Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
The rules said nothing against it. It was a joke, in that it gave Nicholas mixed advantages: it weakened his seat while giving his mount a heavy weapon easily knocked from one hand. The beauty of it was the spice of variety; the challenge to the other’s ingenuity, already affected by anger. The couples turned and faced one another,
and began to advance. Nicholas was grinning, and so was his mount. The noise slackened. Then, with an audible grunt, the tithe barn’s mount drew breath and charged. ‘Moriz! Pray!’ said le Grant.
‘What do you think I’ve been doing?’ said Father Moriz.
About what happened next there were as many versions as there were spectators, although the wagon of ale might have had something to do with the lack of consensus. The couples approached. Nicholas brandished his stave. His mount also brandished his stave, as well a man might with another large man on his shoulders. Then, just before the pairs met, he ceased to brandish it and instead braced it forward and up, as might a man playing a boar with his spear. And as a man would with a spear, he kept the point, as they closed, aimed at the one sensitive target where it would be most unwelcome, however softly it arrived, however promptly it fell.
The tithe barn didn’t notice the threat, but his bearer did. The bearer, with a squeak, veered to the right just as his rider was preparing his blow. His rider yelled, clutched him and lowered his stave, upon which Nicholas knocked him off his perch. The tithe barn crashed to the ground followed by his mount, curled protectively against the sheer force of his imagination. Nicholas, shaken loose by the impact, was hanging round his mount’s neck, helplessly laughing. His mount, frothing with laughter and sweat, dropped his stave and put up his hand, but too late to save Nicholas who tumbled down to the ground, somersaulted twice and, jumping up, seized his mount to fling up their joint arms and face round to all sides of the park, tattered and strutting.
The big man, limping, crossed to him and, after a moment, slapped him on the back and embraced him. The noise was annihilating. Above it all, the sound of trumpets announced the arrival of the cart with the prize. It was declared that, honours being so well divided, the ale would be shared among all the participants, and M. de Fleury had added a second wagon-load at his own expense. The noise was such that the ears of Father Moriz went dead.
‘Well?’ said John le Grant.
‘That’s a man!’ said Astorre.
Father Moriz returned John le Grant’s glare. ‘It is the man we work with,’ he said. ‘We have not taken him in marriage, so far as I know.’ Le Grant flushed. Astorre’s attention had already gone back to the field, followed promptly by his person.
Father Moriz said, ‘You can go and congratulate the victor, or come back to the lodging with me. I am hungry. And I prefer wine to ale.’
They walked back to the barracks together.
‘That was deliberate,’ John le Grant said.
‘Of course it was,’ said the priest. ‘We last saw him with a child in his arms. He is telling us that he is not a father, but a soldier. Presently he will show us that he is not a soldier, but a banker. It is interesting to follow his mind. It is not our duty to admire it.’
Later, he was ashamed to have paraded his perspicuity, when it came to be exactly justified by events. It was the banker who had them brought from their rest two hours later; who sat them down, thanked them briefly for coming, and obtained from them, with admirable economy, an accounting for all that had happened in the Tyrol and since. They were then given a matching report of the Bank’s progress elsewhere, and told to prepare to leave shortly for Scotland.
Through it all, Nicholas was wholly impersonal, as was his custom when conducting negotiations in public; as he had been, no doubt, in those vital interviews in Ham and in Hesdin. To remain detached here, alone in a private room with two men as close to him, in their separate ways, as John and Father Moriz himself, was either an aberration or a notification which required thinking about. He sat before them with the childish bruises and cuts showing above the immaculate chemise and doublet, and ignored what they had just seen as easily as he was ignoring their common past. Father Moriz thought, John is perhaps right, and I am perhaps wrong. He did not even know we were about to arrive. He was cultivating Artois and the army as he was cultivating Anjou, Burgundy, France. I suppose we should thank someone that he is not troubling to cultivate us.
They had reached the end of the curious interview and were about, he thought, to be dismissed when someone tapped on the door and Nicholas opened it. When he came back, his manner was the same, but there was a change of some sort in his face, which was already coloured with the open air. He said, ‘I’ve disturbed your rest. Alonse will take you back to your rooms. Send if you want something to eat; you know Astorre’s cooks are always superb. I’ll have someone bring you at first light tomorrow to go over the detail.’
‘And that’s all?’ said John. His annoyance at the dismissal was justified. It was only mid-afternoon. Instead of intervening, Father Moriz trod peacefully to the window. He was aware that the gaze of Nicholas followed him.
Nicholas said, ‘If you’re not tired, there are a hundred men out there, and you know at least half of them. Go and enjoy yourself. I have some things I must do.’
‘The camp has visitors,’ the priest said. The perpetual haphazard traffic between buildings, tents and sheds had coalesced at one point
into a huddle of horses and packmules with, here and there, the ruddy glitter of steel. In the middle he thought he glimpsed the high shape of a veil, and the folds of a gown on a side-saddle. As he watched, grooms ran up to the leading horse and began to lead it to another part of the encampment.
‘A lady,’ remarked Father Moriz. ‘But not for you, Nicholas, it would seem.’ He heard footsteps coming to join him and knew it was John, and that Nicholas had stayed where he was.
Nicholas said, ‘I am enthralled. Alonse is waiting.’
Below, the procession had stopped. Father Moriz remained looking down. Captain Astorre, fastening his points, came trotting into view. Taking the reins from the groom, Astorre turned the horse round and began to bring the leading members of the cavalcade towards the door of the house in which they stood. John turned. He said, ‘Is it Gelis, Nicholas? Astorre is bringing her here.’
Moriz turned as well. Nicholas stood by the door, gazing outwards. There was only one staircase. Whoever it was, there was no avoiding meeting her now. Nicholas said, ‘It is not Gelis.’ There were footsteps below, and then the clatter of Astorre’s spurs on the stairs, followed by other, softer feet. With a hiss of impatience, Nicholas drew back until he stood with the furthermost wall at his back. His expression was lost in the shadows. Moriz remained at the window, his fingers holding back John. The clatter reached the top of the stairs, and the threshold.
Captain Astorre, bent double, came into the room, his face red, his eye glittering madly. He straightened. On his shoulders, miniature of his stave-bearing father, was a grey-eyed child, crowing, his brown hair tight-curled in the damp, his rotund cheeks merry with dimples. John straightened. Father Moriz increased his grip, studying Nicholas.
‘Well!’ said Captain Astorre, looking round. ‘What’s all this about a room of his own, when a lad wants the house of his father? Here are his nurses to tell you as much. And where is your father, then, young Master Jordan?’
The boy looked round the strange room, cast into dusk by the strong light outside. Reassured by Astorre’s jovial voice by his ear, the child seemed quite at ease. He looked first at the window and smiled at Moriz and John, although they too were strangers. Then the smile, travelling on, reached the wall. ‘M’sieur mon p’p … a … a … a!’ said Jordan de Fleury, in the moderate shriek of a child who has found a promised toy, and is pleased as much with himself as with the enjoyment ahead. ‘R’garde! R’garde! R’garde!’
Nicholas stood free of the wall. ‘Eh bien, c’est M. JeMoi,’ he said. ‘Comme tu est gros.’ He spoke direct to the child, his voice calm.
‘Nenni! ‘Suis ici!’ said the child. It was more than an announcement. His head tilted.
‘Go to him, then!’ said Astorre, raising his hands. But before he could lift him down, the child in turn had stretched his arms to his father. ‘I am here! Where is maman?’
Beside Moriz, John le Grant breathed through his nose. Moriz continued to grip him. At the door he could see two women standing still, saying nothing. The nurses. Astorre hesitated, looking at Nicholas. And Nicholas, after the shortest pause, strode forward and sweeping the boy into the crook of his arm, looked him in the face.
‘Toujours! Encore? That the gentlemen stand aside from the window?’ And when the way was clear, the man with the child took their place, talking. His voice was low, but the child’s was clear and confident, as if reciting some incantation. ‘Horses! Boats! Cows to be milked!’
Then the child said, ‘But she is still busy?’
Nicholas turned, facing the room, still with the child in his arms. ‘No,’ he said. ‘She is coming. She is coming here.’ His gaze fell on Moriz, who felt himself wince. The same gaze travelled over John, and Astorre, and the two women who stood in the doorway.
Nicholas said, ‘Ta maman will be here in three days.’ On the hand spread to hold the child so securely was a mark. Father Moriz knew what it was, and that it had not been there earlier in the day. Tracking Gelis, Nicholas had not realised that the child was so near. Or this encounter would have happened, as intended, in private.
Father Moriz said, ‘Your son will be tired. Let the nurses take him,’ and was surprised to find his help accepted.
Nicholas said, ‘You hear that? To Mistress Clémence. I shall see you tomorrow. You will get fatter.’
‘Always,’ said the child. The woman Clémence, coming forward, lifted the child and set him on his feet, curtseying to the room before she went out, the elderly maid at her heels. He had had his nurses, then, through all his absence. Moriz knew about them from Mistress Margot, and thought, momentarily confused, that he must send to Venice to tell Mistress Margot and assuage some of her fears. And of course, those of the mother as well. Then he remembered what had just been said. The lady Gelis was coming herself. In three days she would be here. And what would happen then, he could not predict.
Astorre, wiser perhaps than anyone, had left. Moriz was afraid John would linger, in the belief that Nicholas wanted their company. On the contrary, the engineer had walked to the door and was waiting for him, too, to leave. Nicholas watched them sardonically. Moriz wondered what resources of imagination or skill or ingenuity, what
quality of callousness had enabled him to carry off what had just happened, betraying nothing, jeopardising nothing. So far.
That night, he said aloud to John what he felt. ‘There is nothing now to be done but to wait.’
To the rest of the camp, the three days that followed were little different in character from the busy, brawling good humour of the month that had passed. Certainly, Astorre took time, now and then, to drop into the temporary nursery of Master Jordan de Fleury and show him how to wield his new wooden sword. Mistress Clémence, who could unbend now and then, would send him away with one of her exceptional pies, and Astorre came to the view that she was rearing the boy well enough, although she didn’t cackle like Pasque at his jokes. Astorre suspected that little Pasque, as a matter of history, was not unaccustomed to the attentions of rough soldiery.
Father Moriz, too, was reassured. He spent time with the child and both nurses, and sometimes found Nicholas there, looking entirely at home in a way that both touched and surprised him. For Nicholas, those sparing but regular calls were the only departure from a schedule crammed with meetings and paperwork. There were no more boisterous excursions into the exercise field. Only, as the bruises started to fade, the weal on his finger grew angrier.
John, as well as Father Moriz, knew what it meant. He was sufficiently aggravated, by the second day, to remark on it. ‘So where is she, Nicholas? Where is Gelis?’
And Nicholas, looking at him with indifference, had pulled open a drawer and, spreading a map, had said, ‘There. No, since last night possibly there. If you have five minutes, I can show you exactly, if that is what you really want to know.’ The pendulum lay on the desk. It looked like an ordinary pebble.
‘I want to know why you are doing it,’ John had said. ‘You know she is coming. She’s got to come.’
‘Of course. So she should have a welcome,’ Nicholas said.
The foreboding which others experienced had already touched Mistress Clémence, an expert in the aberrant conduct of fathers. Studying M. de Fleury, she had watched, unsurprised, the dulling of the glow brought about by those long leisurely days at sea, and distrusted the extreme urbanity which seemed to have replaced it. Either M. de Fleury was unmoved by the approach of his wife, or was able to cover his feelings by a feat of acting which defied the imagination.
She held this view until the third day when, coming to visit the child, he took Mistress Clémence aside and informed her that his
wife was expected tomorrow, and that he wished her to travel with him to meet her.
‘But naturally. I shall prepare Master Jordan,’ she had said.
‘No,’ he said. ‘The boy is not to come. You will be there instead, to assure my wife of his wellbeing. I have arranged to meet her at the palace of Hesdin.’
‘The lady is staying there?’ she had asked. The palace was empty. Everyone knew the palace was empty.
‘She will be taken there. I have the Duke’s kind permission. I have in mind,’ continued M. de Fleury, ‘to show madame some of Hesdin’s particular splendours. You will be pleased, I hope, to accompany us.’
She was disturbed. She would have thought him a little drunk, were it not that she had placed him as a temperate gentleman, except when it suited him. Even as she agreed, Mistress Clémence conveyed mute dissatisfaction. She disapproved of what happened at Hesdin. She agreed because her Christian conscience (and human curiosity) would not have allowed her to refuse. A good nurse is the link between child and parent: the person who interprets one to the other and is respected by both, if not loved. Although she had been loved, in her time.