Authors: Dorothy Dunnett
He laughed. ‘I want you to think I want you to think I am going away after Yule.’ He was smiling directly at her, without the dimples.
‘But you are going to take Jordan to see Bel.’
‘After the Play. Yes. Otherwise you might think you know what I am going to do. And you don’t, Gelis,’ he said. ‘But if you want to play on, then so be it.’
‘Of course I want to play on. I am practising Comedy,’ Gelis retorted.
He smiled a little and rose, collecting his satchel. It was so smooth. Suddenly, it was all much too smooth for her temper. She said, ‘What a callous fool you are, Nicholas. Have you ever given this a thought until now? What would your Jordan have done if I had listened to you on Mount Sinai? What if you and I still die together? What then?’
‘Bel could go and live in Veere. Wolfaert would love it,’ he said.
It still sounded smooth, but it was not: he had gone rather white. It might mean little. It might mean that he had nothing like the defences that she had imagined. And, unexpectedly, he didn’t stop, but went on, as if under compulsion.
‘I thought of Jordan as much as you did that day. I made the same choices that you did, over and over. If you forget that: if you forget why we are together at all, then we should have walked over.’
She rose slowly, her gaze locked in his. Her view of him shimmered. She heard him take a single short breath; and then he turned and walked to the door.
She stood, watching him leave. He was on his way, she knew, to a score of different places, ending at Holyrood. In the doorway he met and spoke to someone, clearing his throat. The other voice was that of the Sersanders girl, Kathi. By the time the exchange ended, Gelis was ready for her, but for the tremor that could not be stilled in her hands.
From pique or from tact, Katelijne Sersanders had gradually stopped coming to the house in the High Street as the enterprise matured, and with it Gelis’s involvement. She had also abandoned Willie Roger. Nicholas, wholly immersed, had not particularly noticed her abstinence: just now, as Gelis had heard, he had paused chiefly to ask after her aunt, who was within six weeks of her delivery. Almost immediately, he went on his way, and Kathi knocked and came in.
‘Chess?’ Gelis said brightly. ‘I was eavesdropping.’
The girl shook back her hood. Her hair was short, like Gelis’s own,
though caught up and pinned to look longer. It was easy to forget that this large-eyed child had travelled as she had through the Egyptian wilderness, and was just eighteen, and interfering, and marriageable.
Katelijne Sersanders said, ‘I didn’t mean to disturb you, but Archie of Berecrofts wants you to come to supper tomorrow, and his housekeeper has sent a bundle for Robin, and there’s a treat for the parrot, but he has to sing for it first. The chess is just a sort of joke.’
‘You are going to tell me that Nicholas plays,’ Gelis said. Speaking his name was an effort.
‘I expect he does,’ Katelijne said. Her voice remained, as ever, perfectly sensible. It occurred to Gelis what a good nun she would make. She listened to Kathi explaining the joke about chess. It concerned an English translation of a book by Jacobus de Cessoles, in which everyone from the Duchess Margaret in Ghent down seemed to be taking a hand.
‘The French is so difficult? What is it called?’ Gelis said. She relieved the girl of her bundles and brought across a platter of sweetmeats. The plate shook and she lost one.
‘The Game and Playe of the Chesse
. No, the translator’s forgotten his English. He’s in Cologne, hence the appeal to the Banco di Niccolò. Master Julius tried to help by sending a verse or two to M. de Fleury, and M. de Fleury just made it worse. That is, you couldn’t print it. You couldn’t even repeat it.’
‘You couldn’t?’ said Gelis teasingly. She had almost recovered. She realised suddenly that Kathi knew it.
‘Oh well,’ the girl said, and gravely began to recite.
It was Nicholas at the top of his bent: scurrilous, witty, engaging. She could hear every shade of his voice in the words. Gelis said, ‘You should tell that to your uncle. It would cheer him. What do you think of the Nativity Play? Are you going to watch it?’
Katelijne Sersanders hadn’t seen it; no one had, but as far as she knew, the whole of Edinburgh and Lothian was going to watch it. People were coming from everywhere. Her aunt couldn’t attend, but Katelijne and her brother would describe it all to her later. ‘It would be nice,’ Kathi said, ‘if her child came at Christmas. It might be born hearing some of the singing. A gift of music from Magus Will Roger.’
‘And a gift of poetry from a somewhat inebriated German
fatiste
, I gather,’ said Gelis. She paused. ‘You are not going to shame and astonish me with the news that Nicholas has translated the text? While playing chess with one hand and beating a drum with the other?’
‘I don’t know whether he writes,’ the girl said. ‘Phemie does, and
my uncle. I think a lot of people have helped. But we shan’t know till next week. Won’t it be dull when it’s over? What are you going to do?’
In her head, in her heart, Gelis stifled an inclination to desperate laughter. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘That rather depends upon Nicholas.’
Chapter 18
h
ITHERTO
,
WHEN SET
in the highest gear with every wheel spinning, Nicholas had been taking his share in a war, or contributing to a scene of international negotiation, or at the very least deploying whip and reins to preserve the multiple concerns of his Bank during some heinous crisis.
Now he was exerting the same extreme concentration of skills for the sake of one brief event: an ephemeral work which, once over, would leave nothing behind it except, of course, bills. It was his belief and intention that, subjected to such an overwhelming concentration of effort, something unique might be born. Something not only unique but superb. Something not only superb but close to a vision he had, but had never put into words: something soaringly wonderful. From this area of his thinking, all cynicism, for once, was debarred.
He knew by now his own gifts. As the weeks went by and the hour of completion approached, he saw every task duly executed; the ocean tamed; the advancing waves drilled into order. In the days before the performance the lists shrank, ticked off one by one, and the shouting began to die down, and the yard of the Abbey of Holyroodhouse, veiled by its awning, emptied of arguing men in cloth tunics, became a silken pavilion, a mysterious cavern where the spoken word lingered like incense, and trumpet peals mixed with the tassels, and a voice sang, inward and solitary, from a tunnel of cloud.
It was too soon to slacken, and too soon to hope, and too soon to wonder. Nicholas worked, smiling, even-tempered, a never-failing source of solutions and calm. During that last week he did not go near his business, but slept in snatches on a truckle bed in the Abbey, and ate what people put in his hand.
The Secrets had come. Many of the experiments were his own, devices to play on the senses. The lighting was put into place, misty, magical in the grey air; and the smoke in its dusky colours; and the
palette of incense and spices. Below the covering turf, John’s gleaming wheels turned without sound. Screened off, alone, Nicholas watched the Angel of the Annunciation spread his swan-wings and float, his yellow head bent, while his son’s childish voice swayed at his side, a silvery air-thread in water. Nicholas stood, considering sound and its trajectories, and Will Roger walked about with him, and the players.
The costumes arrived. The actors, word-perfect, were permitted to leave their chambers of study arid be shown to their places. Nicholas had sat by their desks many times. Now he used all his knowledge of them to help carry them through this last stage. The prompts and signals began to receive their rehearsal: he had not allowed the intrusion of placards. He had not permitted anything which would destroy the fragile illusion: the awe, the pity, the beauty, the triumph of the birth of a child.
He did not think of his son, his mother, the women he loved and had loved. But soothing the boy who played Mary, his fingertips on his shoulder, he was conscious that shadows were present; that far off in Venice a woman in travail with her first child was also here in his thoughts. And somehow the intensity of his conviction seemed to transfer itself to the boy, and the blood returned to his face.
Battle pitch can be sustained for only so long. In every campaign, success depends on the skill of its timing.
The day before the performance, Nicholas worked without respite from long before first light, as did all his henchmen. Even Sandy, pale, with glittering eyes, was no longer the King’s brother, but a willing part in something close now to mystical. That night, Nicholas sent everyone home but the guards, and walked up the hill to his house in the High Street.
Gelis was awake, and opened her door. The house was silent. He stopped.
She said, ‘Take my bed. I shall wake you.’
‘Will you?’ he said; and came in, as if he were a friend; as if all distrust had been neutralised. He stumbled once, reaching her bed, and meant perhaps to rest there and untie his doublet and shirt, but in the event he simply sank back and slept as he was.
The brazier whispered. Its dull red and blue light touched the cushioned settle to which she retreated, her eyes on the low curtained bed. A single candle stood by his pillow, illumining the dense, springing hair, the ends of his lashes, the bridge of his nose. His hand, smudged with dried paint, lay open as if appealing for something. His face was closed in the absolute peace of dreamless sleep; she could not hear him breathe. All the vigour, all the intelligence, all the cruelty were in abeyance, till he should wake.
She had watched him like this once before, during the long agony of their duel in Venice. His sleep had been unnatural then, and full of torment. And she, watching him, had been tormented as well; consumed with anguish and bitterness, for fear he would wrest back his child.
He had taken Jordan. Then he had sent for her.
I made the same choices that you did, over and over
. She knew that he had. She knew why he had.
In time, the candle guttered, and she rose stiffly and went to extinguish it. She paused at his side.
His face was invisible, but he was still deeply asleep. He had turned once, half constrained by the close-fastened doublet. It would be the task of a moment to free him, leaning circumspectly, unloosing the buttons. When she last eased the clothes that he slept in, it had been long ago, and she had been unmarried in Bruges. Then he had lain warm and resistless like this, closer than this, and smitten by sleep for a sweeter reason than this, or the pains of divining. She could do it again. He would not waken, but he would know, when he rose, what she had been thinking of.
She snuffed the candle, and left without touching him.
He slept for four hours, rousing of his own accord an hour before dawn and presenting himself, freshly dressed and new-shaven, to apologise and thank her as any normal man might. Leaving, he turned to ask her if she meant to come to the play and bring Jordan, and smiled when she said yes. She would not see him again until the performance was over.
She felt tired but content, even triumphant. His day had come, and hers with it. She had been put to the test. And there was nothing, today, she could not do.
In Edinburgh that day, the house of Anselm Adorne was one of the very few still to be occupied. From end to end of the town, the crooked streets were all empty; their inhabitants tumbled down to the foot of the Canongate and flushed up the mountain behind, as if the ridge were indeed the chute that Nicholas once had called it. The buildings lining the ridge were hung with banners, to honour the guests of the King.
It had come to James some weeks before that, instead of grudging the cost, he should be exploiting what promised to be the finest single work of prestige he could show, outside Mons Martha the cannon. One did not invite crowned heads to such an event. Those who came, however, represented their lords, and themselves were powerful noblemen, who would take back to their shires, their duchies, their
kingdoms the reports of what Scotland could do. And when a funeral loomed, God forfend, or a marital feast, or a coronation, James would be pleased to consider the loan of his musicians, costumes and experts to those princes who lacked them.
The procession down from the Castle was a triumphant one therefore, despite a shower of rain; and the comfort of the royal stand, when they reached it, drew exclamations from the eminent visitors. They gazed at the face of the Abbey before them, hung with arras and garlands. They studied the silks of the awnings, the veiled and silent box of the stage in the centre below them. They were offered mulled wine and talked, while the benches were filled, and lamps and braziers glimmered, warming the air. From the well of the Abbey arena there arose the buzz of a beehive: the expectant murmur of two thousand curious souls. Then a fanfare of trumpets rang out, and the curtains raced back from the four walls of the stage, light as smoke. Behind them was Paradise, furled in sweet-scented clouds, beyond which glinted the slow-moving wheel of God’s angels and the celestial throne, bright as the sun, with, kneeling beside it, a mighty-winged Gabriel. Then, from a core of dizzying radiance, the voice of God rolled, sending his herald to earth.
It had begun.
Many who were not present would later describe all that happened thereafter, for the report of it, borne on the wind, carried far. A man digging peats was petrified where he stood by the sudden silence as the curtains were drawn, and then by the gasp, and then the snatches of a single voice speaking, so terrifying and rolling and deep that he crossed himself. The voice stopped. Then the breeze slammed forth the peal of an organ, followed by a susurration like a wheatfield under rain, that swelled and swelled until it burgeoned into the voice of a full choir in song. The man leaned on his turf-spade and listened.
Dr Andreas cried, ‘But you must be glad! Shout for joy! One glorious effort, and all your labours will be at an end! See, give the woman your hand. Praise God and shout!’