.’
‘He keeps doing that,’ Kathi said. ‘He’s waiting for his uncle to die, so that he can get hold of his books and his printing press. I don’t think it’s an omen. Master John and Father Moriz left as well, but just to see to the mines in the Tyrol.’
‘I wish we knew where Nicholas was,’ Tilde said fretfully. But she was certain by then that neither Kathi nor the Adorne family knew.
The next time Kathi came, Tilde did know where Nicholas was, because he had sent to tell them. He had also sent to have his wife directed from Cologne to Bruges to await orders. ‘She wants to stay here, but I’m not having her,’ Tilde had said flatly. As a solid, narrow-faced matron of twenty-three she was acquiring something of her mother’s authority. At first, Tilde and her sister had bitterly resented Nicholas when he had married their mother. Now they resented his present wife, who had cheated him in ways no woman should.
Tilde de Charetty seldom talked about Nicholas, and never to Catherine, who had learned to deal with life at second hand through a shifting circle of suitors. Tilde supposed that every girl child in Bruges at some time had dreamed of receiving the merry, loving, undemanding attentions of Claes, the Charetty apprentice. A sweetheart for the season, not a lord to preside at your table, however gentle his manners.
But then, building upon the Charetty business, a lord was what he had become. To Tilde, he had always behaved as a member of the household as much as a stepfather. It was his planning which had brought her Diniz Vasquez her husband. Tilde thanked God for that daily, even if Nicholas often occupied the rest of her thoughts; Nicholas whose ability had always been there under the generous, inconsequential demeanour. Hidden there.
But for Gelis to marry and cheat him had been unforgivable. Tilde inadvertently wakened the baby, slamming down the basket which Katelijne had brought, and had to march up and down with the child over her shoulder declaiming, while Kathi unpacked the pannier. There were two oranges in it, which Kathi set out and peeled. She said, ‘I keep wondering why the lady Gelis did what she did.’
Tilde put down the baby, which was annoyed but no longer alarmed. ‘I thought you’d know. Didn’t you help get the boy away from her in Venice? She hates Nicholas.’
‘Everyone helped. It was time, for the boy’s sake. But if she hated M. de Fleury, why keep the child?’
Tilde held a section of orange and thought briefly. ‘She wanted a baby, she didn’t want Nicholas. Or she hoped the baby was Simon’s.’ She ate the orange.
‘She knew it couldn’t be. Margot told me.’
‘So what do you think?’ Tilde asked. She knew from report that Adorne’s niece had been popular on the pilgrimage in the way a mascot was popular: small, spry and ever willing to help, with her hazel eyes and brown hair and air of perpetual eagerness. Only Jan Adorne had found her tiresome, but Jan Adorne was a plodding student who had over-celebrated at Venice and disliked everyone who knew about it.
Katelijne considered. She ejected some pips. ‘I think that some ladies like freedom, and resent it if a child comes too soon.’
‘So she didn’t want the child? She certainly left it a lot.’
Katelijne shook her head. ‘I think she fell in love with it, when she couldn’t have M. de Fleury.’
Tilde laughed. ‘Well, it’s a theory. So what does Nicholas think of his wife? He chose her.’
‘I don’t know,’ the girl said. ‘But in Alexandria, he was told she was dead, and it was as if –’ She stopped. She was frowning.
‘As if?’ prompted Tilde.
Kathi turned. ‘He loved your mother. What did he do when she died?’
Tilde felt herself flush, and then recollected it was Kathi she was talking to, who censured nobody, and helped whom she could. Tilde said, ‘He tried to come home to us, but we wouldn’t have him. We were stupid. He went off on his own for a long time, until the Venetians caught him and took him to Cyprus. With Primaflora.’ She spoke without thinking. In Cyprus and Rhodes, the lady Primaflora, now dead, had briefly been married to Nicholas. She had been a beauty. She had been a professional courtesan.
‘That was when and how he met Primaflora?’ Kathi had stopped eating, her eyes unfocused again.
It occurred to Tilde, for the first time, that indeed, that was how the affair with Primaflora had begun. She said tentatively, ‘And so … It must have been terrible. Was it terrible? What did he do when he thought Gelis had died and left him as well?’ She drew a shocked breath. ‘Was he
glad
?’
The speckled gaze, refocused, was minatory. ‘Couldn’t stop laughing,’ said Kathi. ‘What are you talking about? I don’t really think he’d go through all that with her in Africa and then marry her, without feeling something when he heard she was dead. The point is, what? She wasn’t your mother, so of course it was different.’
Tilde said nothing. The girl said after a bit, ‘He seemed to be lost. He cares about something, but Dr Tobias isn’t sure either what it is. It may just be that his plan had been spoiled. His future may have depended on this intricate duel with Gelis, and he had nothing to put in its place.’
‘Not the child?’ Tilde said. ‘After all the efforts to find it?’ She was not eating now. In passing encounters, in exotic places, this little girl had seen more of Nicholas as he was now than anyone else. Tilde thought the girl’s view over-simple, but it had a clarity about it which she trusted. Adorne possessed it as well: this gentle, unsentimental appraisal which did not stop him from correcting and chastising those whom he perceived to err.
‘He would have thought of that eventually, I expect,’ Kathi said. ‘As it is, Margot believes that the nurses have been with the boy all along, so the child hasn’t suffered. And if M. de Fleury is planning to have his wife join the baby again, it sounds as if he means a reconciliation. But he may not make it easy, and Gelis will have to find somewhere private to wait where she can be sure of getting his message. It will be very hard for her, because she’s been stupid. As you say, people are.’
Tilde was silent. ‘And after they are together?’ she said. ‘Where will Nicholas go?’
‘It depends what he wants,’ Kathi said. ‘Not a hot country for the sake of the child – and he has walked away from his business there anyway. To Bruges or Venice or Florence if he wants to humiliate Gelis. If he wants to appear, briefly or permanently, like a family, then to somewhere more distant, like Scotland. He can do what he likes there. And he had planned to go back.’
Tilde found she had shivered. She said, ‘But he couldn’t. Simon and his father live there. Simon won’t stay in Madeira and Lagos for ever. And he must hate Gelis now.’ Forgetting her sticky hands, she picked up the baby and laid its face to her cheek. It began to mouth, its eyes closed, and she dabbed kisses on it.